Dislocations of Desire: Gender, Identity and Strategy in La Regenta

Dislocations of Desire provides the first sustained psychoanalytic reading of La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas. In this unique study, Alison Sinclair focuses on the representation and articulation of desire in the novel. She argues that instead of being seduced by the fiction, what is at stake is sexual desire leading to adultery-the characteristic fiction of the adultery novel. According to the critic, the reader must learn to look below the surface in order to see the ontological insecurities that this fiction veils and attempts to contain. In a reading that draws both on a broad spectrum of modern psychoanalytic theory and on an understanding of social, sexual, and medical norms of the period in which the novel was written, Sinclair proposes that the adultery story be understood as a coded resume of fantasied, dislocated, repudiated, and thwarted desire.