Galdós - Amazon Web Services

Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
concentrates on the important theme of illusion and reality, rightly emphasising, in the process,
the subtle ambiguities inherent in Galdós' approach to madness which earlier critics have tended to
overlook. Cervantes, rather than Zola, is seen as the major influence here. Durand is particularly
effective in his analysis of the parallels between Isidora's psychological shortcomings and the
mental and moral deficiencies of the Madrid society portrayed by Galdós in the novel. Here
Cervantine ambiguity and heredity come together to reinforce, through the medium of irony, Galdós'
social critique, for the heredity which unites Rufete and Isidora in a common madness also unites
symbolically Leganés and Madrid. Despite the suggestion, made repeatedly in the description of
Leganés in chapter 1 and rendered with graphic panache in the Canencia episode, that the bordeline
between madness and sanity is not as easy to draw as might be thought, throughout the first part of
the novel Leganés and Madrid remain fundamentally antithetical worlds the respective, and largely
separate, domains of the manifestly mad Rufete and of Isidora, apparently so normal that she not
only shares, but positively embodies, the values and aspirations of the society in which she lives. Not
until the «canon's» letter at the end of Part I ends the suspense which has been carefully maintained
with regard to the validity or otherwise of Isidora's pretensions -and in doing so recalls to mind
the half-forgotten spectre of Rufete's madness- is the real underlying similarity between Isidora, the
«canon» and Rufete finally and fully grasped. With the arrival of this letter, reality, in the shape of
the hereditary bond linking these three in a common, and now manifest, « neurosis », delivers an
ironic commentary on previous appearances, puncturing the apparent normality of Isidora and, by
extension, that of the whole society with which she is identified. With Isidora thus tarred with the
brush of Rufete's madness, the wall separating the apparently antithetical worlds of Leganés (insanity)
and Madrid («normality») collapses, leaving their fundamental similarity fully revealed.
This is a good example of the way in which Galdós adapts the naturalistic theory of the degenerative
family neurosis 59 to suit his own particular purposes. It is surely wrong, therefore, to dismiss such
devices, as Durand does, as «mere naturalistic trappings» 60 . One of the major attractions of the
theory for Galdós was clearly its protean character. By its means he is able to group within the three
generations of a single family a wide variety of psychologically abnormal types without sinning
greatly against verisimilitude (rather as though the major branches of the Rougon-Macquart family
59 V. M. Gordon, «The Medical Background to Galdós' La desheredada », Anales Galdosianos , VII
(1972), 67-76.
60 Art. cit., p. 193.
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