The short stories
Délia wrote more than sixty short stories; however, they remained unknown to contemporary readers until very recently. The first collection of her texts was published by Laila Thaís Correa e Silva in 2022 and contains twenty-two short stories, including nineteen from
O País. Some of her short stories can also be found on the internet and in themed anthologies, such as ‘O crime do convento de …’, published in a volume on Brazilian Gothic writing, also in 2022.
1 Maria Benedita Câmera Bormann (pseudonym Délia), ‘O crime do convento de…’, in Tênebra. Narrativas brasileiras de horror [1839–1899], Júlio França and Oscar Nestarez (eds) (São Paulo: Fósforo, 2022), pp. 361–379.However, during her life, her short stories were popular and often reproduced in various periodicals. As can be seen in Table 2.1, which lists Délia’s short stories in
O País, five of the twenty-five stories were published more than once. ‘Sensitiva’, for example, first appeared under the title ‘Ser ou não ser’ in the
Gazeta da Tarde on 14 May 1884. Eight years later it was republished, under the new title, in
O País, on 4 January 1892, and a few weeks later in
A Família, on 30 January and 13 February 1892, this time divided into two instalments.
2 Barbieri, ‘Contos na imprensa: Délia e a narrativa breve’. Table 2.1: Délia’s short stories published in O País. Prapared by the authors.
Number | Title | Date | Newspaper edition | Reference page | DAY OF THE WEEK | REPUBLICATION (Barbieri, 2020) |
1 | Uma história de ontem | 2 November 1887 | 1123 | 2 | Wednesday | Gazeta da Tarde, 1 January 1884 |
1 | Uma história de ontem | 3 November 1887 | 1124 | 2 | Thursday | |
1 | Uma história de ontem | 6 November 1887 | 1127 | 2 | Sunday | |
1 | Uma história de ontem | 7 November 1887 | 1128 | 2 | Monday | |
2 | A suicida | 6 October 1889 | 1825 | 1 | Sunday | Corymbo (RS), 30 March 1890 |
3 | A estátua de neve | 14 December 1890 | 3155 | 2 | Sunday | |
3 | A estátua de neve | 15 December 1890 | 3156 | 2 | Monday | |
4 | O crime do convento de … | 3 September 1891 | 3416 | 3 | Thursday | Jornal do Recife, 14, 17, 18 and 19 November 1891 |
4 | O crime do convento de … | 4 September 1891 | 3417 | 3 | Friday | |
4 | O crime do convento de … | 5 September 1891 | 3418 | 3 | Saturday | |
4 | O crime do convento de … (conclusion) | 6 September 1891 | 3419 | 3 | Sunday | |
5 | Sensitiva | 4 January 1892 | 3538 | 1 | Monday | A Família, 30 January 1892, 13 February 1892; Gazeta da Tarde, with the title ‘Ser ou não ser’, 14 May 1884 |
6 | Sempre a miragem | 12 January 1892 | 3546 | 1 | Tuesday | |
7 | A avó | 20 January 1892 | 3554 | 1 | Wednesday | Gazeta da Tarde, 21 May 1884 |
8 | A caprichosa | 9 February 1892 | 3574 | 1 | Tuesday | |
9 | Um bom momento | 13 February 1892 | 3578 | 1 | Saturday | |
10 | Um pouco do passado | 20 February 1892 | 3585 | 1 | Saturday | |
(Table 2.1 continued) |
11 | As rivais | 27 February 1892 | 3592 | 1 | Saturday | |
12 | O encontro | 8 March 1892 | 3602 | 1 | Tuesday | |
13 | Nevrose | 17 March 18 | 3611 | 1 | Thursday | |
14 | Amor e vilania | 25 March 1892 | 3619 | 1 | Friday | |
15 | Os primos | 31 March 1892 | 3625 | 1 | Thursday | |
16 | Não olvidada | 9 April 1892 | 3633 | 1 | Saturday | |
17 | Terezita | 16 April 1892 | 3640 | 1 | Saturday | |
18 | Metamorfose | 23 April 1892 | 3646 | 1 | Saturday | |
19 | Heroísmo | 29 April 1892 | 3652 | 1 | Friday | |
20 | Madame de Z. | 7 May 1892 | 3659 | 1 | Saturday | |
21 | Triste reverso | 14 May 1892 | 3665 | 1 | Saturday | |
22 | Felizes amantes | 13 June 1892 | 3695 | 2 | Monday | |
23 | Uma histérica | 2 July 1892 | 3714 | 2 | Saturday | |
24 | Os lábios mentem, os olhos não | 9 July 1892 | 3721 | 3 | Saturday | |
25 | Rosa e branca | 31 July 1892 | 3743 | 3 | Sunday | |
Whereas in her columns ‘Conversas lisbonenses’ and ‘Cartas femininas’ Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho defended the submission of women to patriarchy and their attachment to religious morality, Délia subverted the order of hegemonic masculinity in her short stories and novels,
