O ‘INFERNO DE TODOS NÓS’: O MOTE FAMILIAR EM ÁLBUM DE FAMÍLIA, DE NELSON RODRIGUES

Abstract

This article discusses the unpleasant issues on Album de familia, as the family´s hypocrisy in social relationships, abuse of pater familis, sex, religion and incest. Album de familia, included with the plays called mythical, depicts a family´s nucleus that is on the verge of a collapse and trys to keep up appearances. In dramaturgy from Nelson Rodrigues the family is a recurrent theme – it´s usually presented as the heart of all conflicts, without escape for the characters. In opposite of the social and religious assumptions that the family is a sacred institution, the playwright exposes the family as a place of rotting, turbulence and evils. His plays shocked contemporary audiences because his eschatological manner in exposes the human being. As a result, the writter received many pejoratives codenames like anti-moralist, perverted, damned, among others. In the same way that other avant-garde artists, always ahead of his time, Nelson Rodrigues became the most Brazilian playwrigth nowadays recognized. Especially in Album de familia, the play selected for analysis in this article, the bourgeois, traditional and patriarchal family is criticized, a discussed model in our society. The text uses several intertextual resources as parody and irony, making necessary a multiple and polysemous reading, unlike to superficial and moralistic interpretation when the play was published.