"Dos peligros a la vez": casamento e religião como representações da opressão das mulheres no romance La familia del Comendador, de Juana Manso

Abstract

Through literary texts and journal articles, Juana Paula Manso (1819-1875) attempted to urge women to become aware of the oppression to which they were subject. By advocating for the moral emancipation of women in Brazil and Argentina, that author has played a feminist role in the nineteenth century. In this master’s thesis, we aim at characterizing the oppression of women in one of her novels, namely, La familia del Comendador (1854d). Our theoretical and methodological approach is based on the dialogue established between the fields of feminist literary criticism (Golubov, 2020; Zolin, 2010; 2012; Muzart, 2000; Duarte, 2019) and women’s history (Perrot, 2019; 2021; Lerner, 2019; Del Priore, 2016), once we consider that a historically situated investigation is not only appropriate but also necessary to analyze literary texts. As a conclusion, we point out that, in the novel investigated, marriage and religion are the quintessential domains of oppression of women, that is, what preserves the submission condition imposed to the women characters. Nevertheless, Manso’s stance on that matter does not correspond to a complete opposition to marriage and religious practice. Instead, the author seems to reject forced marriage and coerced convent life, defending freedom of choice as a natural right of women. This point of view aligns with the claims and critiques put forward by Manso in her articles Casamento (1851a, 1851b) and A mulher (1852), which were published in the newspapers Periódico dos Pobres (RJ) and O Jornal das Senhoras (RJ), respectively. We also clarified that irony, dialogue with the reader, and metaphors serve as the discursive strategies employed to construct the critique present within the novel.