The theme of impossible passions in short stories
The theme of impossible passions, characterised by the combination of idealised love and the anguish of existing, under the romantic topic of ‘love and death’, can be found in some of the literature of Brazilian romanticism, such as Luiz Nicolau Fagundes Varella and Álvares de Azevedo, which will be addressed later. Of Varella, an author best known as a poet, we would highlight the fantastic tales he published in the Correio Paulistano newspaper (São Paulo, 1854–1954). This forgotten Brazilian writer deserves to be remembered, precisely in this study on women writers absent from literary histories, because he introduced themes into the short story form that would be dear to Délia’s heart, namely passions, but in our author’s case the subject is forbidden love.
Varella was a great reader of his predecessors at the São Paulo Law School, especially the poet Álvares de Azevedo, but he was also influenced by French literature, especially the writer Charles Nodier (1770–1844). The pseudonym Smarra, which he adopted as a columnist for the
Correio Paulistano newspaper, was inspired by a Nodier short story.
1 Charles Nodier, Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit. 30 March 2006, <www.gutenberg.org/files/18083/18083-h/18083-h.htm> [accessed Jan. 2024]. When we think of Délia, the form of the romantic short story is maintained, as is the theme of impossible passions, but converted by the feeling of prohibitions. Foreign influences also persist; we have seen how George Sand is one of the influences on Délia, just as Nodier is found in Varella.
The fact is that in the example of Luiz Nicolau Fagundes Varella’s short stories we have a relative storytelling tradition in formation in which, as in Délia’s stories, imagination and eloquence predominated, at the expense of the ‘topographical’ approach, which is centred on description. For the French writer Charles Nodier (1780–1844), who introduced a generation of young Romanticists to the
conte fantastique, Gothic literature and vampire tales, and who was the creator of the demonic character behind the pseudonym ‘Smarra’, the excessive use of descriptives undermined fantastical storytelling. The short story writer should use them minimally or almost never in his work. Varella followed this approach in the five short stories he published in the
Correio Paulistano newspaper:
‘As ruínas da glória’, ‘Éster’, ‘Iná’, ‘As bruxas’, and ‘A guarida de pedra’.
2 Luiz Nicolau Fagundes Varella, ‘As ruínas da glória’, Correio Paulistano, 10–15 October 1861, ‘Éster’, Correio Paulistano, 16–18 October 1861, ‘Iná’, Correio Paulistano, 20 and 22 October 1861, ‘As bruxas’, Correio Paulistano, 26 and 29 October 1861, ‘A guarida de pedra, Correio Paulistano, 30 and 31 October, 1 and 5 November 1861. See Alexandro Henrique Paixão, ‘O último arcanjo revel: a prosa poética de Fagundes Varella’ (unpublished undergraduate thesis, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Marília-São Paulo, 2001).Although limited in number compared to Délia’s works, their contribution is equally as important, since these fantastic short stories were filled with eloquent imagination to focus on something that would also be dear to Délia: impossible passions. Even though our author did not write fantastic short stories in the manner of Nodier and Varella, Délia used short fiction to write about female characters who were indulging in erotic fantasies and passionate daydreams.
In Varella’s short stories, the theme of impossible passions is explored through the delirious infatuation of young male characters for ghostly mistresses, who haunt ancient ruins and sea slopes, as happens in ‘As ruínas da glória’ and ‘A guarida da pedra’. Love beyond life and overwhelming dreamlike passion were the prime motives for driving creative imagination and turning away from the world of life. This romantic topic was reproduced and conveyed through countless nineteenth-century authors and works, and is worth revisiting here, because from Varella to Délia, the short story changed very little in terms of literary form, in so far as the brief style guided by the primacy of imagination and eloquence prevailed to the detriment of the referential, the descriptive, or the topographical.
3 On the tradition of the Brazilian Gothic short story, see Júlio França and Oscar Nestarez (eds), Tênebra. Narrativas brasileiras de horror [1839–1899] (São Paulo: Fósforo, 2022), pp. 361–379. All in the name of exalting ‘impossible passions’ in an attempt to escape the immediate and prosaic life of a slave-owning and patriarchal society. There have, however, been changes in terms of content: instead of the fleeting male lovers played by young men uncommitted to life and desperate for love, Déliaʼs heroines embody both romantic passion and resistance to patriarchal structures.
Beyond their shared use of the short story form, with its emphasis on imagination and eloquence, Varella and Délia converge in their critique of patriarchy, particularly through their depictions of the pater familias figure:
The Brazilian patriarchy, coming from the mills to the mansions, did not immediately give in to the street; for a long time they were almost enemies, the mansion and the street. And the biggest fight was over the woman for whom the street yearned, but whom the
pater familias of the mansion endeavoured to keep locked up as much as possible in the bedroom and among the enslaved girls, just like in the mills. Only during the four festivals of the year – and even then, in palanquins, and later in closed carriages.
4 Gilberto Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos: decadência do patriarcado e desenvolvimento do urbano (São Paulo: Global, 2004), p. 139.In Brazil, the rural pater familias embodied patriarchal power, a figure whose authority was anchored in slaveholding estates and who later transplanted this dominance to urban mansions, all while maintaining the structures of slavery. When Délia began publishing her short stories in 1887, slavery was legal in Brazil, a system only abolished on 13 May 1888, with the Lei Áurea. Yet this legal change did not dismantle entrenched hierarchies. Patriarchal domination and slave-like labour relations endured, disproportionately affecting subaltern groups, including women. Female submission, religious morality, familial control, and the exaltation of old age
5 Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos, p. 199. – remained much in force.
6 Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Leitores de Tinta e Papel (Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 2017), pp. 251–252 The author’s depiction of female characters experiencing intense romantic love constitutes a critique of patriarchal structures, particularly familialism’s dual focus on male succession and the religious regulation of sexuality within marriage. Délia takes a hard line against these traditions when she reworks the romantic theme of impossible passions from the perspective of prohibition, presenting something new: the theme of the forbidden passions of her female characters.