A escrita de si como resistência e desclausura em cartas de amor, de Sóror Mariana Alcoforado

Abstract

This qualitative and bibliographic research takes as its object of study the book Cartas de Amor (1992), whose authorship is attributed to the Portuguese nun Mariana Alcoforado (1640-1723). This edition we are using is a Brazilian translation, made by the Brazilian writer Marilene Felinto from the Portuguese translations, since the letters were published in its princeps version, entitled Lettres Portugaises traduites em françois, in 1669, in France. The work is composed of five missives, probably addressed to Noel Bouton de Chamilly (1636-1715), a French officer with whom Soror Mariana would have been lovingly associated in the period of Portuguese Restoration Wars (1640-1668). Despite the doubts related to the number of letters, the order in which they are arranged, their authenticity and/or authorship, we aim to analyze them in the light of the categories of resistance and discharge, from the perspective of Cultural and Gender Studies, considering this production a self writing and, evidently, supported by the scholars that confirm the alcoforadista thesis. Therefore, the relevance of this work is to bring to light women’s writing, in the sense of prose of fiction, and a writer, especially if we pay attention to its avant-garde character, since the epistolary novel gets prominence only in the eighteenth century, being Mariana considered by many the first of its kind in France. Thus, we privilege the debate on women’s writing in the seventeenth century, focusing on female monastic literature, showing asymmetries between genders in this space, which underlie and justify our investigative proposal. In this way and in this direction, we forward our reading of the letters, among many possible, seeking to point out the potential of this writing for the conquest of new spaces of discourse for the one that produced them. For it, we focus on the studies of Morujão (2002; 2011; 2015), Anastácio (2013), Rector (1999), Garretas (1990), Perrot (2005; 2008), Foucault (1992), Figueiredo (2013), Arfuch (2010), Gameiro (2012), Lejeune (2014), Barthes (1981), Bourdieu (2012), among others.