{"id":4080,"date":"2025-06-11T17:34:04","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T17:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4080"},"modified":"2026-04-07T14:21:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T14:21:31","slug":"more-on-secondary-characters-tancredo-the-italian-apollo-in-eca-de-queirozs-os-maias-1888","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2025\/06\/11\/more-on-secondary-characters-tancredo-the-italian-apollo-in-eca-de-queirozs-os-maias-1888\/","title":{"rendered":"MORE ON SECONDARY CHARACTERS: TANCREDO, THE ITALIAN APOLLO, IN E\u00c7A DE QUEIROZ\u2019S ‘OS MAIAS’ (1888)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The book I\u2019m currently working on, a study of secondary characters, has a corpus composed of 19th<\/sup> century novels in diverse European languages. I started with nine authors, but I have decided to abandon Swedish writer Selma Lagerl\u00f6f because I found it impossible to sustain my interest in her novel G\u00f6sta Berling’s Saga<\/em> (1891), which I had selected being curious about Sweden. Lagerl\u00f6f was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1909), and this was her first novel, which she published aged 33 after being a teacher for years. I tried to read the novel in Paul Norlen\u2019s 2009 translation, against which I have no objection at all, but I just found Lagerl\u00f6f\u2019s narrative style quite superficial in plot and in characterization. E\u00e7a de Queiroz\u2019s masterpiece, Os Maias<\/em> (1888), could not be more different, yet I have also decided not to include it in my book. Again, I find the translation by Margaret Jull Costa excellent, by which I mean that it has none of those ugly glitches that affect bad translation. The problem with Queiroz\u2019s novel is that, at 714 pages in the Dedalus edition, it is overlong in relation to the sexual melodrama it narrates, which could have been told in half the pages to the same effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Checking what GoodReaders think of Os Maias<\/em>, I found very many Portuguese persons quite annoyed because they were forced to read this national glory in secondary school. A handful, now adults, expressed admiration for the astuteness with which Queiroz portrays Portugal\u2019s upper classes between the 1850s and the 1880s (the main plot takes place between 1875 and 1885, three years before the publication of the novel). The Maias of the title are three men from the gentry: the grandfather, Afonso; his son, Pedro; and the grandson, Carlos, the protagonist of the novel. Summarized in a couple of lines the novel tells the story of how Pedro commits suicide after his wife, Maria, abandons him for another man, moving abroad with their daughter Maria Eduarda but leaving behind their son Carlos (both are then little children, she is about two years older). Afonso and Carlos come to believe that Maria Eduarda is dead, and she herself has no idea that she has a grandfather and a brother in Lisbon, the city where she returns about twenty-five years after her mother ran away. Not knowing who the other is, the relationship between Maria and Carlos strays from the moral path into the depths of taboo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Queiroz is aware that his main plot is pure sexual melodrama, as I noted, which is why he has Carlos and his best friend Ega discuss the bizarre events as if they were out of place in the mundane reality of their lives, and of Maria\u2019s. Actually, in Os Maias<\/em> characters often discuss the virtues, or lack thereof, of romantic versus realist storytelling, for Queiroz was hailed as Portugal\u2019s main naturalist. I don\u2019t know his other novels, and I\u2019m sorry to say that I have not read Zola yet, precisely because I have an abhorrence of naturalism. Yet, one thing I can say is that I was very much surprised by the crudity of the representation of late 19th<\/sup> century sexuality, not because there were any graphic erotic scenes, but because the whole plot aims at revealing the predatory sexual behaviour of useless, idle, rich men like Carlos. He, his friends, and acquaintances, all unmarried men between 25 and 35, see married women as mere objects to conquer and quickly discard. Queiroz presents the upper-class women of Lisbon as willing participants in the seduction game, but also as its victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Queiroz\u2019s cast of characters is very large, as it is typical in 19th<\/sup> century novels in which the protagonist occupies a central position in society and is, therefore, surrounded by a large social circle and taken care of by many servants. As I read Os Maias<\/em>, it occurred to me that someone should write a paper about the function of cab drivers in 19th<\/sup>-century fiction. Domestic servants, from governesses to footmen, have received some attention, but I was fascinated by how Carlos constantly requires the services of drivers while engaged in his sexual affairs; he even has sex with his mistress, the Countess, during a coach ride and I couldn\u2019t help thinking what the driver must have gossiped with his fellow drivers!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The secondary character I want to discuss, if only briefly, is Tancredo, the character without whom Queiroz\u2019s erotic melodrama would collapse. This Tancredo is a refugee Neapolitan prince that Pedro Maia wounds accidentally during a hunting party organized to honour the Italian. Chagrined, Pedro takes the wounded guest home. Tancredo has run away from Naples, where he has been sentenced to death for conspiring against the Bourbons, which gives him a romantic, revolutionary patina. Maria is not supposed to visit the wounded, bedridden guest but feels excited and, curious, sends her French maid to investigate. The girl describes to her mistress the amazing beauty of the Italian and Maria\u2019s curiosity increases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            When he sends her flowers and a poem in gratitude for her hospitality, Maria is ready to fall in love with the Italian Apollo. Pedro totally misses how the friendship between his wife and his guest Tancredo evolves, as the Italian recovers from the wound, and is devastated when he discovers that Maria has