Exploring Cursileria.

The Culture of Cursileria (Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain), by Noel Valis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 405 pp.

WHEN I WAS TEN years of age, almost half a century ago, my family moved from California to Spain. As my younger sisters and I learned Spanish and absorbed many of the attitudes of the people of Avila, the small Castilian city that is famous for its medieval walls and Renaissance mystics, the words "cursi" and "cursileria" became part of our vocabulary.

In Avila dignified elderly ladies dressed in austere clothes convened in the afternoons at the Casino, which afforded them a magnificent view of the Ambles Valley. As the senoras dipped their churros into cups of thick chocolate, they could be heard muttering with disdain, "Era cursi." "It was cursi." The phrase could just as easily refer to a fanciful hat seen at a recent wedding as to a film showing at a local cinema. Likewise, in the Avila of my childhood, families out for a stroll, among the parterres in the Jardines de San Roque, or along the more rustic Paseo del Rastro, routinely used the term cursileria. More often than not, it was the women in smart wool suits and shoes with pointed toes who reacted to something by exclaiming "Oh how cursi!" The children usually provoked the mild outburst by suggesting that the family's luggage be decorated with hotel stickers collected on their latest school trip, by asking for pink stationery embelished with hearts and flowers for the girls, or something along similar lines.

In those days extended families frequently convened for celebrations at the two main restaurants in Avila, "El Rastro," which is lodged in between several towers of the city's walls at the end of the Paseo, or "Pepillo," which used to overlook the Mercado Grande. At these reunions someone invariably exclaimed "!Que cursi!" The comment might be made spontaneously at the onset, as the party waited for its roast suckling pig and talked about the latest events. At other gatherings the statement might be made during the sobremesa that rounded off the meal. While the men enjoyed their brandy and cigars, and the women sipped anisette, the reproach of cursileria might be made after discussing a relatively substantial subject, such as an essay in the Sunday paper.

Twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls in Avila sporting long braids and gray and green uniforms habitually dallied after school in the Plaza del Ejercito, behind the honey-colored apse of San Pedro, the 800-year-old romanesque church where many of us were confirmed. We admonished one another "No seas cursi." "Don't be cursi." In the spring, more often than not, the topic was our upcoming summer wardrobes. Fifty years ago most clothing in Spain was made to order. As we ended nine months encased in the drab uniform we wore six days a week, our mothers allowed us to help design our summer clothes. This freedom of choice, however, had possible pitfalls. We did not want to get carried away and design something cursi. In those days schoolgirls did not care to look like beauticians from small villages or shop clerks in their Sunday best. Our range of choice was circumscribed. In the Castile of my childhood even youngsters felt, almost intuitively, that discretion, discipline, and conventionality were preferable to being considered cursi.

Cursileria was negative. Cursileria offended Castilian gravitas. The word covered a multitude of sins. Our sense was that most had to do with making a fool of oneself. Affectation was cursi. Pretentious taste that showed aspirations more than discernment was cursi. Lack of social elan led to many manifestations of cursileria. Emotional or sentimental behavior that could be seen to undermine one's dignity was cursi.

In the mid-sixties, when my family returned to the United States, my sisters and I, who were teenagers, lamented the absence of a specific English translation or even a clear definition of cursileria to use at appropriate times in conversation with fellow-Americans. The topic lingered unresoloved over the years.

When Professor George Panichas suggested I review a book on cursileria written by an American Hispanist, one who, like me, focuses on the nineteenth century, I was intrigued. The book is The Culture of Cursileria (Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain). The author, Noel Valis, is Professor of Spanish at Yale University.

Dr. Valis's study has 405 pages; the main text covers 304. Her scholarly publication has 515 footnotes and 828 bibliographical entries. The Culture of Cursileria consists of an introduction, eight chapters dedicated to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a final chapter that focuses on the years that followed the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975. Throughout her study, Valis examines essays on cursileria written by Spaniards over the course of more than a century and literary works that show the various authors' understanding of cursileria. Valis's literary analyses borrow from various disciplines, such as psychology and sociology.

In the thirty-page Introduction to The Culture of Cursileria, Valis gives a general definition of the subject as "the effect produced when there are insufficient means (economic, cultural, social) to achieve desired ends ...." She establishes the importance of cursileria from the onset: "The fear of being perceived as cursi is voiced so insistently in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain that it cannot be disregarded as inconsequential to understanding the period."

Valis informs her readers that cursileria began as a manifestation of cultural inadequacy on the part of the new petite bourgeoisie in the commercial seaport of Cadiz in the 1830s, and gradually spread to the rest of the middle class. While the reasons for the insecurity of the petite bourgeoisie are obvious to her, she states: "What is intriguing to me is why this particular lower-middle class anxiety and feeling of inadequacy as expressed through cursileria should trickle upward, affecting the middle and upper middle class in Spain as well."

