The Embrace of Death and Gothic Pleasure in José de Espronceda

The two major works by Spain's best-known Romantic, José de Espronceda (1808–1842), pull suicidality into the space that gothic pleasure creates for processing societally unacceptable desires. In El estudiante de Salamanca (1837), the ghostly, ghastly skeleton of the heroine, dead from losing the affection of her lover, leads him through a labyrinthine nocturnal city into a netherworld populated by the dead, and with her kiss, both marries him and marks his death. In El diablo mundo (1840–41), death personified, with a mortal sweetness in her gaze, offers the pacific repose of the tomb in her kiss, which repulses even as it seduces. By reading these narratives as suicide, within the framework of gothic pleasure, this article offers a more concrete understanding of death in Espronceda's work, diverges from established tropes of self-annihilation in the nineteenth century, and suggests that literary suicide can be fruitfully explored through the framework of gothic pleasure.