Stylization and Deformation in Valle-Inclán "La Reina Castiza"

Abstract

The year 1920 was a momentous one in the development of Valle-Inclan literature. Four major obras dialogadas were published in rapid succession, each of them revealing fundamental changes in stylistic and thematic orientation, and all of them manifesting a new and vital integration of style with moral and psychological substance. Evil, immorality and perversity had been things of beauty designed to be contemplated, savoured and shared solely for their esthetic magnificence, with no moral judgement expressed or even implied. The depiction of immorality in the post-war period betrays an artistic growth from an amoral appetite for the esthetics of evil without implications of reprehensibility to the confronting of immorality as an operative human force because it is in fact human failing and worthy of censure. Integrated with morally purposeful themes, the art of Valle-Inclan now stems from the particular stylized view of the ugly and the immoral which are recognized as being reprehensible. Never given to mo...