Romance de autoria feminina: “o ser mulher” em Maria Firmina e Júlia Lopes

Abstract

In this research, based on theoretical and methodological assumptions from feminist criticism, which involve literature, culture and gender issues, we wrote about romance of feminine authorship in Brazil using as object of study, novels by Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825-1917) and Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934), focused on the protagonists’ conflicts, investigating their destabilization in relation to the exemplary female patterns which were compatible with the patriarchal values in the 19th and 20th centuries. We intend to show how the writing of feminine authorship negotiates with the patriarchal values, pointing out the way the narratives of resistance emerge in the gender relations in the end of 19th century and enter in the 20th century. We can notice that it is throughout the structural composition of the protagonists of the studied novels that the resistance materializes itself into the literary text immanence and new meanings emerge from the confrontation between text and context by feminist criticism