In the decade covered by the novels analysed in this book – from Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87) to Misericordia (1897) – Galdós's position remained consistent with regard to those groups of the population categorized as ‘deviant’ and perceived as social and moral ‘filth’ by many of his contemporaries. In the discussion of ‘Una visita al Cuarto Estado’, in Fortunata y Jacinta, we saw how Galdós distances himself from his bourgeois characters and the bourgeois narrator, avoiding complicity with a bourgeois system of categorization and control that associates the lower classes with immorality and filth. This position is maintained in all the other novels considered here. Fortunata y Jacinta also provides a clear example of Galdós's tendency to disengage himself from contemporary attitudes to prostitution and drink. Ten years after the second part of Fortunata y Jacinta was published, the author voiced similar views in Misericordia regarding the lower layers of society. In both novels he criticizes bourgeois efforts at classifying and containing those social groups – be they prostitutes, alcoholics or beggars – that represented a threat. The bourgeois attempt at categorizing and labelling social subordinates by setting up binary oppositions is shown not to work. In these novels Galdós highlights the arbitrary nature of systems of classification, showing that the dividing line between categories is often blurred. By subverting the discourses of control and the associations and categorizations produced by them, Galdós shows that such discourses are bourgeois constructions; that is, the polarized division of people into respectable/non-respectable, virtuous/immoral, deserving/undeserving, and so on, is shown to involve a system of power relations, whereby those who have been classified as abnormal or deviating from the behavioural norm become the objects of bourgeois control.

Most of the characters produced as evidence in this study, who in bourgeois and petit-bourgeois eyes are regarded, to a greater or lesser degree, as non-respectable, immoral or undeserving, and therefore in need of moral reform, are not depicted by Galdós as such.