Myth and Meaning: A Paradigmatic Analysis of Galdós' Fortunata y Jacinta

This work is a symbolic study of Benito Pérez Galdós’s masterful novel, Fortunata y Jacinta (1887). It is the first book to apply the totalizing body of Claude Lèvi-Strauss’s anthropological structuralism to analyze the fictive model society encoded in this novel. Jackson discovers that the results of narrative techniques in Fortunata y Jacinta reflect the implied author’s theoretical move from a mimetic mirroring of society to the presentation of an image of life that is consistent with Galdós’s critiques of the excessive formalism of the external society of 19th-century Madrid.