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Editing Draft: Literary Costumbrismo

Literary Costumbrismo is the manifestation of the artistic movement known as Costumbrismo in literature since the 19th century. It reflects the uses and social customs, frequently without analyzing, nor interpreting them in a critical way. This attitude has to do more to the so called literary realism. In its most popular and not highly intellectual slope, it only includes the description of the most apparent and colorist matters of the daily life. Appearing in prose and hardly ever in verse, it reached its peak with the novel of manners and in the minor genre called custom picture in the journalism sector. In relation to theater, it created the comedy of manners and sainete, as a continuation of the so called entremés.

History and origins

It is categorized as a minor genre in the Spanish literature and the English literature of the 19th century. If we check the history of the literature, we can appreciate the use of traditional topics as several precedents of this minor genre. Its relevance in the context of the 19th century was explained as a reaction of the middle class, after the romantic revolution (or even during that time), predicting the possible loss of traditions and folklore “smashed by t­he Industrial Revolution". Nevertheless, it was the progress achieved by the Industrial Revolution, the one which would catapult Costumbrismo, as one of its most lucid and representative authors clearly states:

The genre would have never managed to turn enthroned, but helped by the huge literary movement the perfection of the arts was bringing with it: such productions had had neither opportunity or truth, relying on the aid of the rapidity of the publication. The newspapers were, though, very useful for the writers of these light pictures of custom, whose success is based on its styles flair.

— Mariano José de Larra,

For Larra, the origin of the modern literature of customs takes place in England, with Addison’s work The Spectator

• Another main feature of Costumbrismo was the new possibility of travelling, a romantic passion that created the literary descriptive model of the libros de viajes (literally, books of traveling), usually more focused on the pictures and hackneyed things, the simple impressions or emotions, rather than the critical analysis or the relevant ethnographic study.

Custom pictures

Main article: Custom picture

Custom pictures (also called the articles of customs) are short sketches in which customs are painted, together with uses, habits, typical or representative types of society, landscapes, amusements and even animals, sometimes with the purpose of entertaining (pleasant pictures) and sometimes clearly intended to criticize society and indicate reforms with a moral intention. With the precedent of Juan de Zabaleta in the 17th century, in the 19th century the customs picture Transido de queja (literally, anguished because of complaints) by Mariano Jose de Larras, the most placid style of Ramon Mesonero Romanos and Serafín Estébanez Calderón's lyric style. Then, extensive collective compilations were written based on these pieces, describing types and popular professions, like Los Españoles por sí mismos (The Spaniards on its own way) (1843–1844), a collection that contains ninety eight articles by fifty-one authors. Its success gave birth to similar collections:

• El álbum del bello sexo o las mujeres pintadas por sí mismas (The album of lovely sex or women painted by themselves) (1843)
• Los cubanos pintados por sí mismos (The Cuban painted by themselves) (1852)
• Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos (The Mexicans painted by themselves) (1854)
• Los valencianos pintados por sí mismos (The Valencian painted by themselves) (1859)
• Las españolas pintadas por los españoles (The Spanish women painted by the Spanish men) (1871–1872)
• Las mujeres españolas, portuguesas y americanas (The Spanish women, Portuguese women and American women) (1872, 1873, 1876)
• Los españoles de hogaño (Present Day Spaniards) (1872)
• El álbum de Galicia. Tipos, costumbres y leyendas (The album of Galicia. Types, customs and legends) (1897).

The Costumbrist Novel

Some studies accept as costumbrist novels during the 19th century Spanish period: Sotileza, Peñas arriba by Jose Maria de Pereda, La gaviota by Fernán Caballero, Pepita Jiménez by Juan Valera, La hermana San Sulpicio by Armando Palacio Valdés, and certain passages in Benito Perez Galdós's work. Yet in the 20th century, we find examples like La casa de la Troya or Currito de la Cruz by Alejandro Pérez Lugín and the works of Pedro de Répide, among others.

