Modernity in Brazilian Literature Written by Women: Maria Benedita Bormann and Emilia Bandeira De Melo (1884--1911)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes four understudied novels by two women writers, Maria Benedita Bormann and Emilia Bandeira de Melo. It focuses on the Brazilian field of cultural production as a system of power with two objectives. To uncover the cultural politics that regulates the struggle of the intelligentsia in their endeavor to modernize Brazil, demonstrating that the oligarchic power in the political economy is also at work to set both the standards of artistic validity and the rules of intellectual consecration. It aims to disclose how a certain criteria of quality lead literates, critics, and compilers to ignore the viewpoint of women writers like Bormann and Bandeira de Melo, thus contributing to the erasure of their participation from the arena of debate. Secondly, this study divulges Bormann and Bandeira de Melo's ideas in relation to the cultural field to expose a fundamental aspect of the Brazilian social formation. In tune with other attentive critics of that period, Bormann and Bandeira de Melo show the Brazilian modernization carried out by the intelligentsia as an institutional facade. Their works question the structure of patriarchal domination, both private and public. Bormann and Bandeira de Melo's modernity starts at home opposing to the family norm. Simultaneously, they imagine other forms of sociability, but their focus rests primarily on the emergence of a committed intellectual posture.