Misery, Hope and Humanity in Benito Pérez Galdós's <i>Misericordia</i> (1897)

Abstract

Amidst the great turmoil, appalling conditions and ineffable hardships of impoverished nineteenth-century Spain, the realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós brilliantly weaves a tale of humanity and friendship in Misericordia, a story about the compassion, unfaltering loyalty and devotion of the main character, Benina, towards her neighbors. The plot revolves strategically around the lowest and most economically deprived social group, the beggars, thus separating Galdós's Misericordia from the work of his contemporaries. In this fictional work, the lower class is given great social visibility via Benina, who constitutes the embodiment of all the values, ideology and principles the writer seeks to praise and emphasize in the story.

Keywords

• Benito Pérez Galdós
• Realism
• society
• humanity
• compassion
• power