71
Art. cit.
72
This article was read in typescript by Dr. Jennifer Lowe of Edinburgh University, to whom I am indebted for many helpful comments.
73
«The Reality of Illusion: La desheredada», MLN, 89 (1974), 191-201, at pp. 201 and 198 respectively.
74
See H. Chonon Berkowitz, Pérez Galdós: Spanish Liberal Crusader (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1948), p. 224; Ángel del Río, Estudios galdosianos (Zaragoza, 1953), pp. 15-16; and Gustavo Correa, Realidad, ficción y símbolo en las novelas de Pérez Galdós: ensayo de estética realista (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1967), pp. 163-191.
75
Benito Pérez Galdós Obras completas, ed. Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1950), V, 786. Both La incógnita and Realidad are included in vol. 5 of this edition. Further references are given after quotations in the text.
76
Galdós, novelista moderno, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1973), p. 229.
77
See, e.g., Gilberto Paolini, An Aspect of Spiritualistic Naturalism in the Novels of B. P. Galdós: Charity (New York: Las Américas, 1969), passim; and Arnold M. Penuel, Charity in the Novels of Galdós (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972), pp. 71-76.
78
AG, 2 (1967), 83-101. For the historical background to these ideas, see Penuel, pp. ix-xiii. Galdós' religious ideas were shared by his Victorian contemporaries: «All these novelists [Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy] concentrate on the theme of love, and all in one way or another see the relation of the self to the other as an attempt to satisfy religious longings in a world where relations to God are blocked. To put this another way, Victorian fiction may be said to have as its fundamental theme an exploration of the various ways in which a man may seek to make a god of another person in a world without God, or at any rate in a world where the traditional ways in which the self may be related to God no longer seem open» (J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction [Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968], p. 96). The theme of charity in Galdós' novels is part of what Amado Alonso has called «Lo español y lo universal en Galdós», Materia y forma en poesía, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1969), pp. 201-221.
79
See «The Ambiguity of Orozco's Virtue in Galdós' La incógnita and Realidad», Hispania, 53 (1970), 411-418.
80
La incógnita, like Cervantes' novel, is a novel about a novel, and Realidad structurally parallels the Historia de Don Quijote written by Cide Hamete as a novel within a novel. See Leon Livingstone, «Interior Duplication and the Problem of Form in the Modern Spanish Novel», PMLA, 73 (1958), 393-406; and E. C. Riley, «Three Versions of Don Quixote», MLR, 68 (1973), 807-819. In theme Realidad corresponds exactly to one of the novellas which Cervantes interpolates in the first part of his novel, El curioso impertinente (Chapters 32-35). Both Realidad and El curioso are found in a trunk; both tell the tragic story of husbands who, consumed with the quixotic pursuit of theoretical perfection, destroy their wives' faithfulness; and both use a love triangle to play with reality and illusion. The basis of my comparison of Realidad and El curioso differs from that of René Girard's comparison of Dostoyevsky's The Eternal Husband and El curioso in his Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Sell and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 49-52. The basis of my comparison is the interplay between reality and illusion within a love triangle, whereby both Orozco and Anselmo emerge as quixotic figures, whereas that of Girard's comparison is the mediation of desire, whereby Pavel Pavlovitch and Anselmo are examples of internally mediated desire, distinguishing them from Quijote, who is an example of externally mediated desire. I should further note that, considered from Girard's perspective, Orozco's desire is externally mediated: upon learning of Augusta's infidelity, he struggles to suppress his natural inclination to feel jealous, because of his own ideal of self-perfection, which contemns ordinary human feelings.