Redemptive Mortification in Felipe Trigo’s <i>La Altísima</i> (1907) and <i>Las posadas del amor</i> (1908)

In the early twentieth century, Felipe Trigo was considered the founder of the Spanish erotic novel and Spain’s most widely read and critically debated writer. He advocated a radical feminism, arguing strongly that women should enjoy full equality in education, work and sexual relations. This article explores an acute contradiction between Trigo’s emancipatory discourse and the misogynist logic and androcentric narrative mechanics of his most widely discussed novel, La Altísima and its continuation, Las posadas del amor . I build on existing criticism to reveal a specifically necrophilic logic, including an exemplary instance of the narration of dissection as gender discipline. By examining what were once some of the most widely read literary fictions in the Spanish-speaking world, I illustrate the power of formally conservative popular genre fiction to deliver reactionary ideas in pseudo-progressive packages, and the enduring commercial appeal of necropornographic fantasies centring on dominated, deanimated, and dissected female bodies. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .