Entre o ser e o parecer: aparências, corpo e ironia na ficção de Camilo Castelo Branco

Abstract

Appearance, that is what is seen, worn, displayed and performed, holds a central place in social life. Through it, individuals communicate belonging, construct identities and negotiate their positions in the world. In the nineteenth century, amid the transformations brought about by modernity and the consolidation of bourgeois society, the ability to appear respectable acquires increasing importance, often outweighing even social origin itself. The literature of this period, attentive to such changes, incorporates appearance as an expressive and critical element. It is within this context that the work of Camilo Castelo Branco is situated. This work investigates how appearances are represented and problematized in the novels Coração, Cabeça e Estômago (1862) and A Queda dum Anjo (1866), taking the body, clothing, behaviors and eating habits as privileged manifestations of this social seeming. It is argued that these elements do not function as mere descriptive details, but as narrative devices that reveal inner conflicts, identity instability and contradictions within nineteenth-century society. The analysis demonstrates that Silvestre da Silva and Calisto Elói display psychological density and trajectories marked by transformation, distancing themselves from the notion of stock characters and constituting themselves as subjects in constant negotiation between being and seeming. To support this reading, the study combines literary analysis with contributions from the anthropology of the body, fashion theory, reflections on the narrator and autobiographical studies, as well as discussions on the nineteenth-century dietary culture and reflections on colonial desire. It is concluded that the centrality of appearance constitutes one of the main axes of Camilo’s work and a fundamental instrument of his irony, through which the author constructs a critique of the illusions, values and masks of modernity – a critique that remains relevant for thinking about contemporary forms of identity construction