SOURCE: Ricapito, J. V. “Love and Marriage in Guzmán de Alfarache: An Essay on Literary and Artistic Unity.” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1968): 123-38.

In the following essay, Ricapito examines themes of love and marriage in Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, concentrating on the affair of Guzmán's mother as a pivotal episode in Guzmán's own unhappy love life.

Critics, in evaluating the concept of love in the picaresque genre, have uniformly noted its absence or decreased importance as a literary theme. In one of the first modern critical commentaries on the picaresque, F. W. Chandler underscores the absence of sentiment in the picaresque novel and also notes that, in the case of Pícara Justina, “Love bears a direct proportion to wealth …” In the Spanish picaresque novel, women are usually depicted as inconstant, and love and marriage are generally submitted to the picaro's mercenary schemes...