Our Friend Manso by Benito Pérez Galdós

First published:El amigo Manso, 1882 (English translation, 1987)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: The late 1870’s

Locale: Madrid

Principal Characters:

• Maximo Manso, a scholar, philosopher, and teacher
• Dona Javiera De Pena, an attractive middle-aged widow, who is Maximo’s neighbor
• Manuel de Pena, Dona Javiera’s son and Maximo’s student
• Dona Candida De Garcia Grande, a pretentious widow, who was a friend of Maximo’s mother
• Irene, a beautiful, intelligent young girl, Dona Candida’s niece
• Jose Maria, Maximo’s brother, who made his fortune in Cuba
• Lica, Jose Maria’s Cuban wife

The Novel

Maximo Manso meets his neighbor, Dona Javiera de Pena, one night in the summer of 1878, when a fire alarm forces the residents to leave their building. Dona Javiera is a warm, expansive woman who owns a lucrative meat business. She takes an interest in Maximo and stops by his apartment often to talk or to bring him a cut of meat. A woman of low origins and little education, Dona Javiera is in awe of Maximo’s vast knowledge. He, in turn, is impressed with his neighbor’s perceptiveness and common sense.

Dona Javiera asks Maximo to take charge of the education of her twenty-one-year-old son, Manuel, whose indolence has his mother worried. Dona Javiera does not expect Manuel to become a scholar, but she would like him to receive a basic education in the humanities that would allow him to function in society. Maximo soon charms Manuel with conversations and excursions; the two become good friends and the boy makes excellent progress. Although he does not care for philosophy and never displays talent for writing, Manuel enjoys history and expresses himself well orally.

Dona Candida de Garcia Grande is another frequent visitor to Maximo’s apartment. Her husband, now deceased, had been a businessman and minor politician. With his death, Dona Candida fell into dire economic straits. Vain and pretentious, she talks constantly of her aristocratic friends and her property, while at the same time begging Maximo for handouts. Maximo, who feels obligated to the woman because of her former friendship with his deceased mother, gives her money. Often Dona Candida does not come in person but sends her orphaned niece Irene, who lives with her. Irene is a well-mannered child who shows interest in Maximo’s books, although the teacher soon realizes that her primary preoccupation is far more basic: food. Frequently, he gives her reading materials and candy, and on one occasion he buys her a pair of shoes. As time passes, Irene grows up and stops frequenting Maximo’s house. She enters a teachers’ institute, where she excels at her studies.

Manuel becomes involved with a young woman from the Vendesol family and begins to spend more time courting her than studying. Dona Javiera is delighted, since the Vendesols are a wealthy, respectable family who also made their fortune in the meat business. The relationship, however, does not last.

Maximo Manso’s calm is shattered by the arrival from Cuba of his brother Jose Maria and his wife, Lica, their three children, Lica’s mother and sister, a mulatto nanny, and a black servant. Jose Maria rents a house for his large, boisterous family and decides to run for Congress as a representative from Cuba, then still a Spanish colony. Soon the house is full of politicians, poets, and journalists. Among them is Manuel, whose oratorical skills promise to launch him into a position of political prominence. Public life demands that Jose Maria impose a more urban veneer on his wife and children, whose relaxed, unpolished behavior is unacceptable in Madrid society. Maximo suggests that his brother hire Irene as a governess.

Family etiquette demands that Maximo dine at his brother’s house almost daily. There he comes into frequent contact with Irene, with whom he falls in love. Maximo and Irene spend a large amount of time together, supervising the children’s lessons and strolling through Madrid. On several occasions, Maximo notices that Irene is flushed and exuberant. After some time, however, she confides that she is not happy at Jose Maria’s house.

Jose Maria wins the election and becomes engrossed in his career. Lica gives birth to their fourth child, whom she names Maximo, after his godfather. Jose Maria, more and more convinced of his own importance, has little time for his family and often belittles Lica, whose Cuban customs and vocabulary he finds embarrassing. Soon, Lica learns that he is womanizing and that his prime target is Irene. Maximo is furious.

Dona Candida announces that she has come into some money and intends to move into a better house. She will take Irene with her, since she believes that it is not fitting that the niece of a woman in her position work as a salaried governess. Maximo suspects that Dona Candida is lying, and sure enough, he learns that Jose Maria is paying for the new apartment in order to have access to Irene. Trapped by her conniving aunt and a rich, ambitious politician, Irene confides in Maximo, who confronts his brother and threatens to create a career-damaging scandal.

Having eliminated his rival, Maximo is now in a position to court Irene himself. He soon learns, however, that she is in love with Manuel de Pena. Sick with grief at the realization that his dear disciple is his competitor, he interrogates Irene, who admits that she is not interested in studying or in having a career, but wants to marry Manuel and get away from her aunt. Maximo struggles with his emotions but finally takes the side of the young lovers. Dona Javiera opposes the marriage because the girl is “just a teacher,” but Maximo convinces her to give her approval, and the couple are married. Dona Javiera becomes more attentive than ever to Manso, and she seems a likely mate for him. Maximo, however, falls ill and soon dies.

