De mulheres e casas: O espaço romanesco e patriarcal em Rachel de Queiroz

Abstract

This books, oriented towards a social critic perspective, analyses two novels by Rachel de Queiroz – Dôra, Doralina e Memorial de Maria Moura – in which the relationship between the female protagonists within the space is loaded with a symbolic value – land and house – which reveals and interprets women paradoxical evolution in patriarchal society rooted vigorously in the rural Brazil, mainly in the northeast of part of the country. In a first moment, it aimed to draw considerations in relation to the function of space in the novel both in the point of view of relevant analysis of Literary Theory as well as analysis yielded from Sociology and Cultural Anthropology. In a second moment, it aimed to characterize the rural patriarchal society in Brazil during the first half of XIX and XX century, showing land and house’s symbolical importance in this society as well as women’s relationship with those spaces. In a third moment, the novel Memorial de Maria Moura, in which the XIX century patriarchal society is reported, the relationship between the female protagonist and the spaces encompassing the land and house. And, last of all, it aimed to compare the aforementioned novel with Dôra, Doralina, in which the action unfolds in the same space, cearense and rural, one century later, in the first half of XX century, in order to verify a possible women evolution and their relationship in relation to those spaces. Rachel de Queiroz, in her novels here in analyzed, discusses the problematic of female protagonists confronting a patriarchal world, showing the female evolution, in this type of society, was slow, gradual and contradictory, seeming at many times even impossible to occur.