Hypotheses
In the case of Délia, the literary form is the short story, and the material content is the Rio de Janeiro press of the late nineteenth century and its respective national circumstances; while as the structure of feeling, that is, what emerges from the dynamic interaction between text and context, between form and content, we highlight so-called forbidden passions, as a literary representation of the short story. At least that is the cultural hypothesis we intend to present in advance from the following fragment:
Sofia was born in the province of… but educated in Rio de Janeiro, bathed in this splendid sunshine and embraced by the fragrant breeze of these unparalleled nights. She dearly loved the court, despite the heat and the fevers, with the indulgent blindness that we attach to loved ones, even though we are aware of some of their faults. In times of epidemic, when everyone was cursing this climate, she sighed deeply, losing her gaze on the imperious blue horizon, where the sombre mountains seemed to hold up the sky […]. Sofia was her father and brothers’ idol, and her weak complexion made her the target of all their solicitude and affection… [one time] she heard about the arrival of the opera company and asked her father to subscribe […]. They debuted with La Traviata […], that music, sometimes vivid, sometimes morbid, faithfully reproducing the agitations of the soul, had awakened her exalted nature, which had hitherto been weakened by difficult development […]. The impression was provoked by the music; the shock caused her indefinable sensations, which surprised her, enchanted her, gave her energy at will and interested her in the smallest things [such as] her desire to learn horse-riding, and soon she was an intrepid rider, somewhat reckless, which greatly worried Arthur, her favourite brother, who accompanied her on her crazy rides […]. In the summer, the family retired to the countryside and Sofia went for walks all day long: she woke up early, drank milk and rode, helped by her brother and, chatting, they went off aimlessly […]. Arthur smiled at her extravagances, making her promise not to do anything rash, and obeyed the whimsical girl. As soon as her brother came out to meet her, Sofia disappeared at a gallop and the boy, taken aback, begged her to stop and swore that he would no longer fulfil any of her wishes. She was lying on the grass, waiting for him, pretending to have fainted, with her eyelids clenched shut, and Arthur was shouting out for her, distressed, desperate. Sofia laughed with joy and sat down excitedly, kissing her brother’s pale cheeks, compensating him with a thousand caresses for his fears and his condescension towards her eccentricities.
[…] When everyone is asleep in the hush of the night, I open the window, and alone, before the heavens, I let my imagination run wild. I feel like I would fall in love with a
man who were the target of much hatred and whose life was a fabric of struggles
and woes. I would love him madly, driven by the spirit of contradiction, which is the basis of the
feminine character, and by the infernal pride of compensating him with my affection for all the sorrows that hurt him […]. I would live by him and for him, and the moment I could no longer be of use to him, I should disappear! What do you say to that, Arthur? she asked, smiling adorably
[…]. Her brother looked at her and said, squeezing her in his arms: ‘You’re a mad enchantress, capable of seducing angels, but don’t let yourself be trapped by the whims of your exalted mind. You know that, for women, life has a very positive and very hard side, which can be summed up in the fulfilment of moral and social duties […].’ The girl had heard those wise words, which seemed to her like a death knell, killing her dear fantasies, laying bare the sad realities of life, placing a barrier to her daydreams, so beautiful, so riveting, so rich in feverish mirages! […] One evening, while they were playing
Aida, she called Arthur and said to him in a weak voice: ‘I am a
nervous nature, incapable of submitting to the common law of other organisms. I needed a passion, an idea that would galvanise me, giving me the strength to live and the joy to find devotion. I had all this in the depths of my soul, and you, with your practice of the world, extinguished my vital principle. I die, and I die satisfied, because my dream is unrealisable! Farewell!… Death will completely erase my sweet illusion, or who knows, maybe I’ll be given back my ardent aspiration in the mystery of the tomb!’. And she died, smiling.
1 Maria Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), ‘Sensitiva’, Contos por Délia (1887–1892), Alexandro Henrique Paixão and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (eds), p. 86. (
emphasis and ellipses added)
We have highlighted the following keywords: ‘times of epidemic’; ‘La Traviata’ and ‘Aida’; ‘nervous nature’; ‘man and woes’; and ‘feminine character’.
In this excerpt, Délia tells us about the eccentric, but also unsuccessful, experiences of Sofia, a well-educated young woman living in Rio de Janeiro at the time of Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1921). Although imagination and eloquence prevail, we are going to prioritise the historical clues presented by the excerpt, not to force the descriptive or topographical, but rather to locate the short story in a period, because literary–historical analysis is important when the intention is to study a structure of feeling.
