Imagen femenina en la literatura española del último tercio del siglo XIXde Benito Pérez Galdós a Emilia Pardo Bazán

Resumen

This thesis addresses the aesthetic language of fashion and the image that the woman projects through her distinctive elements. The primary source will be literature from the Spanish Restoration period: from Galdós’ contemporary novels to Emilia Pardo Bazán’s narrative. Other pieces from important authors, such as Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, Padre Coloma, Juan Valera, Octavio Picón or Palacios Valdés will also appear. Aspects related to beautification, beauty, sumptuary expression, habitus and customs related to different social classes have been determined, all arranged in specific social, anthropological, cultural and historical coordinates. The definition and classification of different types of female through their clothing and their private and domestic environment have been fundamentally key in this study, as well as the phenomenon of fashion and its debts to tradition and outside influences. The term “fashion”, its concept and meaning, is a suggestive phenomenon that since antiquity has appeared in literature, which in itself constitutes an important documentary source, an indisputable reference point from the “Bible”, "The Odyssey", the "Geography of Strabo”, the "Cantares de Gesta", even the contemporary narrative; all of this offers a complete sample of how men dressed in certain historical moments. An extensive collection of luxury and gala elements, clothing and decorative formulas about personal adornment, are revealed to the historian and scholar which accesses what is an essential database.Since the Age of Enlightenment, classicists and pre-Romantics opted for a determined aesthetic model, configured through the Poetics of The Picturesque and The Sublime, although both tendencies would adopt different postures in history; Winckelmann and Lodoli establish rigid and condemnatory principles, but historical Romanticism, in the first third of the nineteenth century, reinforces the concrete feeling that men are more deep-rooted in history and it is more closely related to them. It is, precisely, throughout the nineteenth century when the woman began to integrate in public life and form an active part of history; The French Revolution would mark a milestone in terms of attitude towards women with respect to the world around them. The French Revolution would also discover that women could occupy a place in society and in political life, out of the strictly private environment. Furthermore, in their domestic space, women are also subject to observation by men; it is portrayed, not only through the visual arts, but also through narrative. Many are the titles of literary works that have a woman's name, many stories that have the heroine as protagonist: the woman as a symbol, an object of an aesthetic category, an observable phenomenon from the medical or psychic point of view, the woman as social element, the projection of her physical image: traits, clothes or attitude. The whole century will reflect on the fascination exercised by women and she will be the absolute protagonist of her drama. From the sublimation of an ideal to the insertion of women in the social realities of the moment, literature purifies the desires, passions and frustrations of the woman herself. The evocation of daily life, the sumptuary repertoires, the presence of tradition in terms of dress and the decorum in women are juxtaposed to a historical, cultural and, sometimes, hostile environment, in which the “Angel in the House” will revolt in different ways.