The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s <em>La barraca</em> (<em>The Cabin</em>)

Abstract

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin, 1898) presents a vivid portrait of the struggles of the rural population of the Valencian huerta. When the local people prevent a plot of land from being cultivated as an act of popular resistance against the landowning class, the arrival of Batiste Borrull provokes a campaign of marginalisation and aggression against his family. The collective violence of the mob enacted by men, women and children is unleashed against his daughter Roseta, his sons, and finally five-year-old Pascualet, who is pushed into an irrigation ditch by hostile boys and contracts a fatal infection. The mounting brutality that culminates in the death of a young child becomes a powerful manifestation of social pathologies including rural primitivism, alcoholism and entrenched poverty. This article explores ideological and discursive contexts for the portrait of rural violence at the turn of the twentieth century, including class-based theories of degeneration and crowd psychology. It also examines the trope of stagnant water that courses through the plain as a symbol of contamination, echoing the moral sickness of rural society. Critics have argued that in his social protest novels, Blasco Ibáñez denounces the idle and degenerate bourgeoisie, following instead the anarchist and socialist argument that the vices of the proletariat are the result of capitalist exploitation (Fuentes 2009). By contrast, this article proposes that La barraca underscores the primitivism and pathological violence of the landless rural labourers, thereby reinforcing a bourgeois ideological foundation for the exposition of social injustice in late nineteenth-century Spain.