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In relation to alcoholism 46 in novels of Galdós, Fuentes Peris studies the portrayal of Mauricia la Dura in Fortunata y Jacinta and notes that she is representative of the working-class public drunkenness which occasioned middleclass contempt (Fuentes Peris 91) for its manifestation in a woman, whose assigned roles in society as domestic nurturer and ángel del hogar 47 made female inebriety seem much more serious. She perceptively comments on the contrast between the vivid portrayal of Mauricia‘s drunkenness and the de-emphasized picture of habitual intoxication of José Izquierdo, whose moral and physical degeneration is treated much more lightly by Galdós (Fuentes Peris 109). In this dissertation, I propose to extend Fuentes Peris‘ consideration of degeneration in Mauricia to include her other features which would have confirmed, in the eyes of Galdós‘s contemporaries, her profoundly degenerate state, since Fuentes Peris devotes little space to the consideration of Mauricia‘s madness, to her prostitution and to her ambiguous sexuality all of which were viewed at the time as degenerative processes.
An analysis of degeneration theory in Galdós‘s novels by Collin McKinney (2010) has been published during the course of the preparation of this dissertation. In Mapping the Social Body. Urbanization, the Gaze and the Novels of Galdós, alcoholism: Fuentes Peris cites conflicting opinions as to the status of alcoholism as a moral failing or as a disease (Fuentes Peris 91). My impression is that Huss considered it as a disease while Morel (Morel, Traité 79 ff.), quoting Huss extensively, considers the disease in a chapter entitled ―Dégénérescences par las agents intoxicants,‖ scarcely a purely moral mechanism. Esquerdo clearly held similar views in 1881 when he writes, ―muchos dipsomaniacos no son otra cosa que paralìticos progresivos‖ (Esquerdo, Garayo 24). The latter entity was very much recognized as a disease to the extent that a visiting psychiatrist, Donald Fraser, reported in 1878 that Esquerdo was treating it with phosphorus (Fraser 349), a decade before its syphilitic cause began to be established by Fournier. 47 ángel del hogar: the bourgeois ideology of ideal, domestic womanhood that served to distinguish the middle-class from the pueblo and from the aristocracy. As with so many ideologies, it represented a form of control. Its appearance in Galdós has been the subject of a monograph by Bridget Aldaraca (1991). 46