Analysis of keywords and of the short story ‘Sensitiva’
In this section, we will analyse just one excerpt from the short story ‘Sensitiva’ in order to present an example of commentary on and interpretation of her fictional production. For the textual commentary and interpretation, we will work with the text explanation,
1 Erich Auerbach, ‘Epílogo’, Mimesis (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2001), pp. 501–502. using the ‘keywords’ resource to interpret the ‘structure of feeling’ found in the literary unit of the short story. And why is it so important to work out the keywords to be extracted from a literary text and arrive at a basic structure of feeling? First, the nineteenth–century short story functions as a communicative artefact, circulating during the formative stages of a literary public, one newly exposed to Délia’s intellectual and emotional world. Second, it provides critical material for historical–literary analysis. In this case, we try to assign meanings and causations to words and syntactic expressions that we consider significant for representing general societal experiences. These experiences, in turn, reveal a certain structure of feeling.
Raymond Williams wrote that ‘the experience of literature is thus a kind of training for general experience’.
2 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, p. 249. In other words, literature plays the role of reality, which means that going to the text and interpreting it is a way of understanding its specific time and space, as well as the way of life experienced in a particular era. Heuristically, for the purposes of accessing this, we must perform keyword analysis.
The keywords are like a vocabulary of the time. These words and/or syntactic expressions can function as key explanatory points of a certain historical moment recreated through the ink and paper of fiction. As the sociologist Raymundo Faoro stated, dealing with Machado de Assis, to recreate the author and his work, not as they were in reality, but rather in the ink and paper of fiction.
3 Raymundo Faoro, Machado de Assis: a pirâmide e o trapézio (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Azul, 2001). This is our challenge with Délia, using some of her keywords as an interpretative resource. They will provide a linguistic map of a particular society. In literature, this means that keywords grant us access to the fictional form and content of a specific time and space, content that reveals (it bears repeating) a ‘structure of feeling.’ This structure reflects new meanings and values introduced or reinforced by literature itself, a social construct.
We identify a certain structure of feeling through the literary conventions traditionally developed by the canon. Or else we localise what is not uniformly or predominantly produced by the dominant groups of writers in a certain period. We understand that Délia did not fall into either of these cases, in other words, neither into the canon, nor into the dominant group of writers, since she was actually a writer made absent from the literary histories of the past and present.
Indeed, this is why we need to talk about her and other women writers, and try to understand the structure of feeling that they reflected in their works. We need to consider whether or not what they have fictionalised differs from existing conventions. In other words, whether it is a recreation or a simple literary reproduction.
4 Raymond Williams, La Larga Revolución (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 2003), p. 100. With this in mind, our hypothesis is contrary to this last point, that is, the reproductive nature of Délia’s short stories. Based on previous reading, we believe that, whether in relation to our author or Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Carmen Dolores, or many others, literary transformations have indeed occurred, despite the repetitions, as we will demonstrate.
For us, Délia, in her short stories, tries to give a creative response to the experience of new feelings in women, such as forbidden passions, something that the structure of feeling found in the short story to be analysed will help us to interpret. Whether what we have learned from ‘Sensitiva’ can be applied to all Délia’s short stories is, however, something we cannot assert. As mentioned above, we shall reference other stories by the author to support our reflection, but we cannot say whether forbidden passions uniformly constitute the structure of feeling in all her stories. It will be up to future studies to analyse this possibility in depth.
The oxymoron ‘structure of feeling’ was first coined by Levin Ludwig Schücking (1878–1964) when, in 1929, he wrote and published The Puritan Family in English, defining the characteristics, ideas, feelings, and habits of the Puritan family as part of a ‘basic structure of feeling’:
Our present task is to examine the peculiar characteristics of the English and the special circumstances from which these derive […] I speak of the way the English regard emotion, an attitude that is evident in a certain economy of words. The vocabulary used for the ordinary purposes of daily life is indeed astonishingly small, a fact that is in keeping with the cult of a marked reserve […] a habit by no mean incompatible with that sense of one’s own worth which in the present instance has become part of the basic
structure of feeling.
5 Levin L. Schücking, The Puritan Family: A Social Study from the Literary Sources (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 1–2, emphasis added.The German sociologist, famous for his book Die Soziologie der literarischen Geschmacksbildung (1931), invites us to think about one of the peculiarities of English culture: the Puritan family’s rather reserved vocabulary in their daily lives. This vocabulary reflects a basic structure of feeling, a common culture in fact, reproduced in the words, in the syntactic expressions, in other words, in the keywords of the time, as we have suggested.
Culture is ordinary, Raymond Williams wrote in a 1958 essay precisely entitled ‘Culture Is Ordinary’,
6 Raymond Williams, ‘A cultura é algo comum’, Recursos de Esperança (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2015), pp. 3–28. which is a kind of summary of his capital book,
Culture and Society (1958). In this work, the author invites us to understand different societies’ way of life by means of common elements, reflected in the fictional and non-fictional productions of different authors and their eras. In the book, Williams studies five keywords and a set of social experiences, traditions, and values that were shared by all the canonised or non-canonised writers of an era. So much so that certain vocabularies were repeated in the literary works of a specific time and space, allowing us to capture a certain structure of feeling, as the author explains, reflected in cultural productions.
Therefore, by structure of feeling, we are thinking of that which expresses the cultural way of life of a given historical moment, that is, the way of feeling, thinking, and communicating an era through fictional and non-fictional productions. Still on the method: we will select an extract from the story to present to the reader for familiarisation, and in sequence put our thoughts and interpretations to the test.
7 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 501–502. We will highlight just five keywords, as we consider this number to be sufficient for the subject we will be discussing: forbidden passions. As already introduced, during our commentary and interpretation we will mobilise a bibliography drawn from literary theory and criticism, the sociology of literature, and psychoanalysis.