O SENHOR DE BOUGRELON BY JEAN LORRAIN: A JOURNEY BY THE “NETHERLANDS”

Abstract

The great industrial and economic development generated, by the Industrial Revolution, deeply changed the European society changing lifestyles and social relations. However in this fast changing times, the doubt concerning the efficiency of scientific methods to explain this new world triggered, in the end of the XIX century, a profound crisis. As a consequence, it appears a kind of man who rejects the materialism of the bourgeois society and searches for more refined sensations; the decadent, who also isolates himself in his own “ivory tower” and taking refuge in the ways of art. This is the general framework where Jean Lorrain lived, french journalist and writer decadentist, and worked and it also is the background of the novels which is the object of this work O Senhor de Bougrelon. This way, it is intended to reflect about some important aspects concerning the decadent aesthetics of the end of XIX century. The decedent aspects present in this book by Lorrain are: dandyism; aestheticism; the desire for isolation and the escape from real world; the emphasis on imagination and fantasy; and the taste for the exotic and the extravagant. These different constant plastic references in the novel, as the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci, Boticelli, Bernardino Luini, Peter Bruegel and Bosch Hyeronimus, are worth being analyzed because they reveal essential characteristics of such aesthetics.