This chapter analyses how attitudes towards prostitution, and the images of filth that were generated around it particularly in the last third of the century, are dramatized in Fortunata y Jacinta and, to an extent, in Nazarín. Galdós's reproduction of contemporary perceptions of prostitution and filth is examined in the context of the ‘regulatory’ cultural debates on public health, class and gender that emerged in Restoration Spain, as elsewhere at the time. Prostitution was perceived, during this period, as a threat to public health. In public health discourses, prostitutes became associated with filth and decomposing organic waste. Like dirt and refuse they were also seen as a source of polluting miasmas: as a source of physical and moral disease. Furthermore, the discourse on domesticity constructed marriage and the family as the norm of behaviour, thereby presenting the figure of the prostitute as abnormal or deviant and, therefore, in need of reform. Given this threat, the need arose to keep prostitution under constant surveillance, to control and regulate it through the deployment of a series of disciplinary strategies.

Tsuchiya has observed the ‘panoptic’ strategies developed in Fortunata y Jacinta. I hope to build on her analysis of notions of control and resistance in the novel with reference to contemporary debates on domesticity and femininity by setting my discussion within a wider, alternative theoretical framework. This will also allow me to add to Jagoe's detailed examination of Fortunata's challenge to the bourgeois ideology of domesticity, middle-class morality and gender roles, as well as her subversion of the idea of true womanhood.In order to appreciate how control works in the novel and, similarly, where Galdós stands in relation to bourgeois control, it is necessary to start by analysing contemporary discourses on class, gender and public hygiene and coverage of ideas on social regulation, as well as more recent discussions on discipline and control.