BEGGING AND POVERTY IN THE NOVEL MISERICORDIA BY BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS: A NEO-HISTORICIST READING

Abstract

The New Historicism theory implies a specific reading practice aimed at explaining, among other things, why the texts represent models of social conduct and transmit dominant codes in the cultural frameworks in which they are inscribed. Thus, for example, the whole of the literary production of a specific period can be studied in terms of the network of dominant social, political, and cultural institutions at a given historical moment. The novels of Spanish realism, especially those of writers ideologically involved in the national social and political life, retain the analytical potential of the Spanish literary texts of the last years of the nineteenth-century century in terms of the "sites of conflict" and "textual fissures" immanent to the theoretical postulates of New Historicism. The novel Misericordia (1897) is one of the best works of Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920), conceived in his late phase of "spiritual realism" and frequently designated as a clear testimony of his ideological disillusionment with the objectives of the Regeneration ideology of that epoch. In this novel, Galdós paints and recreates the nineteenth-century Madrid environment: its streets, neighborhoods, cafés, taverns, houses, churches, cemeteries, and other urban locations. Starting from the postulates of the New Historicism theory, the article analyzes Galdos’s conceptualization of begging and poverty as symbolic projections of a social and historical crisis in fin-de-siècle Spain. Poverty, begging, and other forms of social marginalization were of great interest to Galdós, especially in the late phase of his novelistic activity. At the end of the century, Spain lost its last overseas colonies, thus ending a series of defeats and political failures that marked nineteenth-century national history. Precisely, the textual fragments in which the lives of the beggars, the poor, and other categories of the marginalized are described testify to the presence of a dialogue between the subjects of power and the unfortunate social entities, symbols of the Spanish national decadence of the time. Thus, analyzing the position of man in times of crisis of all individual or national values (as a consequence of the historical, political, and social crisis at the end of the century), there can be only hope for the individual to preserve goodness or humanity in his daily activities, help the neighbor and all those in need, and respond with love to acts of hatred, pride, or different forms of humiliation.