Banca de DEFESA: MARAYSA ARAUJO SILVA

"DOS PELIGROS A LA VEZ": MARRIAGE AND RELIGION AS REPRESENTATIONS OF THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN IN THE NOVEL LA FAMILIA DEL COMENDADOR, BY JUANA MANSO

La família del Comendador; Juana Manso; feminist literary criticism; opression of women; marriage and religion.

The writings of Juana Paula Manso (1819-1875) that circulated in Brazil and Argentina proposed to awaken the women to the oppression to which they were subjected. In this respect, we take into account that, in the heart of the nineteenth century, the writer played a feminist role. In her claims, Manso clearly expressed her urge to “disseminate the knowledge, and work together, as much as it was necessary, to the social development and the moral emancipation of the woman” (O Jornal das Senhoras, 1852, p. 1). Having considered such attitude, we selected one of the works of Manso, that is, the novel La familia del Comendador (1854), and carried out this research, aiming to characterize the representation of the oppression of women in this novel. Our theoretical-methodological framework is based on the dialogue established between the fields of feminist literary criticism (Golubov, 2020; Zolin, 2010; 2012; Muzart, 2000; Duarte, 2019) and women’s history (Perrot, 2019; 2021; Lerner, 2019; Del Priore, 2016), once we consider that a historically situated approach is not only appropriate, but most importantly necessary to the analyze the literary text. Bearing in mind the representations found, our conclusion is that, in the novel, marriage and religion are the quintessential domains of oppression of women, that is, what preserves the submission condition ascribed to the women characters. Nevertheless, the stance of Manso is not completely against marriage or religious practice. In fact, the author rejects the forms of force marriage and the forced stay in a nunnery. For both cases, she advocates that the freedom of choice must be taken as a natural right that also belongs to women, not only to men. This stance is in line with the claims and critique put forward by Manso in her articles Casamento (1851) and A mulher (1852), which were published, respectively, in the newspapers Periódico dos Pobres (RJ) and O Jornal das Senhoras (RJ). In addition, we found out that irony, the dialogue with the reader, and the metaphors are the discursive strategies employed to construct the critique present in the novel.