Entre a tradição e a modernidade: a representação da mulher no romance Gizinha, de Polycarpo Feitosa

Abstract

The present study aims to conduct an analysis of the novel "Gizinha" (1930) by the potiguar writer Polycarpo Feitosa, in order to identify the relevance of the female voice in the construction of the narrative, as well as the traces of patriarchy present in the style, theme, and different voices of the novel. Therefore, the research encompasses the following objectives: to examine the relationship between literature and the presence of women in the social and discursive practices of a culture built upon male discourse; to identify a silence that subtracts from women their own bodies, as stated by the narrator, with the purpose of to reveal the blind spots that jump between the lines of the noveland to destabilize the models of reading, criticism and literary historiography, making the more explicit gender marks. In order to comprehend the chosen theme, literature has been considered from a historical perspective. Thus, this work engages with the theoretical orientations of Showalter (1994) and Moi (1999), for the establishment of the foundational bases of feminist criticism; of Butler (2022) and Lauretis (2019), concerning the notions of gender and gender culture; of Woodward, Silva, and Hall (2014) regarding the cultural construction of identities. The analysis of the corpus reveals that by including the voice of women in History, the reader is not only allowed to fill in some gaps constructed by cultural tradition but also encouraged to identify with the subjectivity of the characters, undoing 'the silences of narration', that space between becoming and not becoming, contributing to an increasingly effective demarcation of the category of women in the contemporary world.