Private Affairs, Public Office: Reading the Body of Virgília in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

David Jackson,Apsara Iyer

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2015v68n3p55

Abstract

As Machado de Assis's The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) reflects on the life of a single man, two dominant forces emerge within the narrative: Bras Cubas's desire for a family and his quest for political office. These parallel efforts coincide in the form of the political wife, the woman who enables both domestic and public glory. Using the encounter of public and private spaces as a point of departure, this essay considers female forms as circumscribed by their private and public duties. Evaluating Virgilia and Marcela, we explore the significance of materiality and promiscuity in the reading of women's bodies within the text.

Highlights

In 1588, writing on the women of her casas pías, Magdalena de San Gerónimo declared that much of the harm caused to empires came from the liberty and vagrancy of individual women1
Our contemplation of sexuality and the body politic considers distinct themes treated in existing literary criticism. he relationship between the materiality of the female form and its representative capacity emerges in the work of Amy Kaminsky (1993), who has evaluated the way in which distinct Latin American regions asserted national brands of feminism through the space of the female body
Rather than making a general claim about the casual relationship between all female bodies and the state, as Kamensky and Sanchez-Eppler do, we focus instead on a speciic subset of women, those who enter a public domain through their marriage with a political igure

Summary

Introduction

In 1588, writing on the women of her casas pías, Magdalena de San Gerónimo declared that much of the harm caused to empires came from the liberty and vagrancy of individual women1. 56 Apsara Iyer and Kenneth David Jackson, Private Afairs, Public Oice: ... Rather than making a general claim about the casual relationship between all female bodies and the state, as Kamensky and Sanchez-Eppler do, we focus instead on a speciic subset of women, those who enter a public domain through their marriage with a political igure.

Results

Conclusion