The panoptismo of everyday life: Hegemony of vision, bourgeois and patriarchal space in urban narrative of the Renaissance

This essay explores the role of vision as a controlling device in the public space of Barcelona according to the Catalan Renaixenca fiction published between 1862 and 1888. Through an analysis of the works of Narcis Oller, Joaquim Riera i Bertran, Robert Robert, and Emili Vilanova, we will see how the disciplinary panopticism designed by Jeremy Bentham and analyzed by Michel Foucault is also present in the everyday life of the modern bourgeois city. Catalan Realism and Costumbrism of the period show a special preoccupation for the impact of urban modernization. They both try to expose the way in which the effects of the industrial revolution and the implementation of Ildefons Cerda's urban expansion project of Barcelona affected not only the overall perception of urban spaces but also the social practices of citizens in the public space. In particular, this essay tries to demonstrate how urban space is perceived and represented as a visual spectacle which works like a twofold panoptical regime. On the one hand, it allows for the imposition of the new socio-economic values of the emerging bourgeoisie while, at the same time, it perpetuates the traditional patriarchal values by controlling and restricting the access and the mobility of women in the public space.