El personaje de María Sudre en La familia de León Roch de Galdós. Literatura y Medicina en el siglo XIX

Abstract

In this first novels, Galdós attributes to his women characters some mental disorder, that he never dares to qualify with the name which they were known in the first half of the 19th century by the French neurology. In La familia de León Roch, for instante, Galdós prefers to use an euphemism, therefore, he calls “cerebral congestion” to the nervous that María Sudre –the main Character of his novel—suffers. Galdós presents these alterations as the result of a lymphatic temperament and as a consequence of a life-style which leads her to hysteria. On the one hand, our author could the relationship between both illnesses through the numerous medical books whuch talk about them; on the other hand, Galdós could read about these diseases in foreign literature, from Wuthering Heights ro Madame Bovary. In Emily Bronte’s as well as in Flauvert’s novels, the feminine characters –hysteria victims— suffer from cerebral fever.