A condição feminina na sociedade brasileira do entresséculos sob a ótica de Júlia Lopes de Almeida

Abstract

Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934) was an important Brazilian writer who actively participated in the brazilian intellectual and literary scene at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Despite her extensive work, widely published during her time, the writer was gradually rendered invisible by phallocentric criticism after her death, being rarely found in our literary historiographies. However, feminist literary criticism has been recovering this and other authors, bringing to light these erased names from our literature. Most of Júlia Lopes' fictional works tend to have female protagonists, from whom one can glimpse the living conditions of various women of that period – from a questioning point of view, as we intend to illustrate. With this in mind, this work focuses on six short stories from the collection Ânsia Eterna, originally published in 1903 – “Esperando”, “In extremis”, “Os porcos”, “Sob as estrelas”, “O caso de Rute”, and “As rosas” –, from which we will observe the author's perspective on three themes addressed by her in these narratives: bourgeois marriage, abandonment of mixed-race women, and violence against women. Based on this, our research aims to investigate how, through these plots, a problematic of women is outlined, in order to highlight Almeida's critical position regarding the female condition in Brazilian society at the fin-de-siècle. To this end, we focus on the characterization and experiences of the female characters, as well as the narrative resources and strategies in the presentation of the plot, paying attention to subliminal messages and some signaled ruptures. In our discussions, we rely on the theoretical contributions of Beauvoir (1967, 1970), Perrot (1991, 2003, 2005), Del Priore (2020), Telles (1992, 2004), Muzart (1990, 1995, 1996, 2014), De Luca (1997), among other authors. The study has a qualitative approach and, regarding methodological procedures, a bibliographic review was conducted. In the end, we realized, from the studied short stories, that the writer exposes and questions the mechanisms of patriarchal domination responsible for subjugating and oppressing the "second sex." Therefore, far from reinforcing traditions, as some researchers claim, the writer subtly criticized them, with skill and shrewdness, as directly confronting that androcentric 19th-century society could have cost her the fame and success she achieved among your contemporaries.