Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Life, Works, and Literary Impact
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: A Biographical Sketch
1. Born in Seville on January 17, 1836, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer belonged to a noble family of Flanders established in Seville in the late sixteenth century. He was the father of a genre painter who died when Bécquer was 5 years old, leaving his family in a dreadful economic situation. In 1846, Bécquer was admitted to the College of San Telmo to study navigation. The following year, his mother died. A few months later, the school was closed, and Bécquer was taken in by a few aunts. He began to frequent the house of his godmother, which had a library where he discovered the literary works he always revered, such as the poetry of Lord Byron, Espronceda, and Victor Hugo. At that time, he wrote his first poems, almost all of which are now lost. His uncle taught him to draw, but it did not attract him as much as writing verses because his dream was to succeed in poetry. At 18, he decided to move to Madrid to fulfill his dreams.
Early Struggles in Madrid
3. Bécquer arrived in Madrid in 1854 with a suitcase full of verses and 30 dollars. As he said himself, he aspired to the life of a bird, which spends hours singing and draws sustenance from God. Triumph came later than expected, and he had to spend several years of hardships in modest guesthouses, resorting to the charity of his friends to avoid starvation. At that time, he tried to make a living translating books and articles, tailoring novels for theater success, or writing opera librettos, always signing his work with a pseudonym. He secured a position after a friend spoke to an officer at a ministry, but he was fired a few days later. Despite this, he wrote poems while awaiting inspiration, both neoclassical and directed an ambitious publishing project. Deprivation and intense work damaged his health.
“Letters to a Woman”
4. Between December 1860 and April 1861, the newspaper El Contemporáneo published Bécquer’s four “Letters to a Woman,” in which he identified poetry in colloquial terms, a task very fashionable at that time.
Bécquer’s Legends: Themes and Settings
5. Bécquer’s legends often featured believable characters and ideas as sentimental as a male of the 19th century but belonged to medieval times. With identical intention, he most often placed his stories in places he visited throughout his life and things that he himself experienced.
The Ideal Woman in Bécquer’s Works
6. The ideal woman is portrayed as the beloved: clear-eyed, blonde (blue), with white skin, rosy cheeks, delicate, and angelic.
Recurring Motifs: Churches and Monasteries
7. Bécquer often used churches, monasteries, and similar settings in his legends, evoking a sense of fear and mystery.
Analysis of Specific Legends
“The Mount of Souls” and Other Tales
9. In “The Mount of Souls,” Alonso goes to look for his beloved’s blue ribbon on the mountain of souls, but that day was All Saints’ Day, which ended badly. In “Green Eyes,” something happens on the bank of a river where Fernando awaits the woman he is in love with, who tells him to go with her, thrown into the water and supposedly die because they do not get to know anything. “The Organist” does not end in death, but the death of the pianist appears at the beginning of the work.
10. In “The Mount of Souls,” the story is marked by two different aspects: one that could be real and the other wonderful. The part that may consider it real is the moment that Alonso dies, he dies devoured by wolves and not strange any strange circumstances and from the fantastic Death account. In “Moonlight,” because nothing appears fantasy, and when it comes to where, as he had seen the woman who was enamored but it was a woman, was a ray of moonlight that penetrated through the trees.