3 R.W. Connel and J.W. Messerschmidt, ‘Masculinidade hegemônica: repensando o conceito’, Revista Estudos Feministas, 21, 1 (2013), pp. 241–282, <https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104–026X2013000100014> [accessed 20 Jan. 2024]. critically analysing the female condition through ‘confessions about male seduction’, as we will see below.
It is known that it was while her husband José Bernardino was away on a long journey that the writer from Rio Grande do Sul stepped up her contribution to Rio de Janeiro newspapers
4 Telles, ‘Délia’. and, as the information in Table 2.1 demonstrates, perfected her short story writing. In the twenty-five short stories published in
O País, Délia created heroines who sought freedom at any cost, emphasising women’s struggle against patriarchal society. Some of them are stronger than the others, like the courtesan nicknamed Alegria, from the short story ‘Uma história de ontem’ or Lélia, from ‘Uma histérica’, who refuses to marry her cousin and dresses up as a man to tell her listeners about her adventures in Europe. Others opted to commit suicide, like the heroines of ‘A suicida’ and ‘Nevrose’, in an act of revolt or disobedience against the female resignation that was generally defended at the time, not least by Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho in her columns in
O País.
Most of the women who populate Délia’s short stories and novels are close to irrationality and nature, in contrast to the men, who are on the side of reason and discourse, reinforcing the dominant view in the nineteenth century that equated femininity with insanity due to the sexual tensions and affections they experienced, whether in fantasy or in everyday reality.
5 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady. Women, Madness and English Culture (1830–1980) (London: Penguin Books, 1987). According to Elaine Showalter, in medicine hysteria was included ‘within the specific historical framework of the nineteenth century as an unconscious form of feminist protest, the counterpart of the attack on patriarchal values carried out by the women’s movement of the time’.
6 Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 5. Representing female pathology in literature, in turn, is a form of protest against the rigid patriarchal system.
7 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). We can relate Délia to the main women writers of the nineteenth century through what Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have called the anxiety of authorship, an adaptation of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence.
8 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Gilbert and Gubar adapted Bloom’s theory – which describes male authors internalising a fear of failure in relation to their literary predecessors – to explore women writers. They argued that female authors eased their unique ‘anxieties of authorship’ by embracing Emily Dickinson’s advice: ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.’
9 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 73. Like Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot, Délia,
struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture, suggesting further that these writers – whether consciously or unconsciously – incorporate these struggles into the fictions that they create.
10 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 51.Délia, therefore, suggests that literature is a space in which Brazilian women readers can indulge in fantasies and, at the same time, face their own dilemmas and frustrations through the experiences and actions of fictional characters. Délia seems to claim that the literature of the time did not need to be feminist in order to propose something new, that is, to feed the reader’s dissatisfaction with the female condition and the strength of her desires and affections.