In the first three chapters of Valis's book, cursileria is seen as "a structure of feeling shaping middle classness in Spain," especially in the 1830s, '40s and '50s. Valis deals with objects, trades, and social practices of the first half of the nineteenth century as they appear in essays, fiction, and poetry. She believes they helped the petite bourgeoisie, at least emotionally, make up for a precarious financial position and lack of roots and traditions. Valis writes about the cursive style of handwriting that was cultivated by accountants and their families, about autograph albums, fans, flowers, poetry recitations, salon poets, and society chroniclers.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on novels by Benito Perez Galdos. The first one mirrors the new system of credit in the life of the Spanish middle classes in the 1860s and '70s. Valis tells her readers that Galdos saw living on credit beyond one's means as a form of cursileria because it represents aspirations and desires without the means to fulfill them. She makes the case that the second book, Galdos's historical novel about Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the statesman of the Restoration, was an attempt to use history to legitimize the aspirations of the middle classes, to give them a new form of validation. In these two chapters Valis also suggests that the growing numbers and influence of the middle classes had such an impact on Spanish society as a whole that "the emotions fueling cursi behavior and attitudes in the 1860s and '70s start to take on a more national configuration."

In Chapter 6 Valis explains that cursileria grew in importance in Spain at the turn of the century, becoming a real obsession. Spanish intellectuals known collectively as the Generation of '98 articulated the national identity crisis that occurred after the loss of the remnants of Empire in 1898. These authors, including Galdos, expressed the feeling of loss, the perceived sense of inadequacy, and the lack of direction of the Spanish people in the early decades of the twentieth century. Valis posits that, as Spain was marginalized in the international sphere, cursileria became a metaphor of loss, marginality, and confusion.

In the last chapters of this study the term cursileria is applied to an expanding range of emotions, attitudes, cultural tendencies, and literary manifestations. In general, cursileria becomes identified with what Valis calls "the Spanish sense of being out of place in a changing world."

Noel Valis's choice of topics was indicated by the use some well-known Spanish writers made of the word cursileria. As we read the chapters of her book we learn that, within the broad framework of inadequacy, cursileria meant different things to different intellectuals over the course of a century and a half. Thus, we can imagine the challenge the author faced in trying to thread together the array of topics covered by the word cursileria. The attempt itself is a tour de force. Nonetheless, something is missing.

More specifically, this study of Spanish bourgeois attitudes does not address religion or the Catholic Church. However, religious and Church-related topics might help explain why the anxieties of the lower middle class spread to professionals and the alta burguesia, the upper middle class.

Religion, the changing role of the Church in Spanish society, the status of the clergy, and the fate of ecclesiastical property were central to the entire nineteenth century. These topics were major issues in the Peninsular War against Napoleon (1808-1814), and in five civil wars in the period between 1821 and 1876. They were part of the tensions between traditionalists, moderate liberals, and radical liberals that led to a whirlwind of coup d'etats, abdications, dethronements, changes of regime, of constitutions, policies, and cabinets. These religious and Church-related topics were central again in the 1930s during the Second Spanish Republic and the last civil war.

The Bourgeois or Liberal Revolution of the nineteenth century dismantled the grand institutional Church of the Ancien Regime. Disentailment was a massive transfer of property that mainly benefited the middle and upper echelons of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the clergy and a large sector of the poor that relied on social services and education provided by the Church. For decades papal excommunication weighed heavily on the people who bought property that had been stolen from the Church. In Catholic Spain these matters inevitably contributed to creating the bourgeois malaise Valis explores.

The lingering sense of shame felt by many members of the Spanish upper middle class was brought home to me in the summer of 1963 when my family spent a week on the large farm of friends in the province of Badajoz. They drove us to the top of a hill, a vantage point from which to survey lush lands along the Guadiana River. Our host proudly informed us that his farm was the only one in sight that had not derived from property stolen from the Catholic Church. He claimed his family was the only one in the area that had not inherited a sense of shame along with the estate.

The nineteenth-century quest for respectability by landowners who were professionals, political bosses, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers may have been driven, to some extent, by the need to camouflage the unsavory aspects of their families' rise in the world that were still too close for comfort.

Tracing in greater length the manifestations of thoughts and feelings of sadness, guilt, shame, and pity connected to disentailment, especially those of the pious women who may have had little to say about their family's financial decisions, might prove to be fascinating. Such research probably would contribute insights into the sense of inadequacy that produced cursileria on the wide scale documented by Noel Valis's erudite study. The Culture of Cursileria (Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain) could open up further areas of investigation.

ALEXANDRA WILHELMSEN is Professor of Modern Languages and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Dallas. A Weaver Fellowship recipient, she received her doctorate in history from the University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain, in 1971.