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Post-Structuralist Theory Mirrored in Helena Parente Cunha's Woman between Mirrors

1991; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 74; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/344187

2153-6414

Carmen Chaves Tesser,

Literature, Culture, and Criticism

Scholars dedicated to literary theory have, in the last few years, created a heated debate about feminine voice, feminine space, feminist vs. feminine within a seemingly phallocentric society. The debate usually ranges from a passive acceptance of the writings of the major psychoanalytical theorists to the full rejection of their ideas. Ann Rosalind Jones, in her article, Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L'Ecriture Feminine, describes a sub-controversy of the debate, namely, the French theorists' view of feminism (Showalter 361-77). Poststructuralist theory itself is a product of decentering theory. One begins to question all foundations, and, by so doing, questions the basic foundation-language. Language, it is often argued, is a masculine artifice and therefore cannot express femaleness. The debate will continue to provide us with subject matter for many articles and professional meetings to come. It seems that when discussing writing by women, we fall into this debate whether we like it or not. Thinking this debate provides the premise for the present paper. My purpose here is to show that a talented writer who is also a literary critic and professor of literary theory responds to these issues by writing a novel. Indeed, as I have already proposed elsewhere (McClendon 24), I believe that in Brazil today, theory has been driving literature rather than analyzing it. In this study, I will look at Helena Parente Cunha's text as a response to the post-structuralist writers Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan specifically. We will leave for another context the issue of the French theoretical point of view in Brazilian letters. Suffice it to say here that French thought (pre)dominates in Latin America as it does in Anglo America. I believe that Parente Cunha's text itself, the finished product, is one way to express that which is intuitive within the theories, but onerously expressed, since our only recourse is language that, in itself, is an artifice. When Mulher no espelho appeared in 1983, Helena Parente Cunha had been a Professor of Literary Theory in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro for fifteen years. The book, her first novel, followed the publication of several volumes of poetry and short stories. In 1982, the manuscript for the novel won the Premio Cruz e Sousa, second place in the Concurso Nacional de Romance in Brazil, primarily for its solid psychological synthesis of woman/women without precedent in Brazilian literature, not merely for its possibly confessional aspect, but also above all its profoundly revelatory qualities, in language immensely suited to its aims (qtd. in Ellison and Lindstrom v). While I argue that on one level, reading only feminist theoretical eyes, we see the psychological process of individuation at work, I believe that this text and others by contemporary Brazilian authors, men and women, are more complex and involve other theoretical issues. Therefore, I would like to direct our thought away from the feminist/feminine point of view for the moment. My argument, as stated before, is that Parente Cunha is working through the maze of post-structuralist