O sonho de Firmina em Carolina: rastros do poder e da escravidão dos afetos e do desejo na voz subversiva de escritoras femininas

Abstract

Firmina's Dream in Carolina: traces of power and slavery of affections and desire in the subversive voice of female writers seeks to understand how Maria Firmina dos Reis and Carolina Maria de Jesus faced the silencing established by the patriarchal hegemony of their time to demystify the idea of the weaker sex and take over the scenario of female literary production in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. More than that, considering that literature records, as an archive, a subliminal, silent, effective slavery over women in both historical moments, based on the analysis of the relationships between the characters of Úrsula [1860] and Quarto de Despejo: Diário de Uma Favelada [1960], we try to demonstrate that this domination, including over erotic-love freedom, is reinvented and disseminated. Under the magnifying glass of theorists who reflect on the precepts of love and eroticism and their transformations in the course of history, such as Octavio Paz, bell hooks, Pierre Bourdieu, Ana Cláudia Pacheco, Georges Bataille; de memória, como Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Aleida Assmann; poder e contemporaneidade, como Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, it was possible to discuss the silencing and rescue of the two authors; reflect on the presentation of the theme of affection and eroticism in the novel Úrsula and on the contribution of Quarto de Despejo: Diário de Uma Favelada to the visibility of the violated woman in her right to experience affection and eroticism; think about the importance of Firmina's voice as an author and how the her aesthetic project impacts Carolina as an author/character. From this perspective, based on bibliographical research and qualitative analysis of the two literary works, we understand that the link between these two women is established in invisible but powerful intersections, and translates into what they mean for society and contemporary Brazilian literature.