41
Marie A. WeIlington ya notó «la falta de sensibilidad de Florentina».
42
Peter Bly dice a este propósito: «Florentina, in actual fact, is no dressmaker and she should not have attempted the task. She is really doing more harm than good», y más adelante añade: «Her gifts of clothes lack the mark of a true sacrifice» (59).
43
«Florentina stands for modern religion of the purest type -for Christianity in the highest degree. She is a developed woman, not a stunted dwarf» (Lister 349).
44
Especialmente ilustrativa a este respecto es la tercera serie de Episodios nacionales, en la que asistimos a la irrupción, la degeneración y la muerte del romanticismo, representadas respectivamente por las situaciones amorosas del primer episodio, de los ocho centrales y del último. He tratado este problema en otro estudio.
45
González Arias (170) disregards Alcalá Galiano's suspicions and dates the relationship from 1883.
46
In her recent book Roberta Johnson (35-120), without using the Russian term, discusses this character type and its theoretical/philosophical underpinnings in most of these novelists.
47
Needless to say, the novelistic text, turned inward upon itself to reveal its inner workings, exemplifies this same retreat from empirical reality and literary Realism at the very moment that the Realist's use of scientific perspectives (Eoff 1-20) is being perfected and widened. Ironically, it is the analytical mind-set of science that allows the mind to visualize the text as possessing «mechanisms» of anti-mimetic self-analysis and yet permits that same mind to relate this essentially antimimetic exposé of inner mechanisms to the scientific, political, and other empirically corroborable frameworks that have an impact on the novel.
48
Even as «superfluous men», Oblomov, Manso, and Augusto are unique, since, rather than deviating from the mediocrity of everyday life by imagining realities ahead of their time, they visualize a return to more idyllic forms of life that never truly were (Chances 82-83).
49
Consult Bataillon for additional historical sources used by Galdós in writing Zaragoza. Toreno (153-55) regards the city's resistance in the first and second sieges as heroic and truly remarkable, as an experience that inspired Spanish forces and then ironically was held up to the French people by Napoleon as a model they should emulate. Carr (107), observing that the Spanish army was considered on the whole to be cowardly and incompetent at the time, notes that Europe was astounded to read that Zaragoza had fought off the French for two and one half months.
50
Regalado García has stated that Galdós deliberately sought to tap into the tradition of Spanish nationalism and patriotic pride in the first series of Episodios: «La selección de temas, y dentro de ella la de episodios específicos, va guiada por la intención consciente del autor de buscar la esencia del espíritu patriótico en la heroica exaltación nacional de aquellos años de guerra encarnizada contra los invasores» (50). Gilman describes Zaragoza as «an epic told novelistically» (177), while Larrea characterizes the book as a hybrid of the epic and the realist historical novel (261).