Periferias narrativas: vozes em trânsito

Abstract

The research aimed to perform a study on the representation of silence in three characters from different literary works. As a corpus for the analysis, we selected the novels São Bernardo (1934) by Graciliano Ramos, A confissão da leoa (2012) by Mia Couto and Dois Irmãos (2000) by Milton Hatoum. The characters chosen to compose the analyzes are: Madalena, a teacher who lives on the São Bernardo farm with her husband Paulo Honório, in an country of Alagoas; Mariamar, a woman who tells her story in a village in Mozambique; and Domingas, an orphaned and indigenous girl who lives as a maid at a Lebanese house in the city of Manaus. For the analyzes, the absence of the female voice in these three distinct texts was taken into account and comparisons of their conditions were promoted in the differentiated contexts in which they are found. As a theoretical contribution, we had the contribution of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Mary Del Priore, Peter Stearns, among others that are important for this research. Thus, it was verified how the social construction determined the performance of these women in the literary texts and in what way the historical and social processes contributed to the silencing of them in the society. These characters roles are presented as part of exclusionary and patriarchal societies in which power and its mechanisms are manupulated by them. These female characters appear subjugated, silenced and oppressed in the literary texts studied and the results point to the permanence of a social structure in which the role of women still appears limited.