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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
so-called «honor plays», is using the values and violence it prescribes in a negative way to point to
his own Christian values. 83
Of the three main characters of Realidad , Augusta alone travels the road from locura to cordura .
Like Quijote, she is bored with the conventionality of life and feels impelled to recreate ordinary life
in a novelistic fashion: « Yo apetezco lo extraño, eso que con desprecio llaman novelesco los tontos,
juzgando las novelas más sorprendentes que la realidad » (p. 825). This leads Augusta to criticize an
objective morality and to argue that morality is a personal, individual and subjective matter. It is on
this basis that she justifies her affair with Viera. Still, at the end of the novel, she does renounce her
illusion, at least to herself, and promises to make amends for her wrongdoing much as Don Quijote
renounced his knight errantry and made a firm purpose of amendment in the final chapter of the
second part of the Quijote. From the brief glimpse of her conduct in Torquemada y San Pedro (Part
1, Chapters 7-11), she does seem to have kept this promise.
To sum up, Galdós portrays the moral ideas of Orozco and Viera as illusions, mistaken ideas which
they assert as reality, but which simply do not correspond to the reality of the «'practical' type of
sanctity expressed in a Christlike charity» (Parker, «Nazarín...» p. 87) demanded by the modern world.
The negative light in which Galdós casts these mistaken ideas is accentuated by his identification of
these two characters with Quijote. Augusta, too, is like Quijote: she seeks to live life as if it were a
novel, yet she, unlike her husband and lover, and like Quijote, attains desengaño . In consequence,
Augusta is the only character which Galdós uses quijotismo to exalt in Realidad . From the
perspective of later novels such as Nazarín, Halma and Misericordia our examination of the
illusions of these three characters gives an important clue as to how Galdós initiates the « proceso
de espiritualización » in las novelas españolas contemporáneas .
83 See P. N. Dunn's seminal essay « Honour and the Christian Background in Calderón », BHS ,
37 (1960), 75-105, rpf. in Critical Essays on the Theatre of Calderón , ed. Bruce W. Wardropper
(New York: New York Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 24-60. Also see his « Patrimonio del alma », BHS ,
41 (1964), 78-85.
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