left with the Italian. Amazingly, Tancredo does not say a single word throughout this episode. He is just an attractive image, a magnetic presence, a sexual icon for whom Maria falls. He never appears again directly. A report by another character mentions that Maria and Tancredo lived for three years in Austria, where they had a daughter who died when she was only two. Tancredo, a gambler, died still young, in a duel in Monaco, leaving Maria penniless and in urgent need of a male protector. That\u2019s all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Tancredo is so secondary that he does not appear in the lists of main characters in Os Maias<\/em> available online. Yet, without Maria\u2019s sexual infatuation with him, there would be no plot: it\u2019s because she runs away with Tancredo taking her daughter Maria Eduarda that Pedro kills himself and, what is worse, that Carlos and Maria are not aware of each other\u2019s existence, with the horrendous consequences this has when they meet as adults. Tancredo, then, appears to be a flat character whose presence in the plot is merely functional, what could be called a tertiary character. He\u2019s not a background character like the drivers I mentioned before, but his whole characterization can be reduced to a few basic traits: he\u2019s an aristocratic, sexually appealing man and a gambler. In the studies of character I have read, Tancredo and similar characters hardly deserve a mention. Yet, there he is, complicating the existence of three generations of Maia men, if we think of how the lives of Afonso, Pedro, and even Carlos, who never meets him, are destroyed by his affair with Maria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Funnily, seeking some information on Tancredo, I came across a novel published in 2018 by Italian author Paola D\u2019Agostino, Tancredi il Napoletano<\/em>. This is part of what Jeremy Rosen calls \u2018secondary character elaboration\u2019, a popular, parasitical trend by which current authors latch onto a well-known classic to write what is, basically, fan fiction, often with little to add to the preyed upon classic. In the article of the Portuguese Diario de Noticias<\/em> about D\u2019Agostino (https:\/\/www.dn.pt\/arquivo\/diario-de-noticias\/o-napolitano-dos-maias-renasce-num-romance-da-napolitana-de-lisboa-14278175.html<\/a>), the rather fawning journalist explains that D\u2019Agostino\u2019s imagination was stirred by her first stay in Portugal in 1998 as an Erasmus student. She still lives there. Being a Neapolitan, she was fascinated by how well Queiroz portrayed Tancredo using just a basic sketch and felt the need to explore the Italian\u2019s background before the fated meeting with Maria. Her interviewer notes that D\u2019Agostini gives Tancredo, or rather Tancredi, \u201cuma forte densidade.\u201d D\u2019Agostini\u2019s fan-fic has left no trace that I could find beyond this article, but the translation of her novel into Queiroz\u2019s own Portuguese is a strange footnote in the history of Os Maias<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The more I read and pay attention, the more I confirm my initial hypothesis that we know next to nothing about characters in fiction. My good friend V\u00edctor Mart\u00ednez-Gil called my attention to how Cervantes appears to be the first author to create a minor character with no function whatsoever. V\u00edctor told me that the illustrious Claudio Guill\u00e9n was the first to note the uselessness of Contreras in \u201cLa gitanilla\u201d [The Gypsy Girl], where his only function is to be upbraided by the ladies when they ask him for some money which he seems reluctant to lend. He does nothing, contributes nothing to the plot. Queiroz uses diverse characters who, like Contreras, could be described as \u2018fillers\u2019, such as a mature female relative that Afonso Maia invites to live in his home, and who is later said to have died without doing anything at all for the plot. Other minor characters have peculiar functions, such as the anonymous low-class man Carlos sees having sex with the not so shy English governess, Miss Sarah; or Manuelinho, the young son of a local builder, whose presence in a scene with Afonso Maia is intended to show that he likes children and will be a sweet great-grandfather (oddly, at this point neither the readers nor he know that he already is a great-grandfather).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I might be wrong, but my impression is that while Dickens\u2019s characters are always of service to the plot, and hardly ever mere \u2018fillers\u2019, Queiroz\u2019s characters appear in Os Maia<\/em> as they could appear in real life: because they are there. Many scenes are about Carlos meeting people, either for the first time or as part of his social life. In other 19th<\/sup>-century novels, the moment a minor character is introduced you can bet that they\u2019ll play a role in the plot, and have some function. In Os Maia<\/em>, that is not necessarily the case. I spent the whole novel, for instance, wondering why Queiroz needed the Finnish ambassador, Steinbroken, since the conversation I expected about the differences between Finland and Portugal never happens. Mysteries of authorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            More next week\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The book I\u2019m currently working on, a study of secondary characters, has a corpus composed of 19th century novels in diverse European languages. I started with nine authors, but I have decided to abandon Swedish writer Selma Lagerl\u00f6f because I found it impossible to sustain my interest in her novel G\u00f6sta Berling’s Saga (1891), which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,799,22],"tags":[1299,1294,1284,1295,1300,1283,1296],"class_list":["post-4080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-literary-criticism","category-literary-studies","tag-19th-century-fiction","tag-eca-de-queiroz","tag-minor-character","tag-os-maias","tag-portuguese-novel","tag-secondary-character","tag-tancredo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4080"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4408,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080\/revisions\/4408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}