SOURCE: Nickel, Catherine. “Recasting the Image of the Fallen Woman in Valle-Inclán's ‘Eulalia’.” Studies in Short Fiction 24, no. 3 (summer 1987): 289-94.

In the following essay, Nickel considers the image of the fallen woman in Valle-Inclán's “Eulalia.”

In 1864 William Gayer Starbuck wrote that “When a woman falls from her purity there is no return for her as well may one attempt to wash the stain from the sullied snow. Men sin and are forgiven; but the memory of a woman's guilt cannot be removed on earth.”¹ The ideological assumptions underlying these assertions remained popular for many years and late nineteenth-century fiction is filled with fallen women who complete their social and moral descent by throwing themselves into a river, lake or other body of water. Though not every adulteress ended up in the river, this particular image held such a powerful attraction that it eventually became a literary...