Abstract

The 19th century represents the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil and, with it, significant changes in society and the local population. A formerly reclusive member of society begins to take shape not only in public life but also within the literature: the Brazilian woman. Despite her changing social role, prevailing hygienist and medical theories of the time pointed to the lack of vocation of the nineteenth-century woman for rational matters; which in naturalism implies that these pseudo-scientific theories would be the base to dissect and explain the social pathologies of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and society at large. In my thesis, I propose the analysis of the Naturalist novel Lar (Home), by Pardal Mallet—a lesser-known Brazilian author who was involved with Naturalist, pro-abolitionist, republican, and divorce issues from 1887 to 1894—while contesting its main argument that female characters in the novel sought only one thing: marriage in order to appease their sexual curiosity. Additionally, I will also analyze the representation of middle-class women in Rio and their greater participation in society in the last decades of the 1800s. For my theoretical basis, I use Gayatri Spivak's analysis of women as the Other, the subaltern; and the examination carried out throughout this work will ultimately focus on answering one question: does the carioca woman of the 19th century have a representation consistent with the advances of social insertion that the genre conquered throughout that century, in this novel?

Degree

MA

College and Department

Humanities; Spanish and Portuguese

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2023-04-10

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd13134

Keywords

Women, 19th century Rio, Bourgeoisie, Home, Pardal Mallet, Voluptuousness, Naturalism

Language

portuguese

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