O figurino da traição: uma análise das personagens adúlteras em o primo Basílio, de Eça de Queirós

Abstract

Cousin Basílio (2006) narrates the routine of Luísa, a young woman married to Jorge who lives in Lisbon, Portugal, and who, with her husband's estrangement, starts an affair with her cousin, Basílio. The book by Eça de Queirós, written in the 19th century, focuses on the criticism of bourgeois society, portrayed as futile and hypocritical. The novel belongs to the literary school Realism. During this period, writers often wrote novels in which society was analyzed, writing in detail and descriptively the characters, space, time, in addition to making social denunciations. It is from this perspective that Queirós creates the clothing of the characters, describing them in intense detail. The description of clothes aims to categorize them economically, socially and morally. Thus, this work proposes to analyze the construction of the characters Luísa and Leopoldina, from the perspective of the costumes as an element of their configuration, since clothing is an important factor in the construction of identity, including the characters in a novel. As a theoretical reference for this research, we use works by authors who discuss notions about the aesthetics of the realistic novel (BAKHTIN, 2010; 2015; WATT, 1984), about the composition of the characters (BRAIT, 1985; CANDIDO, 2014) and, finally, authors who discuss the themes: fashion, culture and identity (LIPOVETSKY, 2009, among others). Therefore, the analysis of the characters, it is concluded that Queirós (2006) reinforces the moral composition, both being women who commit adultery, especially Luísa and Leopoldina, based on their clothing.