Introduction
In this chapter, we will present aspects of the life and literary work, particularly the short stories, of Délia, the pseudonym of Brazilian writer Maria Câmara Bormann (Porto Alegre, 25 November 1853–Rio de Janeiro, 23 July 1895) published in
O País. We shall begin with a brief account of her biography and her fictional work and go on to present the methodology of the ‘keywords’
1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). and the term ‘structure of feeling’,
2 The term ‘structure of feeling’ was introduced by Raymond Williams (1921–88) in his various books and essays to analyse British literature. This concept is also used to assess the literary culture of specific periods; through the ‘structure of feeling’, one can understand how literature reflects its era and its own identity. Further discussion of this term can be found on pages XX and XX of this chapter. For more on the topic see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and La Larga Revolución (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 2003). to be used here to explain Délia’s short story, ‘Sensitiva’, published on 4 January 1892.
3 See Table 2.1 for a complete list of Délia’s short stories, which were collected in Maria Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), Contos por Délia (1887–1892), Alexandro Henrique Paixão and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (eds) (Campinas: Editora da Faculdade de Educação, Unicamp, 2024). Our aim is to comment on and interpret one of Delia’s short stories through a literary–historical analysis of a fragment of her writing. It will therefore be necessary to refer to examples from Brazilian romantic literature from the late nineteenth century, such as the fantastic short stories by forgotten romantic writer Luiz Nicolau Fagundes Varella (Rio Claro-RJ, 1841–Niterói-RJ, 1875); or indeed other literary references, even when presented in passing, such as the ‘cult of passions’ of the 1600s
4 Erich Auerbach, Le culte des passions (Paris: Macula, 1998). or the Byronian style of the 1800s.
5 Antonio Candido, Na sala de aula (São Paulo: Ática, 2002). These and other literary elements will be engaged and combined with a theoretical–methodological framework drawn from different fields of knowledge, including: the literary criticism of Antonio Candido, the philology of Erich Auerbach, the sociology of culture of Raymond Williams and Levin Schückïng, and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. From the latter, we will relate a case of hysteria analysed by Freud in order to compare it to the meanings and values represented in literary form by Délia, with the aim of reflecting on a text and its context interacting dynamically.
6 Antonio Candido, Literatura e sociedade (São Paulo: Folha de S. Paulo, 2000), pp. 5–16.