Fermina Daza and Doña Blanca’s mother-in-law conflict

Fermina Daza and Doña Blanca’s mother-in-law conflict turns the Urbino palace into a contested domestic world: Doña Blanca’s authority shapes its customs, while Fermina’s attempts to live by her own preferences are repeatedly checked or accommodated only in diminished form. The conflict helps account for Fermina’s despair after her honeymoon and reveals how family lineage, mourning, and social convention can make a home feel like a prison.

The household after the honeymoon

When Fermina returns from her honeymoon and takes possession of the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, she feels trapped in the wrong house, though not with the wrong husband. She spends six years there, which she regards as the worst period of her life. Doña Blanca’s bitterness and the lethargy of Juvenal Urbino’s sisters make the household an especially difficult place to inhabit. The young marriage that had seemed happy lasts only through the honeymoon; daily life in the palace exposes a conflict that the wedding had not resolved.

Doña Blanca’s influence is bound up with bereavement. Once a lively, intelligent woman who had been the center of her social world, she has changed after widowhood: she becomes embittered and hostile toward the wider world. Her resentment is connected to her husband’s decision to sacrifice himself for a cause she despised, rather than remain alive for her. This history helps explain the force of her presence in the house, but does not soften its effect on Fermina, who finds herself living under the rule of a grieving woman’s fixed customs.

Customs, correction, and accommodation

The conflict plays out through ordinary routines as much as explicit arguments. Fermina resents the palace’s formal meals and evening rosary, the criticism of her table manners and dress, and the judgment of how she walks and nurses her child. Her efforts to introduce five-o’clock tea, with small cakes and candied flowers in the English fashion, meet Doña Blanca’s objection that such fare does not belong in her home. Even Fermina’s account of a dream is subject to correction: Doña Blanca declares that a decent woman should not have dreamed it. In this household, private experience as well as public conduct is treated as something the older woman may judge.

Food makes the conflict tangible. Doña Blanca keeps eggplant on the menu almost every day out of respect for her dead husband, while Fermina refuses to eat it. The dish also recalls an earlier episode in Fermina’s childhood, when her father forced her to eat a large casserole and the punishment became associated in her memory with castor oil. The palace’s repeated meals therefore press an old aversion into the present: a household custom maintained in the name of the dead becomes another demand Fermina cannot accept without distress.

Music provides a second, more formal measure of Doña Blanca’s authority. She holds that a decent woman should know how to play the piano. Juvenal objects to subjecting his wife to the lessons he had endured as a child, but can secure only a substitution: a harp instead of a piano. A costly instrument is brought from Vienna, and Fermina studies first with a teacher from Mompox, who dies two weeks later, and then with the seminary’s leading musician. The lessons become an imposed obligation that she accepts in hopes of avoiding a larger rupture. The harp survives as a valued heirloom in the City Museum until it and its contents are later destroyed by fire, giving this domestic discipline a material afterlife beyond the household.

Juvenal’s failure to mediate

Fermina’s isolation is intensified by her husband’s response. Juvenal is pained by the deterioration of his mother, but he does not effectively challenge her power. He turns away from Fermina’s pleas, trusting that time, divine wisdom, and his wife’s capacity to adapt will settle the situation. Fermina therefore blames him for the trap more than she blames Doña Blanca or Juvenal’s sisters: in her view, he is the person who might have intervened, yet his family’s standing makes him bold in public while leaving him weak in the household conflict.

Juvenal gives the marital difficulties a general explanation, treating marriage itself as an improbable bond between people with different characters, upbringings, and social origins. He remarks, “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.” But this reflection does not remove the particular imbalance of their home. The marriage spans opposing classes in a city still nostalgic for the viceroys, and Juvenal’s deference to lineage leaves Fermina to bear the consequences of a household organized around his mother’s authority.

From resistance to reluctant endurance

Fermina initially holds to a phrase that affirms her freedom of thought: “To hell with a fan when the wind is blowing.” Yet the account describes her as becoming caught in the conventions and prejudices of her new world more quickly than she expected. She grows protective of the privileges she has managed to win and wary of embarrassment and scorn. Her study of the harp, like her persistence within the household, becomes a sacrifice made in the hope that Doña Blanca’s circumstances might change.

The conflict does not end in a clean victory or reconciliation in the evidence given here. Instead, it marks the first six years of Fermina’s married life as a period of constraint and helps explain her sense that the palace is a place of misfortune. At the same time, the account distinguishes the mother-in-law’s power from the marriage itself: Juvenal and Fermina retain tenderness and desire, and memories of earlier affection can soften their estrangement. That remaining bond does not erase Doña Blanca’s role in the crisis; it shows why the household conflict is not simply a measure of whether the marriage contains love, but of whether love can survive the conventions and loyalties governing their shared home.