Os (des)caminhos patriarcais no romance A falência, de Júlia Lopes de Almeida: uma leitura feminista possível

Abstract

This MA Thesis deals with the novelistic writing of Júlia Lopes de Almeida, a carioca author, from the 19th century, who published more than 30 books, including novels, short stories, essays and plays. Júlia Lopes de Almeida is one of the 19thc Brazilian writers who were forgotten by the critics and by the history of Brazilian literature from the mid-20th century, becoming a victim of memoricide, a concept by Constância Lima Duarte (2019) for this erasure. Therefore, this MA Thesis also addresses the forgetfulness and process of rescuing the Carioca writer, in addition to the issues related to writing by female authorship being on the sidelines of the Brazilian canon. These themes make up one chapter of the thesis. In this study, I focus on the novel A falência (1901) and, after identifying that the work portrays multiple ruins, the study verifies verify how the female characters react to these failures and analyze the novel from the perspective of criticism feminist and from an interdisciplinary point of view, intertwining history, law and literature, which I did in other chapter. By relating the legal, political, social and economic failures with the main characters, I identified that these ruins served as an instrument of liberation and resistance of the characters, insofar as the carioca writer, in addition to demonstrating the life condition of the woman of her time, denounces in the work the great shock suffered by patriarchy and does so through a “possible feminism”. As a theoretical basis, I used the writings of Constância Lima Duarte (2019), Zahidé Muzart (2014), Rita Terezinha Schmidt (2012), Eurídice Figueiredo (2020), Massaud Moisés (2016), Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (2012) and Boris Fausto (2012), among others.