José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was born on 25th November 1845 in the small town of Povoa de Varzim in the north of Portugal. His mother was nineteen and unmarried. Only the name of his father – a magistrate – appears on the birth certificate. His mother returned immediately to her respectable family in Viana do Castelo, and Eça was left with his wetnurse, who looked after him for six years until her death. Although his parents did marry – when Eça was four – and had six more children, Eça did not live with them until he was twenty-one, living instead either with his grandparents or at boarding school in Oporto, where he spent the holidays with an aunt. His father only officially acknowledged Eça when Eça himself was forty. His father did, however, pay for his son’s studies at boarding school and at Coimbra University, where Eça studied Law. Like the character of Vítor in The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, Eça was not at all drawn to the legal profession. Instead, he joined the diplomatic service, working as consul in Havana (1872–74), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1874–79), Bristol (1879–88) and, finally, Paris, where he served until his death in 1900.
He began writing stories and essays, which were published in the Gazeta de Portugal, and became involved with a group of intellectuals known as the Generation of ’70, who were committed to reforms in society and in the arts. The novels he wrote in the next thirty years were all biting satires on, for example, celibacy and the priesthood (The Crime of Father Amaro, 1875), the romantic ideal of passion (Cousin Basílio, 1878), religious and social hypocrisy (The Relic, 1887) and, in what is generally considered to be his masterpiece, The Maias (1888), the disintegration and decadence of Portuguese society. Only in his last novel, The City and the Mountains (1901), did he appear to soften, praising the simple rustic life and condemning life in the city.
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The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers was only published in Portuguese in 1980, when Eça’s work went out of copyright. Three editions came out almost simultaneously, all based on a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon. Many Eça scholars were horrified that what they considered to be an unfinished work by Eça should be made public. Eça, they argued, had clearly chosen not to publish it during his lifetime and his wishes should be respected.
We do not know definitively why Eça chose not to publish the novel. It was part of a planned twelve-volume series entitled Crónicas da Vida Sentimental, intended to be a gallery of nineteenth-century Portugal, a project that came to nothing. It is possible that his heirs may have been put off by the apparently unfinished nature of the manuscript or possibly by the subject matter, but Eça himself wrote of the novel in 1877: ‘It’s not immoral or indecent. It’s cruel.’ He added that he thought it ‘the best, most interesting novel I have yet written’, infinitely superior to his Cousin Basílio, and ‘a real literary and moral bombshell’.
Could Eça have decided not to publish the book because the feelings and incidents described in it were simply too close to home? Eça’s novels, unsurprisingly, abound in orphans being shuffled off to live with aunts and uncles; here, Vítor’s childhood trajectory – wetnurse, aunt, friend of family and, finally, uncle – is the one that most closely follows Eça’s own. But there is also the secrecy and shame surrounding Vítor’s birth and, possibly more importantly, the void at the centre of Vítor’s life which only Genoveva can fill. When he wakes up after Genoveva’s first soirée, the memory of her fills his soul ‘with all the sweetness of a mother’s kiss’, and, later, life without her affection seems to him unacceptable, her affection being ‘the sweetest thing he had ever known, an affirmation of his self-worth’. These deep longings for the love of a mother, however unconscious, are complicated by the fact that the woman who becomes his lover is not only his mother but also a high-class prostitute. There is something deeply unsettling and possibly vengeful about this conjunction in one character of what are traditionally regarded as the highest and lowest of female roles. The mother who abandons her child is portrayed as selfish, immoral, unnatural and doomed to a terrible death. Although no one would suggest that there was an incestuous relationship between Eça and his mother, nevertheless, given the similarities between his and Vítor’s background, would incest between mother and son – with the mother depicted as a corrupt, mercenary courtesan – have violated too great a taboo and been too potentially wounding to his own family? Could Vítor’s longing for a mother’s love have been seen as an implicit criticism of Eça’s own mother? Was there a danger of fact and fiction becoming dangerously blurred? We will, of course, probably never know. It is interesting to note, though, that when Eça returned to the theme of incest in The Maias (which he began writing shortly after abandoning The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers), the incest is between brother and sister, rather than mother and son.
As to the unfinished nature of the book, while it is true that Eça had still not settled on a title or even on the names of one or two minor characters and that there are occasional non sequiturs or redundancies, in my view, the novel still stands as an utterly convincing whole, providing us with an acid portrait of a society in which everyone and everything has its price. It gives us, above all, the truly extraordinary figure of Genoveva, a self-made woman if ever there was one, who knows almost to the date when her looks will cease to be saleable. Genoveva is, it is true, a rapacious schemer, and yet while one is repelled by her lack of scruples, one cannot but be seduced by her sheer energy and by her passionate commitment to grasping what she perceives as her last chance of happiness with Vítor. She is, ultimately, a tragic figure, for, having rejected motherhood and motherly love when she abandoned Vítor as a baby, she is ultimately destroyed when that love reappears in perverted form.
In Vítor, on the other hand, we have a brilliant portrait of a man in search of definition, an emotional orphan, whose feelings change with the wind. He is full of bravado and ambitious plans – he will run away with Genoveva, he will be a successful lawyer or a famous writer. When he does become a published poet, his poetry is a poor imitation of a minor French writer and is published in a women’s magazine.
Eça also gives us a gallery of vividly drawn minor characters, particularly at the two parties held by Genoveva – Dâmaso, the plump fool soon parted from his money, blunt-speaking, honest Uncle Timóteo, the tender extrovert, Sarrotini, the unctuous João Marinho. These ‘soirées’ are provincial caricatures of their Paris equivalent and give Eça plenty of scope for poking fun at what he perceived to be third-rate bourgeois Lisbon society. Eça, as always, finds gold in the very mediocrity he is mocking, and the result is a novel that is both tragic and richly comic.