The Comedy of Manners

Main article: Comedy of manners

The comedy of manners appeared in Spain in the 19th century with Romantic authors like Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza (Contigo, pan y cebolla) and Manuel Bretón de los Herreros with important works such as A la vejez, viruelas (1824), A Madrid me vuelvo (1828), El pelo de la dehesa (1837) or Muérete ¡y verás! (Go Ahead and Die, You'll See!) (1840). The formula prospered and at the beginning of the 20th century it became popular in the work of the brothers Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero and in the sainetes by Carlos Arniches (Del Madrid Castizo).

Costumbrismo in the English literature

In England Richard Steele (1672–1729), who published his costumbrist magazine The Tatler, and Joseph Addison (1672–1719), founded The Spectator magazine. They were costumbrist writers and both of them have been considered the parents of what they called Essay or Sketch of manners.

Costumbrismo in the French literature

The abbé Étienne de Jouy (1764–1846), whose work published in Gazette de France between 1811 and 1817 influenced notably Spanish costumbrist Mariano José de Larra, is a representative of the costumbrist genre in the French literature, after the translations of Pierre de Marivaux (1688–1763) and the essays of Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814). Paul-Louis Courier (1772–1825) is less known but as important as Jouy.

Costumbrismo in the Spanish literature

One of the features of the Spanish art, especially its literature, is its tendency towards Realism that already begins to take shape in the first written text of the Spanish narrative preserved, Cantar de Mio Cid (The Poem of the Cid), and that finds its continuation in the folkloric features of the Libro de Buen Amor (The Book of Good Love), La Celestina (Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea), Lazarillo de Tormes (The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities) or Don Quijote (Don Quixote) itself.

Costumbrismo, as one of the elements that constitute this complicated tendency towards Realism, begins to develop in Spain especially in the 17th century because of the popularizing guidelines coming from the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation and because king Phillip II of Spain ordered to shut the cultural borders. Thus, popular people and environments that are not presumptuous, and that enable people to identify themselves with a closer religiosity, are taken as models by painters like Caravaggio. We can see popular examples of this trend in paintings of Diego Velázquez and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Costumbrism becomes one of the elements that make up satiric literary genres like the picaresque novel and comic literary genres like the entremés. Generally, it is considered that Juan de Zabaleta, Francisco Santos, Antonio Liñán y Verdugo and Bautista Ramiro de Navarra are the first costumbrist baroque writers who specialized in this kind of topics.

In the 18th century, the entremés is transformed into a sainete (a popular Spanish comic opera piece) with such important authors as Ramón de la Cruz, who specialized in a kind of Madrileñismo (manner of speaking from Madrid), and Juan Ignacio González del Castillo, who reproduced topics and customs from Cadiz. In the 1700s some painters begin to pay attention to the popular customs and types through fads like Majismo. Francisco Goya in his Cartones para tapices or in his bullfighting prints; and the Béquer family, with their popular Sevillanas (from Seville) scenes, arrived to create quite a school of painting consecrated to the Andalucian customs formed by José Domínguez Bécquer (1805–1841), father of the famous poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870) and the painter Valeriano Bécquer (1833–1870), whose cousin, Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer (1817–1879), was also a costumbrist painter. Furthermore, in the cultural environments Casticismo (literally Purity), a tendency to fix a natural, popular and national pattern for the literary style based on the native traditions, was set against Cosmopolitanism and the Frenchification of the Enlightenment.

In the 19th century, this autochthonous tradition acquires independence through the subjective element that covers Romanticism. It makes that the interest in the collective identity or volksgeist (national or popular character) be renewed through Nationalism and Regionalism, being expressed on purpose in genres like the article or the custom picture, and cultivated in the press and then gathered in individual or collective collections by authors like Sebastián Miñano y Bedoya, Mariano José de Larra, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos and Serafín Estébanez Calderón, among many others, and the novel of manners, but also in the theater through chico genre (literally, little genre), and it appears as a non depreciable element in the novels of Realism (Fernán Caballero, José María de Pereda, Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Juan Valera.) In Naturalism Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, who finds an interrelationship in the attractive and dazzling Valencian paintings of Joaquín Sorolla, is distinguished for his novels of Valencian ambientation. Another literary genre, the libro de viajes (literally, books of travelling), cultivated by national authors and by foreign authors, is also a son of the curiosity that feels the epoch for everything related to the picturesque customs.

