Poder, ideologia e gênero na obra ‘A letra escarlate’, uma leitura sob a ótica discursiva

Abstract

This dissertation is a discursive analysis of the French affiliation of power relations, ideology and gender, materialized and characterized by different discursive formations evidenced in the work The Scarlet Letter (1850), authored by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1805-1864), referring to the protagonist of the novel: Hester Prynne. The theoretical and methodological path used is a qualitative-discursive approach and bibliographical research. To develop the discursive analysis proposal, the archegenealogical theoretical and methodological procedure was used, an assumption defined by Michel Foucault, in the relationship between Knowledge-PowerSubject; and the concepts of Structure and Event, a theoretical and methodological assumption defined by Michel Pêcheux, in the relationship between Language-Discourse-Ideology-Subject. The corpus assembly is composed of excerpts from the work The Scarlet Letter (1850), used as a background for the analysis and from which the linguistic materiality was selected. With the aim of highlighting statements and discursive formations and power relations relating to the character and the problematization in relation to the theme, this dissertation verticalized selected excerpts from the work with the theories of French discourse analysis, in dialogue with other proposed theoretical references. The analysis showed that Hester Prynne is framed in an androcentric, patriarchal and puritan society, marked by ideologies, power-knowledge relations, ideological and repressive State apparatuses that materialize discourses determining behavior, conduct and set up a structure of power and domination of the female subject, of violence and oppression, placing the female subject in a power relationship of subalternity and silencing. Still, even though she is in a repressive society for the female subject, the character resists and, with pride, continues her life with an affirmative attitude, without reacting to the decisions of power relations, thus resisting the system of structural domination, showing that she has a strong morality of her own and an ethics of individual existence within herself. To achieve the expected results, the analysis was based on the following authors: Althusser (1970), Bourdieu (2010), Brito (2017), Brandão (2012) Foucault (2008, 2012, 1999, 1996, 1979), Safiotti (2015), Orlandi (2009), Pêcheux (1995, 2008), Stearns (2015), Karnal et al (2010), Lerner (2019), Beauvoir (1967), Lauretis (2019), Žižek (2014).