9 - Una historia perversa (2001) and Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818–31): Creating Monsters

Summary

This chapter will discuss what makes reading Una historia perversa [A Perverse Story] such a Gothic experience: it will consider, first, how Adelaida García Morales utilizes elements that make up the Gothic villain and second, the Gothic treatment of the issue of creation by men, which can be read as doubly transgressive since it is a ‘usurpation of divine powers of creation [… and] also a male appropriation of the female ability to give birth’. As in Frankenstein, the consequences of such a double transgression in the Spanish novel are both monstrous and disastrous for all concerned, including the creator himself; thus, a comparison of the male protagonist of each novel will be central to the chapter's argument. However, at least as important as this is its corollary: the anxiety for women generated by fearing for their own autonomy at the hands of the male creator. This is treated indirectly in Shelley's novel too, as Punter observes: ‘in psychic terms we are confronting […] the making over of the body into the control and power of another; […] we are looking here in particular at women's experience.’ Lastly and by way of conclusion to the chapter, there will be an exploration of the particularly suggestive motif of the forbidden room in Una historia perversa and its relationship to the three areas discussed: the Gothic villain, creation by a man and being on the receiving end of this for a woman. The forbidden room is not used by Shelley, as it happens, but, descending from Bluebeard, a tale widely recognized as Gothic avant la lettre, it is easy to find in other Gothic texts such as Stoker's Dracula or, to take a twentieth-century example, Stephen King's The Shining.

Una historia perversa is laden with Gothic features despite the author's choice not to employ the supernatural at all in this novel and to set it in modern-day Madrid. The story is narrated in alternating chapters by Octavio Saló, a celebrated sculptor, and his wife, Andrea, who meets him through the art gallery she runs. The nightmare that the story rapidly becomes, arises from Octavio's secret technique, for unbeknown to the admiring public – which at first includes Andrea herself – he makes his sculptures from the bodies of people he murders for this purpose.