Affinities of Marianela de Galdós with the «novel of customs» of the Elizabethan period

Abstract

The article wants to compare Marianela (1878), the last in the Galdós's series of "realistic novels", with the "novels of customs", one of the most prolific genres of the Elizabethan period. The comparative analysis highlights the common and differential factors between the two narrative modalities in order to clarify and assess the originality of the great novelist, within this literary context, based on antinomic measures, be it in the narrative resources, the social profiles of the characters, the structural axis of an account outside the intrigues that supernate by the folletinesque plots, thematic motifs in conflict and various small stories of lesser depth. This form of composition is what the author of Marianela takes into account, for the purpose of dismantling an agonizing paraliterary model and replacing it with a newer one, giving it a deep symbolism that emerges between the extremes of lyrical fabulation and reality prosaic, metaforizing the anthymity of physical/ideal beauty, vision/blindness, even mining landscapes, as they have been interpreting very notorious critics of a work subject to multiple interpretations. He doesn't quit, yet, Don Benito to certain argumental affinities offered by the novel of customs, such as in the thematic coincidences of his novel with a tale of W. Ayguals de Izco in The Palace of Crimes (1855), or in the social prototype of Nela, the orphan protagonist who lives in complete helplessness, only remediable with the happy educational solution of a positivism that could have led her to her good progress.