Costumbrismo invades the 19th century zarzuela and a certain type of the teatro por horas (a series of short stage plays) heir of the entremés. The born science of the folklore, which studies in a scientific way the popular traditions, takes on compiling, classifying and studying traditional lyrics, short stories, coplas, music, games, superstitions and beliefs, sayings, handicrafts, gastronomy, ceremonies, rites, folklore, parties, legends, songs, dances and vulgar romances. In this area stand out some experts like Agustín Durán, Antonio Machado Álvarez, Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Eusebio Vasco and many others. In literature, this interest in popular literature is spilled across the so-called Neopopularism of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, serious literature was even written in dialects like Extremaduran language (José María Gabriel y Galán, Luis chamizo), Asturian language or even the Murcian language.

In the 20th century Quintero brothers stand out for their Andalusian costumbrist comedies and Carlos Arniches for his Madrilenian pieces. The costumbrist element appears as fundamental in the expressionist painter and writer José Gutiérez Solana, one of the few costumbrist writers who doesn’t extol the popular aspects and who shows himself brutally critic in, for example, La España negra (1920), against the obliging paintings of Julio Romero de Torres (however they are expressionists in essence) or more balanced by Ignacio Zuloaga. Nevertheless, since the Spanish Civil War, Costumbrismo involutes as it is identified with the superficial and uncritical picturesqueness of the European travellers to Spain from the 19th century and with an Andalusian (from Andalusia) impoverishing reductionism that was good for the economic necessity to promote Tourism, especially in the cinema, where this type of products became known as españoladas (regarding to certain artistic works which exaggerate and fake the spanish character). Nevertheless, some pre-war and post-war authors headed by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Elucidario de Madrid, El Rastro) are saved because they follow the 19th century tradition of the Sketch of manners. This group revolves around the so-called Madrileñismo (manner of speaking from Madrid), like Eusebio Blasco (1844–1903), Pedro de Répide (1882–1947), Emiliano Ramírez Ángel (1883–1928), Luis Bello or, in the post-war, Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles. As for the Andalucismo (Andalusian literary expression), the deep 19th century vein is renewed by writers like José Nogales (1860–1908), Salvador Rueda (1857–1933), Arturo Reyes (1864–1913) and others. Costumbrismo of the so-called Generation of ‘98 has more value and dark hints, and in its trips it looks for the difference between the real Spain and the official Spain: Miguel de Unamuno writes De mi país (1903), Pio Baroja his Vitrina pintoresca (1935), receiving in his Basque (from the Basque Country, a little region in the North of Spain) trilogies, customs of that region, as his brother Ricardo Baroja does in his etchings and literature; Azorín appears to the Castilian (from Castile, in the center of Spain) and Andalusian scenery (Los pueblos, Alma española, Madrid. Guía sentimental...). Afterwards, only authors like Camilo José Cela, seems to have counted with the costumbrist element, who is the creator of a new type of Sketch of manners, the esbozo carpetovetónico, close to esperpento, and authors like Francisco Candel, Ramón Ayerra or Francisco Umbral. The last one is the creator of a type of anti-bourgeois Costumbrismo with a radiant style.

Literary Costumbrismo in Latin America

The costumbrist novel had an especial repercussion in some countries. Thus, in Mexico or in Colombia for example, where Costumbrismo was also added in others types of novel, not specifically in the costumbrist ones, it is well known the weight that elements of this nature have in a sentimental novel like María, by Jorge Isaacs. For his part, the article of customs, very popular and with wide dissemination, recreates sketches of manners of pure localism in its types and language, emphasis on the approach of the picturesque, occasionally container of a satire and social criticism with intention of reform, and other times almost photographic reproductions of reality (sometimes with very raw scenes and rough, even rude, vocabulary.) It was common that the American costumbrist work abounded in localisms in its desire to reflect a reality in a way as faithful as possible.

Bibliography

• Fernández Montesinos, José (1960). Costumbrismo y novela. Ensayo sobre el redescubrimiento de la realidad española. Castalia. Retrieved 4 September 2016.