326 society and its future. These follies and vices, in the view of many of Galdós‘s day, were seen as fundamentally degenerative in nature.
Chapter 7: Conclusions
Degeneration, as it was understood in the theory of the 1880s, is inherent in the four novels of this study. It first appeared in La desheredada as a feature of Galdós‘s segunda manera novels as a result of the influence of the Naturalism of Zola, epitomized by his L’Assommoir (1877), the preface to the second edition of Thérèse