Constructing a Picturesque Spain: An Empirical Approach to Women Travelogues Written in English (1842–1949)

Abstract

Constructing a Picturesque Spain: An Empirical Approach to Women Travelogues Written in English (1842–1949) Alberto Egea Fernández-Montesinos “The picturesque is a grammar of images with layered effects.” (Conron 67) “Our souvenirs of Córdova are a mixture of mezquitas and mosquitos.” (Pitt Byrne 317) The search for the picturesque has been a traveler’s obsession for centuries. In the case of Spain, discovering a hidden oriental view of the Alhambra, unveiling a non-touristic tablao for authentic flamenco or just capturing a shot of a picturesque character has been a commonplace endeavor for visitors since the advent of modernity. In this search for the hidden picturesque that reaches to this day, accidents of tourists falling into a lake or suffering an accident from a cliff are unfortunately common as seen in popular travel blogs and trending Instagram pics. These types of misfortunes might seem very postmodern for some, but its origins can be traced back precisely to the beginnings of the use of the term ‘picturesque’. In his comic poem of 1812, William Combe presents Dr. Syntax’s travels and how he stumbles into a lake while attempting to reach the best location for the perfectly picturesque sketch of a ruined castle [Figure 1]. Besides this anecdotical fall, what makes Coombe’s book a pioneer is how it questions the British obsession with the aesthetics of the picturesque. Combe formulates a critical voice right at the peak of the debate about the three main categories of representation of the time: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the newly formulated Picturesque.1 Coombe’s work is a foundational piece in this regard since the author satirized the aesthetic ideals lying behind the picturesque which is precisely the main topic of this essay. The following pages explore why the picturesque was so extensively and obsessively used for decades to describe anything Spanish. The purpose is to understand why this term [End Page 112] was chosen and what effects it has had in the construction of an image of Spain which persists to this day. A good point of departure could be to ask oneself what was there about Spain that made the writing and reading of travel narratives so attractive for such a large audience in various English-speaking countries. To this end, I propose a classification of the various acceptations of the term ‘picturesque’ trying to establish when and how it is applied to a wide variety of situations, characters, objects and enclaves. The classification resulting with the various meanings of ‘picturesque’ can serve as a propaedeutic for future nation branding analysis and travel studies.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Doctor Syntax Tumbling into the Water” (106). This image is licensed with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 permit from Creative Commons. Picturesque seems to be the default term to refer to Spain from a foreign gaze in this very diverse corpus of writers and travelogues. No matter the geographical origin of the author, the time period of the trip or the regions visited, one common denominator was the use of the term ‘picturesque’. If one adjective had to be chosen to summarize how Spain is represented out of the diversity of texts, decades, and authors, it would be the term ‘picturesque’. From northern Spanish farmers to folkloric costumes, from oriental architecture to culinary customs, from landscapes to historical characters, all of them were unequivocally described as picturesque. Regarding the authors of the travelogues, during the last two centuries, numerous women writers arrived in Spain from the United Kingdom, the United States and other English-speaking countries, and dedicated a significant part of their leisure time to writing about various aspects of Spanish culture. The critical attention obtained by their travelogues is surprisingly insignificant compared to that of their male counterparts. Even if these [End Page 113] women texts have literary, anthropological and rhetorical values worth analyzing, there has been very little interest in studying the same processes which took place in accounts written by men.3 This neglect is more surprising if we consider the important number of travelogues written by these women which have become available recently through new digital databases...