| Summary: | In this essay, I examine how the set of Japanese decorative items present in Benito Pérez Galdós's La familia de León Roch (1878) elucidates a reformulation of the Krausist model of masculinity embodied by the novel's hero. Focusing on Buddhist imagery in the text, I explore how allusions to the Eastern religion provide a symbolic framework to explore other modes for the liberal hero to be in the world that renders his apparent excesses into the positive behaviors necessary to effect reform and social change. Considering the rudimentary understandings of Buddhism that reached Spain amid the late-nineteenth-century Japan craze, Japonisme , then, I interpret León Roch not as a failed model of masculinity, but rather as an alternative within Galdós's broader revision of the Krausist ideal of the "hombre nuevo" in the late 1870s. In this essay, I examine how the set of Japanese decorative items present in Benito Pérez Galdós's La familia de León Roch (1878) elucidates a reformulation of the Krausist model of masculinity embodied by the novel's hero. Focusing on Buddhist imagery in the text, I explore how allusions to the Eastern religion provide a symbolic framework to explore other modes for the liberal hero to be in the world that renders his apparent excesses into the positive behaviors necessary to effect reform and social change. Considering the rudimentary understandings of Buddhism that reached Spain amid the late-nineteenth-century Japan craze, Japonisme, then, I interpret León Roch not as a failed model of masculinity but rather as an alternative within Galdós's broader revision of the Krausist's ideal of the "hombre nuevo" in the late 1870s.
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