Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Lucióla:Critical Frames

1988; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382882000365061

1469-3550

María Tai Wolff,

Linguistics and Language Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: ALENCAR, JOSÉ MARTINIANO DE (1829–1877)LUCÍOLA [J. M. DE ALENCAR] Notes 1. José de Alencar, Lucíola, in Obra completa (Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1959), I, 309. Further references to this novel will be indicated by page number. 2. Alencar, ‘Benção paterna’ to Sonhos d'ouro in Obra completa, I, 699. 3. Ibid. 4. Roberto Schwarz, Ao vencedor as batatas: Forma literária e processo social nos inicios do romance brasileiro (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977), 48. 5. Schwarz, 49. 6. Antonio Candido, Formação da literatura brasileira, 5th ed. (São Paulo: Univ. de São Paulo/Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1975), II, 235. 7. Candido, 229. 8. Michael Holquist, Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), xxvii. 9. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1980), 213. 10. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3. 11. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 216. 12. Alencar, Senhora, in Obra completa, I, 951. 13. ‘Alencar, Diva, in Obra completa, I, 462. Further references to this novel will be indicated ‘(D, page number)’. 14. Lúcia's ‘conversion’ merits more extensive discussion, in two contexts in particular. First, she can be seen as an example of the ‘holy sinner’ figure. In recent work on ‘The Carnavalization of the Holy Sinner: An Intertextual Dialogue between Thomas Mann and João Guimarães Rosa’ (Latin American Literary Review XIV [1986], 136–144) and ‘A dialética do pecador santo na literatura brasileira’ (paper presented at Modern Language Association Meeting, Chicago, 30 December 1985), Ana Luiza Andrade has explored the ‘essential ambivalence’ of this figure, who ‘radically disrupts … recognized binary oppositions’ such as good and evil, or, in Lúcia's case, sin and virtue. We can also examine Lúcia's transformation together with the sudden changes in the heroines of Alencar's other ‘perfis de mulher’: Emília, in Diva, and Aurélia, in Senhora, abruptly and inexplicably accept or submit to their partners. In Ao vencedor as batatas, Roberto Schwarz has suggested that the suddenly happy endings of Alencar's novels are forced and awkward; their artificiality would be another sign of Alencar's attempt to impose a novelistic model which is ‘out of place’ in Brazil. In accord with my discussion of Lucíola, I would see the odd ‘closures’ Alencar imposes in the other works as examples of his strategic manipulations of these literary models. 15. Wilson Martins, História da inteligência brasileira (São Paulo: Cultrix, Univ. de São Paulo, 1977), III, 177. 16. Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1986), 109. 17. ‘Benção paterna’, 692. 18. Raimundo de Menezes, José de Alencar: Literato e político, (Rio de Janeiro: Livros Técnicos e Científicos, 1977), 171. 19. Schwarz, 13. 20. Another critical reader of the surprisingly daring (and even explicit) novels which apparently circulated in the second half of the nineteenth century was Machado de Assis. In his biography of Machado, R. Magalhães Junior describes the author's mocking ‘reviews’ of such works as As aventuras de um estudante ou As esperanças malogradas de Henrique, by João José de Sousa Meneses Júnior. In his article on this work, Machado pokes fun at the dreadful novel by pretending to acclaim it. Among his techniques is to quote (and effusively praise) such passages as: ‘Trajava [Elisa] um vestido branco de uma espécie de cetim, era a imagem de uma inocente pomba, decotado, e a furto deixava perceber os seus benquistos seios que meus olhos pareciam engoli-los …’ (quoted in Vida e obra de Machado de Assis [Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1981], II, 72). According to Magalhães, Machado himself also played on the public's taste for slightly scandalous fiction. To stimulate the sales of the Jornal das Famílias, Machado and its publishers apparently generated a false ‘polemic’ over the publication of his short story ‘Confissões de uma viúva moça’, which appeared in that magazine in 1865. As each instalment of the story came out, an attack on ‘um romance dos mais perigosos para a juventude’ also appeared in the Correio Mercantil. If Magalhães is correct, in this ‘hábil propaganda’, Machado, like Alencar, had diagnosed the reading interests of a society of ‘G.M.s’. 21. Schwarz, 13–54, especially 14 and 36, for example. 22. Wilson Martins’ analysis of Lucíola takes as its point of departure the novel's two ‘reading scenes’. He sees La Dame aux camélias as a model for the first half of the novel, and Paul et Virginie as a model for the second half; especially astute is his observation that the novel combines elements of two literary movements (‘A história realista de Lúcia transforma-se, afinal, na história romântica de Maria da Glória, narrada no capítulo XIX e que tem a função de reconstituir-lhe o que ela mesma denomina a “virgindade do coração”’; 179). Yet I see Lucíola's ‘tomada de posição’ with regard to these two texts quite differently. While Martins affirms that ‘Lucíola é claramente uma obra, não de observação, mas de imitação literária’ (176), I would suggest that he has at least looked quite carefully at past literature, and that—as sections of Martins’ own analysis seem to suggest—his brand of ‘imitation’ is not unaware or subservient, but innovative.