The Characters

Maximo Manso, whose name translates roughly as “great meek one” or “maximum gentleness,” appears to be a self-sacrificing soul of whom people take advantage. He constantly yields to the demands of others. He himself comments repeatedly on his tractability: “When will my painful efforts on behalf of others cease?” he laments. “Fortunate is he who lights one candle to charity and another to selfishness.” As is often the case in Benito Pérez Galdós’ novels, the character’s name is ironic. On the one hand, Maximo is kind and mild mannered. On the other, he is self-righteous and intolerant. Like Don Quixote, a literary creation that greatly influenced Pérez Galdós, he wishes to mold the world in accordance with his own ideals. When Irene fails to conform to his image of her, he is sorely disappointed.

Maximo is the embodiment of Krausism, a philosophy that was popular in nineteenth century Spain. Krausism taught that reality progresses toward higher internal unities. God includes both nature and humanity, while transcending both. Man is the highest component of the material universe. Each individual person is like the cell of a body. The progress of society depends on the perfection of its components; therefore, by educating the individual, one works toward the improvement of society. Maximo sees education as the tool through which he will mold Manuel and Irene. Yet he fails to take into consideration the role of the emotions and the pressures of society. Although Maximo is credited with being a great scholar in search of the truth, his idealism blinds rather than illuminates him. It is obvious to the reader far earlier than to Maximo that Manuel, not his middle-aged teacher, is a likely match for Irene.

In Our Friend Manso, Pérez Galdós attempts to break away from naturalism, a literary current that stresses the dominating influence of heredity and environment on human life. To this end, he identifies Maximo as a literary creation from the beginning. The novel opens with the words, “I don’t exist,” and the first chapter relates how the character is drawn out of the author’s pen and given its own life. At the end, after his death, Maximo continues his narrative from Heaven. By depriving his character of a personal past, Pérez Galdós tries to endow him with independence and free will.

Pérez Galdós, however, is not completely successful. In Our Friend Manso the characters are more archetypes than individuals. Thus, Jose Maria is a classic example of a breed of newly rich Spanish males: ambitious, shallow, egocentric. Manuel de Pena is a flamboyant orator with nothing to say, a type that, in Pérez Galdós’ opinion, plagues Spanish politics. Dona Candida is the penniless social climber who feeds her illusions of grandeur by forcing herself into moneyed circles. Dona Javiera is the rich businesswoman who,although of humble origins, becomes increasingly pretentious and socially ambitious. Lica is the sweet, indolent Cuban, and Irene, the materialistic young woman who, in spite of her intellectual potential, craves the comfort, security—and emptiness—of a place at the side of a rising young politician.

Critical Context

The nineteenth century Spanish novelists prior to Pérez Galdós were mostly regionalists or costumbristas, writers who described the picturesque and folkloric elements of life. Pérez Galdós, who was a practicing journalist, revolutionized the novel by using his gift for observation, his political acumen, and his knowledge of history to create a narrative that penetrates deep into the national psyche. Although Pérez Galdós is usually classified as a realist, his characters are sometimes caricatures, exaggerating traits associated with particular social types. All Pérez Galdós’ works are an attempt to understand Spanish society—how it is, and how it became that way. Pérez Galdós’ first novel, La fontana de oro (1868), contained both costumbrista and historical elements, and each succeeding work was a new attempt to comprehend the interelation between history and personal experience.

In 1873, with the publication of Trafalgar (English translation, 1884), Pérez Galdós began the first series of his “national episodes,” or historical novels. Three years later, he published Dona Perfecta (1876; English translation, 1880), the first of his “Spanish contemporary novels.” Although Pérez Galdós appeared to be moving in opposite directions at once, the historical and contemporary sequences were actually complementary. The first represented an effort to comprehend contemporary Spain by following the course of history from the past to the present. The second allowed the author to construct archetypes in order to reach a deeper comprehension of contemporary Spanish society.

Dona Perfecta was followed by Gloria (1876-1877; English translation, 1879) and Marianela (1878; English translation, 1883). All three depicted the intolerance of the inhabitants of the small towns of rural Spain. With La desheredada (1881; The Disinherited Lady, 1957), Pérez Galdós created the city novel and entered a new period in which he depicted the perverse commitment to material wealth and social climbing at the time of the Bourbon Restoration (1874). Our Friend Manso forms part of the second period of “Spanish contemporary novels.” In it, Pérez Galdós continues to examine the distortion of values of the new Spain that was emerging during the second part of the nineteenth century. While its predecessor explores the determinism imposed by history and heredity, Our Friend Manso attempts to introduce an element of free will into the narrative. That Pérez Galdós does not completely succeed does not diminish the significance of the novel. Our Friend Manso, although not Pérez Galdós’ best work, is a step toward the creation of his masterpieces, Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-1887; Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women, 1973) and his four-volume Torquemada series (1889-1895), in which he reaches a synthesis of the historical and the individual, of the deterministic and the independent.

Bibliography

Bly, Peter A. Galdós’ Novel of the Historical Imagination: A Study of the Contemporary Novels, 1984.

Dendle, Brian. Galdós: The Mature Thought, 1980.

Eoff, Sherman H. Novels of Pérez Galdós

Gilman, Stephen. Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867-1887, 1981.

Pattison, Walter. Benito Pérez Galdós, 1975.

Pattison, Walter. Benito Pérez Galdós and the Creative Process, 1954.

Rutherford, John. “Story, Character, Setting, and Narrative Mode in Galdós’ El Amigo Manso,” in Style and Structure in Literature, 1976. Edited by Roger Fowler.

Woodbridge, Hensley C. Benito Pérez Galdós: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, 1976.