101
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 184.
102
«Este detalle pinta a la señora de Bringas y da completa idea de su limitada inteligencia, así como de su perversa educación moral, vicio histórico y castizo, pues no lo anula, ni aun lo disimula, el barniz de urbanidad con que resplandecen, a la luz de las relaciones superficiales, muchas personas de levita y mantilla» (p. 21).
103
Rosalía's experience with Pez will force her to readjust a highly inflated assessment of the market value of her sexual favors -«no le doy un tesoro por una miseria...» (p. 210)- an evaluation derived from. the erroneous premise that she is living in an economy of scarcity.
104
Galdós makes sure that the reader is aware of Ido's linguistic idiosyncracy by having Refugio say in Tormento: «francamente, naturalmente, como dice Ido...» (p. 39). Michael Nimetz comments on the reappearance of Ido's voice in his book Humor in Galdós (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 94. He states that our knowledge of Ido precludes the assumption that he is, or has been, the narrator. This is true; however, we cannot therefore conclude, as so many critics tend to do when faced with an apparently inexplicable element in Galdós' narrative structure, that his insertion of Ido's voice is equivalent to an authorial mistake or lapse. Nimetz' statement that «except for a few seemingly insignificant 'yo's,' La de Bringas reads like a third-person narrative» also ignores the fleshing-out process of the «narrator-agent» (to use Nimetz' own apt phrase). It is of structural importance that the narrator is Pez's intimate friend, for he demonstrates his own fish-like characteristics by emerging from the revolutionary storm as a replacement for none other than Bringas himself. His job is to «administrar todo lo que había pertenecido a la Corona» (p. 222). In effect, he has replaced Bringas in his position as «oficial primero del Patrimonio» (p. 135). It would seem that he had also replaced Bringas in the domestic sphere, at least on a temporary and ad hoc basis. «Quiso repetir las pruebas de su ruinosa amistad, mas yo me apresuré a ponerles punto...» (p. 223).
105
Galdós emphasizes the impossibility of earning a living by the one employment outside of marriage considered decent for a young single woman of the middle class, sewing. Refugio, in Tormento: «¿Pues no he trabajado bastante? ¿De qué son mis dedos? Se han vuelto de palo de tanto coser. ¿Y qué he ganado? Miseria y más miseria...» (p. 45).
106
Throughout the novel, the «insider's» perspective is not only that of the middle class, but limited to the Palace inhabitants. Nowhere does this become more evident than in the scene of the ceremonious «comida de los pobres» in Chapter VIII.
107
Henri Lefevbre, «Forma, Función, Estructura en 'El Capital'», en Estructuralismo y Política (Buenos Aires: Editorial La Pléyade, 1973), p. 161.
108
Comparo a Galdós con Zola porque en esta novela Galdós se propone hacer una novela naturalista siguiendo los cánones naturalistas que Zola había propuesto en El Naturalismo (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1972).
109
Iris M. Zavala, Ideología y Política en la Novela Española del S. XIX (Salamanca: Anaya, 1971), pp. 317-331.
110
Citado en Ibid., p. 323.