Felix, Regina. Sedução e heroísmo: imaginação de mulher. Entre a República das Letras e a Belle Epoque (1884-1911). Mulheres, 2007.

Débora Ferreira

doi:10.21471/jls.v9i0.252

Abstract

Regina Felix’s Sedução e heroísmo: imaginação de mulher is a welcome contribution to the historiography of women’s writing in Brazil. Focusing her analysis on four narrative works, two by Maria Benedita Bormann (1853-1895) and two by Emília Bandeira de Melo (1852-1910), Felix successfully shows how Bormann’s and Melo’s literary representations capture the ongoing changes in societal gender roles, namely the process whereby middle-class Brazilian women moved from the patriarchal “casa grande” to the public sphere of the street, where work issues and political voices prevailed.

Highlights

Regina Felix’s Sedução e heroísmo: imaginação de mulher is a welcome contribution to the historiography of women’s writing in Brazil. Focusing her analysis on four narrative works, two by Maria Benedita Bormann (1853-1895) and two by Emília Bandeira de Melo (1852-1910), Felix successfully shows how Bormann’s and Melo’s literary representations capture the ongoing changes in societal gender roles, namely the process whereby middle-class Brazilian women moved from the patriarchal “casa grande” to the public sphere of the street, where work issues and political voices prevailed
The book opens with a dense review of major philosophers, theoreticians, and literary critics
The first chapter very successfully contextualizes Bormann’s and Melo’s milieus from the Republic of Letters to the Belle Époque. In it Felix reviews, in broad strokes, Rio de Janeiro’s gendered spaces of public and private spheres against a theoretical background that combines Jürgen Habermas, Roberto DaMatta, and Hannah Arendt. She reveals to the reader, on the one hand, the major Brazilian literary authors and philosophers of the time— the predominantly male ruling literati—and, on the other hand, women in their prescribed roles as domesticated, spiritualized beings or as markers of the patriarchal status, contained within the home outside of which undisciplined women were erased from the national narrative

Summary

Introduction

The book opens with a dense review of major philosophers, theoreticians, and literary critics. Regina Felix’s Sedução e heroísmo: imaginação de mulher is a welcome contribution to the historiography of women’s writing in Brazil.

Results

Conclusion