“Jugamos a la guerra”: Boys, Toys, and Military Masculinity in Galdós’s La desheredada

Abstract

In the sixth chapter of Benito Pérez Galdós’s La desheredada, we find children at play in an impoverished neighborhood of Madrid. But what at first glance appears to be a simple representation of boys playing war is, upon closer inspection, a problematization of Spanish masculinity. This article suggests that the concepts of militarism and masculinity were synonymous throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Galdós, however, critiques this conflation by converting the children’s game into a tragedy.