A dissonant female voice in 19th century Maranhão

The anti-slavery discourse of Maria Firmina dos Reis

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5902/1679849X68891

Keywords:

Female writing, Dissonance, 19th century Brazilian literature

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.

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Author Biography

Marcos Antônio Fernandes dos Santos, Universidade Estadual do Maranhão - UEMA

Doutorando em Letras (Estudos Literários), pela Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul; Mestre em Letras (Teoria Literária), pela Universidade Estadual do Maranhão.

References

BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Estética da criação verbal. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. 4. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.

CANDIDO, Antonio. O direito à literatura. In: Vários escritos. 4ª ed. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro: Duas Cidades/Ouro sobre Azul, 2004, p. 169-191.

DUARTE, Eduardo de Assis, Maria Firmina dos Reis e os primórdios da ficção afrobrasileira. [Posfácio]. In: REIS, Maria Firmina dos Reis. Úrsula; A Escrava. Florianópolis: Ed. Mulheres; Belo Horizonte: PUC Minas, 2004.

MOTT, Maria Lúcia de Barros. Submissão e resistência: a mulher na luta contra a escravidão. São Paulo: Contexto, 1988.

REIS, Maria Firmina dos. Úrsula e outras obras. 2. ed. – Brasília: Câmara dos Deputados, Edições Câmara, 2019. (Série prazer de ler; n. 11 e-book)

SILVA, Régia Agostinho da. A mente, essa ninguém pode escravizar: Maria Firmina dos Reis e a escrita feita por mulheres no Maranhão. Revista Leitura: Teoria & Prática. Campinas – SP, v. 29, n. 56, p. 11-19, 2011.

Published

2023-04-01

How to Cite

Fernandes dos Santos, M. A. (2023). A dissonant female voice in 19th century Maranhão: The anti-slavery discourse of Maria Firmina dos Reis. Literatura E Autoritarismo, (40), 83–92. https://doi.org/10.5902/1679849X68891