Character is no less an artificial construct than are the other elements of the novel. But the seemingly natural device of the proper name effects the conventional emergence of the literary construct which is the character's ‘personality’. Through the postulation that he conforms to a model (both literary and cultural), a character has meaning particularly for the reader of the nineteenth-century novel. The artifice which creates this illusion can be analyzed at many levels. Roland Barthes illustrates how ‘when identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created’. In Galdós' ironic art the various ‘semes’, or connotations, which traverse the character often derive from contradictory or incompatible literary, cultural, or social ‘codes’, and thus their concurrence forms an ironic portrait. In many of his novels, the protagonist is the axis around which these literary, cultural, and social codes revolve. The irony of the portrait, therefore, reveals and is reflected in that of the other units of meaning that converge upon and re-emerge from the locus of the character, weaving the total text. The two figures studied in this chapter, Isidora Rufete and Rosalía de Bringas, are both ‘characters’ whose ‘personalities’ and ‘attitudes’ form the ironic nexus of their novels.

La desheredada (1881) was the first of Galdós' Novelas contemporáneas and as such marks an important turning point in his artistic style. For with this novel he leaves behind the strong tendency to polemics and the rather stereotyped characters to which this gives rise. Isidora Rufete is a large and dominating figure whose illusions are revealed with great creativity. With this novel Galdós employs various narrative modes, not all of them found before in his work.