Prohibited Pleasures: Female Literacy, Sex and Adultery in Turn-of-the-Century Brazilian Fiction

Vezzani, Cintia Kozonoi

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-aarm-3850

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Prohibited Pleasures: Female Literacy, Sex and Adultery in Turn-of-the-Century Brazilian Fiction

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In this dissertation I examine the entanglement between female literacy and female sexuality in nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. I investigate the ways in which male authors used literature as a mechanism for policing female sexuality and stabilizing the traditional family. I argue that nineteenth-century Brazilian fiction exhibits a recurring preoccupation with a perceived crisis in the institution of marriage. This crisis was often associated with an alleged growth in female adultery which, as some authors claimed, was a symptom of the social decay brought about by modernization and the breakdown of traditional gender roles. I first trace the migration of this literary concern with female sexuality from Europe to Brazil to demonstrate that Brazilian authors not only drew on European literary models, but also created a local literary tradition with the figure of the adulteress at its center. This study covers a period ranging from the publication of José de Alencar’s courtesan novel Lucíola in 1862 to the publication of Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s A Falência (The Bankruptcy) in 1901. Almeida’s novel, the first adultery novel written by a Brazilian woman, explicitly critiqued male authors’ accounts of female adultery and articulated a new vision of the family based on female solidarity and education. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which novelists created and criticized romantic fantasies of love, desire, and consumption in the wake of social and political changes that placed women’s rights and the future of the family at the center of public debate.

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