A dissonant female voice in 19th century Maranhão

The anti-slavery discourse of Maria Firmina dos Reis

Abstract

Maria Firmina dos Reis, a writer from Maranhão in the 19th century, was a woman ahead of her time and who broke many paradigms, mainly because she was a woman and dedicated herself to writing. At the height of slavery in Brazil, she wrote and questioned the slave system. This article aims to investigate traces of dissonance through the writer's discourse, in the works Úrsula and A escrava. The methodology used is based on literature, characterized as critical analysis. For the theoretical construction, authors such as Antônio Candido, Mikhail Bakhtin, Maria Lúcia Mott, among others, were used. A black writer talking about slavery, under the abolitionist bias in the middle of the 19th century, is the renewal of hope in better days and the necessary update to the literary molds in force at the time. It is also the harbinger of the conquest of space that many human types did not have and conquered over time.