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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
Cuban uprising in 1895 signalled the disaster of 1898 221 . Both the economic infrastructure and the
political superstructure of the Restoration regime were falling apart. But in the face of this weakness
on the part of the bourgeoisie, the working class was unable to offer an alternative. Its movement was
deeply divided between anarchists and socialists and had experienced considerable repression since
1884. Without trying to argue a one to one relationship between economic and political phenomena on
one hand, and artistic creations such as novels on the other, I think we can see how the virtual collapse
of the Restoration, the lack of any viable alternative to it, and the pessimism that this situation imbued
in all sectors of society, were important social factors which contributed to Galdós's turn away from
historical process in search of ahistorical solutions.
Nevertheless this shift does not mean that the historical is eliminated from these novels. Rather, as
we shall see in this study of Ángel Guerra , the oscillation continues. In spite of Galdós's efforts to
find a spiritual alternative, materiality continues to permeate his search. The emphasis may now be on
the spiritual, but the historical problems refuse to go away. The spiritual and the historical continue
to form a duality which is expressed primarily in contradictions in the development of Ángel as a
character and in the proposed resolutions the novel offers.
Ángel Guerra is Galdós's first effort to understand the evangelical vision of charity in the terms
of the modem world. The question which is posed here is, in its broadest terms: how can a spiritual
factor predominate in an increasingly urbanized society whose way of life is based on the steam
engine and the exchange of commodities? The artistic problems which are posed stem from a historical
base, for Galdós understood that the New Testament concept of charity was enunciated in a world far
less complicated and skeptical than nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Thus the spiritual-historical
duality is present in the basic hypothesis of the novel.
In the working out of this hypothesis, the dynamic developed in Ángel Guerra is the opposite
of Fortunata y Jacinta . In the latter work, Fortunata is an outsider who seeks to be integrated into
bourgeois society (although on her own terms), and the renovation of society is dependent on the
success of her efforts. In the former, on the other hand, Ángel is a bourgeois who rejects the values and
institutions of his class. He strives continually to achieve a radical break with society, first through
violent social revolution and then through the establishment of a messianic religious order which will
function as an alternative external to the status quo. Whereas in Fortunata y Jacinta the renovation
221 See particularly the chapter «The Restoration and the Disaster, 1874-1898» in Raymond Carr,
Spain 1808-1939 , (Oxford: Oxford. U. Press, 1966.)
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