Impostors and Alienated Women: Passion, Politics and Passive Resistance in Camilo's A Brasileira de Prazins

Abstract

This article re-examines Camilo Castelo Branco's novel A Brasileira de Prazins (1882) in light of the title's identification of the novel's heroine as the exclusive property of her husband, Feliciano de Prazins. It will be argued that not only the fact that others impose their wills on Marta but also the lack of realistic alternatives to her arranged marriage reflect the unsatisfactory political solution of compromise imposed on Portugal after the popular Maria da Fonte revolution of the 1840s. The total indifference to Marta's own needs displayed by those around her (and her own apparent reaction in retreating into compensatory wish-fulfilment) reflect the author's own sense of the futility of political idealism as an agent of meaningful change at a time when the Republican movement was beginning to gain some popular support in Portugal, which Camilo expresses in his own recollections and reflections on the rebellion which forms the historical basis for the novel.