201
Critics who have noted this basic belief of Galdós have generally seen it in a different light. See, among others: Gustavo Correa, Realidad, ficción y símbolo en las novelas de Pérez Galdós (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1967), pp. 231-53; Sherman H. Eoff, The Modern Spanish Novel (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 143-44; Arnold M. Peñuel, «Galdós, Freud and Humanistic Psychology», Hispania, 55 (1972), 66-69.
202
In the essay referred to in note 8, I have attempted to demonstrate that two other seemingly disparate characters (Manso and Maximiliano Rubín) are likewise manifestations of a single concept. Work in progress develops these views concerning Galdós' paradigmatic characters and other elements of his novelistic world which are here only touched upon. In the case of Fortunata and Torquemada there are still other similarities that merit attention. For example, the two characters also play similar roles in relation to society. At their deaths each has bequeathed -fortune being one of the components of Fortunata's name- renewed life to another social class, she in the form of a child to the sterile bourgeoisie and Torquemada title, position, and wealth to the sterile nobility. Nature -be its aspect otherwise positive or negative- is the vital force. How differently Zola elaborated the effects of the natural (sex, instinct) on the upper classes in telling the sordid story of his prostitute protagonist in Nana (1880). A comparison of that novel and Fortunata is illuminating both for their similarities and their divergences. Galdós was doubtless quite aware of the relationship. It is easy to forget, because of Galdós' enlivening variations, that Fortunata too, is a type and has many nineteenth-century sisters, among them Marguerite Gautier, Thaïs, and -in the naturalistic novel proper- Nana and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
203
Carmen Bravo Villasante, «Veintiocho cartas de Galdós a Pereda», Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 250-52 (1970-71), 23.
204
«Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts», in David Newton de Molina, ed., On Literary Intention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1976), p. 220.
205
(London: Collins, 1974).
206
Tres personajes galdosianos, p. 170.
207
Pedro Ortiz Armengol, «Vigencia de Fortunata», Revista de Occidente, 5-6 (1976), 47.
208
«Historia, reflejo literario y estructura de la novela: el ejemplo de Torquemada», Ideologies and Literature, I (1977), 38.
209
The relation of these views to those of Peter B. Goldman are too complex to take up here. Suffice it to say that definition of the term is the crux of the matter. See Goldman's «Galdós and the Aesthetic of Ambiguity: Notes on the Thematic Structure of Nazarín», Anales Galdosianos, 9 (1974), 99-112.
210
Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine (New York: The Century Co., 1906), II, p. 94. In French: «Les avares ne croient point à une vie à venir, le présent est tout pour eux». Eugénie Grandet (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1965), p. 120.