Délia’s plots revolved around arranged marriages, unrequited love, extramarital or abusive relationships, the impossibility of divorce, situations that exposed the hypocrisies of bourgeois marriage and caused irreparable damage to her female characters, something that we call ‘confessions about seduction’. Délia’s short stories published in
O País portray, through an omniscient female narrator, sexual affections experienced in a confessional manner. When Délia began writing her short stories, Freudian psychoanalysis had yet to be systematised, and the ideas about anxiety neuroses caused by sexual intercourse were still being developed.
11 Sigmund Freud, ‘Draft E. How Anxiety Originates’, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1) ([1886 and 1899] London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), pp. 189–194. However, Délia was already introducing her readers to ‘psychological moments’ in her short stories, crafting narratives shaped as confessions in which her female characters fictionally relived their own seduction.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud, in a famous letter to Wilhelm Fliess, entitled ‘Draft E: How Anxiety Originates’, introduced a thought about anxiety neuroses caused by the sexual act, which would culminate in a subsequently abandoned theory about seduction.
12 Freud, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, pp. 189–194. According to the
Dicionário de Psicanálise:
The word seduction refers, first and foremost, to the idea of a sexual scene in which a subject, usually an adult, uses their real or imagined power to abuse another subject, reduced to a passive position: a child or a woman, in general.
13 Élisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon, Dicionário de Psicanálise, Vera Ribeiro (trans.) (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1998), p. 696.It was thanks to this disastrous experience of sexual abuse commonly witnessed by Freud’s hysterical patients that the founder of psychoanalysis began to question whether what was being narrated in the therapeutic setting, as proof of a violent sexual affection (seduction), was in fact a confession of a lived experience or actually the expression of a sexual fantasy. From the reflections on ‘anxiety neuroses’ caused by the sexual acts that patients confessed to Freud, hypotheses emerged that propelled the nascent psychoanalysis towards the discoveries of a psychic reality of an unconscious nature in relation to the concreteness of a very disturbing empirical reality disclosed by patients. Whether refuted or not, the fact is that, from then on, the theory of seduction entered the annals of psychoanalysis, supporting several debates on the psychic and/or empirical character of sexual affections, something that European and Brazilian women’s literature was trying to figure out throughout the nineteenth century, combining fantasy and reality. For example, in ‘Sempre a miragem’, Délia found inspiration in the work of the French novelist, memoirist, and journalist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, better known by her pseudonym George Sand. The story emphasises the influence of George Sand’s works on the life of the heroine Amélia, who found comfort and identification in the passion, despair, and irony of
Valentine and
Indiana, both published in 1832.
14 Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (pseudonym George Sand), Valentine [1832] 2005, <www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17251/pg17251-images.html> [accessed 20 Jan. 2024]; Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (pseudonym George Sand), Indiana [1832] no date, Quebec, <https://beq.ebooksgratuits.com/vents/sand-indiana.pdf> [accessed 20 Jan. 2024]. Like Délia’s short stories, they explore the complexities of love and marriage, and denounce the limited education provided to women in nineteenth-century society.
George Sand and Délia contemporise key elements of Viennese psychoanalysis, such as the theme of seduction, while also reworking a male-dominated literary tradition of psychological narratives about women, as seen in classics like Richardson’s Pamela, Alencar’s Senhora, and Machado de Assis’s Helena.
15 Samuel Richardson, Pamela Or Virtue Rewarded ([1740] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); José de Alencar, Senhora ([1875], São Paulo: Penguin e Companhia das Letras, 2013); Machado de Assis, Helena, Obra Completa, vol. 1 ([1876] São Paulo: Nova Aguilar, 2015), pp. 378–487. Delia’s writing, like George Sand’s, allows for a more refined understanding of female experiences, providing a platform for women’s voices to be heard and their struggles to be recognised. Through her writing in the form of short stories, Délia condenses women’s experiences and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of women’s lives.