For a meticulous analysis of Cayetano's letters and their function in the novel, see in this issue, Lee Fontanella, «Doña Perfecta as Historiographic Lesson». (N. del A.)

The story pattern of tales about unhappy lovers is that parents are hostile to the love of the young couple who, plotting some sort of meeting, usually at night, fall victims of errors, misunderstandings or fatal coincidences and die, or, in any case, are separated. Some of the common models are Pyramus and Thisbe (Ovid's Metamorphoses), Tristan and Iseult, Calisto and Melibea, Romeo and Juliette. «The identification of sources has», aptly put by author-editor J. E. Varey, «been a favourite game of the academic...», «Galdós in the Light of Recent Criticism», Galdós Studies, Tamesis (1970), p. 12. There have been attempts to trace Doña Perfecta to Turgenev or Balzac but these studies are of a comparative nature. My position is that «identifiable» sources help explore how Doña Perfecta came to be constructed but that the critic must understand, above all, what Galdós' narrative purposes were and what artistic and ideological functions passages, scenes and characters possess in a novel written for the Restoration public. (N. del A.)

Each new version of the same story-pattern, no matter how true to ¿he model or type, corresponds to its particular place and time in history. For example, DP's first serialized appearance indicates a low or middle-income (and hence not overly cultured) public. Cf. Fr. Yndurain, Galdós entre la novela y el folletín, Taurus (1970), p. 58. For the persistency of patterns, especially in tragedy, see Richmond Lattimor, The Story-pattern of Greek Tragedies, Univ. of Michigan (1960); also, Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folk Tale (Austin, Texas, 1968). For a discussion of pertinent problems, cf. Jameson, Prison-House, op. cit., 64-69. (N. del A.)

The model situation is «Arcadia», a backward rural part of Peloponnesus which in various writers, especially Virgil, became an archetype of ideal country life and, later, a setting for an entirely happy and free life, summed up in the notion of the Golden Age or, as is known in Spanish, «menosprecio de la Corte y alabanza de la aldea». Arcadia, like Utopia, is of course a myth and Galdós puts it to ironic use by showing how a peasantry, trapped by the ideology of ideal rural life, propagated by landowners and clergymen, can have a false consciousness of its own surroundings. For a serious survey of the town-country contrast, especially in English literature, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City. (N. del A.)

Besides its thesis (which supposedly led Galdós to create good and evil characters), the melodramatic bent of the novel is the one problem that has bothered critics. There are many decent technical discussions of how melodramatic strands are there in the plot, characterization, suspense or outcome but almost always with apologetic caveats -as if the presence of melodramatic tendencies reduced the category of Doña Perfecta as a good novel. Cf. Cardona, op. cit., for ways in which Galdós avoids the «Pit of melodrama». Cardona's views are evaluative: «The novel, although perilously walking on the edge of melodrama, is able to avoid it because of its tragic structure» (p. 44). Also see Robert Sánchez, «Doña Perfecta and the histrionic projection of characters», Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, III (1969), 175-90. (N. del A.)

Just so we do not overwork truisms: all narrative fiction is artifice, no matter what critical model we follow. In the particular case of Doña Perfecta, as, say, with epics, the more complete the artifice is the more coherent the vision and, ironically, the more truthful is Galdós' fiction to Spanish, contemporary history. For one of the best proofs available that Galdós was aware of artifice, see a forthcoming article, Peter Standish, «Theatricality and humour: Galdós' technique in Doña Perfecta», BHS, July 1977 issue. Standish shows by scrutinizing the narrator's participation that Galdós was very much in control even of apparent crudenesses of style. (N. del A.)

One critic who has successfully placed Doña Perfecta in its historical context is Josette Blanquat, «De l'histoire au roman Doña Perfecta: approche méthodologique», Actes de VIe Congres national des hispanistes français de l'Enseignement supérieur, Annales littéraires de l'Université de Besançon, 126 (1972), 59-71. Comparing fictional situations with material from contemporary newspapers, Blanquat shows to what extent Doña Perfecta is a sociological document. See also, but with caution when it comes to the literal sense of the novel, K. V. Tsurinov's «Soviet Introduction to Doña Perfecta (1964)» tr. Into English by V. A. Chamberlin, AG, X (1975), 63-81. (N. del A.)

See the conclusion of this study for an illustration of this charge. The general argument of Doña Perfecta's critics becomes, I hope, more meaningful at the end because it follows the analysis and interpretation of the novel. (N. del A.)

For an effective argument against supposed dichotomies and facile reductions in Doña Perfecta cf. R. Cardwell, «[...] Art or Argument?» Op. cit. (N. del A.)

The difficulty here, of course, is the adaptation of the concept of «evolution» to literary history whereby some sort of movement of an orderly kind is assumed to take place (in, say, a «genre», a cluster of «themes» or «ideas», the «works» of a particular author, or a «generation») which in turn produces changes of a novel kind. The process of change and the new direction are often dealt apart from concrete history (even though movement, change and newness occur only in history and during particular ages) and the results, sometimes amusingly, are the case of one genre, or idea or work begetting another, and so on. In Galdosian studies the results of this method have been uneven, with some sound appraisals of Galdós' development of narrative art. (N. del A.)