And thinking of the referential elements, by indicating
La Traviata, from 1853, and
Aida, from 1871, both by Verdi, the story occupies an artistic scene after the 1870s, when the Brazilian empire was already in decline and the middle classes, who were previously mere accessories to Rio society, became part of the establishment.
2 Alexandro Henrique Paixão, ‘Um público para a literatura oitocentista no Brasil: o exemplo dos emigrantes portugueses do Rio de Janeiro em 1860’, Escritos 5, 5 (2011), p. 109, <http://escritos.rb.gov.br/numero05/artigo06.php> [accessed Jan. 2024]. But what clue do we have of this, of her belonging to these middle strata? She was born in the province and not in Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, the family do not own any land, they just have a cottage for country escapes, a holiday home. So we are dealing with an educated girl from a middle-class family with dreams of worldliness and grandeur in an imperial society in decline or, rather, full of crises and epidemics.
This is how we read the keyword ‘times of epidemic’ as a synonym for crises:
a) health crises, such as cholera, that hit Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, generating political and public health problems in the capital of the empire;
3 Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Leitores de tinta e papel, p. 126.b) social crises, marked by the Paraguayan war (1864–1870) and the trade crisis. These events caused a tax hike, price fluctuations, a drop in consumption, stockpiling of goods, etc, all of which shook trade in the capital;
4 Paixão, Leitores de tinta e papel, pp. 80–84.c) nervous breakdowns of women who are educated and wealthy, but submissive to the positive order of the 1870s, seeing this as a temporal landmark of the story: positivism.
Positivism as a social and philosophical perspective began to take hold in Brazil in the late 1860s,
5 Alexandro Henrique Paixão and Hiago Vaccaro Malandrin, ‘Educação e Sociedade oitocentistas: sobre positivismo e currículo em uma escola popular’. Leitura: Teoria & Prática, 37 (2019), pp. 139–164, <https://doi.org/10.34112/2317–0972a2019v37n75p139–164> [accessed 5 Jan. 2024]. and it is Sofia’s brother who reminds us of this when he exhorts his sister: ‘You know that, for women, life has a very positive [ie, positivist] and very hard side, which can be summed up in the fulfilment of moral and social duties’. It is against this positive patriarchal order, represented in the story by her father and brothers, that Sofia suffers from love, desire, madness and folly, because the female character does not want to live the order of life, but of fantastic dreams, of delirium, driven by the art of the opera. Indeed, art here is not taken as an impulse for life, but for death, as Sofia pursues the same fate as Verdi’s character Violeta.
This is the second keyword we consider important in the extract: the operas La Traviata and Aida. We do not have space here to analyse these operas, but what we do need to know is that Délia’s attention is drawn by the stories of Violeta, in Verdi’s adaptation of The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils, who dies in poverty in the face of impossible love, and of Aida, the Ethiopian enslaved woman, who realises her equally impossible love with an Egyptian general only on her deathbed. These were epochal artistic models that give us clues as to the type of structure of feeling that we are dealing with in this short story, which is itself related to the forbidden feelings that lead to an epidemic, as if love were a disease and had no cure.
Through these references, we recognise that the character Sofia is Délia’s Violeta off stage. With one difference: Violeta and Aida lived their love experiences, fought for them, failed and died; whereas Sofia did not. Everything is a great delirium, a great romance of the childish dreams of a girl in love, whose only men in her life are her father and her siblings, especially her brother, Artur.
It is against this backdrop that the parental complex defines the impulse behind Sofia’s suicidal fantasies as an expression of female revolt. Going to the opera, the emotional revelations that La Traviata provoked, everything was translated into childish games with her brother, in a sadistic and sexual way. Sofia’s affections for her father, as patriarch (we know nothing about her mother), are seemingly transferred, potentially to her brother Artur, the legitimate heir to the patriarchy, although presented as a fragile, submissive, and realistic character, who shares the same physique as the man of her dreams. This is the chain of feelings that the story presents: love for her father, for Artur, and, finally, for an imagined lover. But it is not Sofia’s father or her platonic love that is really affecting her mind and heart, but her brother. Artur represents the paternal and masculine category in the story.
This ‘family romance’ is the most insinuated and spicy element of the story.
6 Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 9) ([1906 and 1908] London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1959), pp. 235–241. The horse-riding scene, which one of the greatest exponents of literary criticism and the sociology of Brazilian literature, Antonio Candido, had exquisitely identified in the romantic poet Álvares de Azevedo as a topic of ‘sexual anguish’,
7 Antonio Candido, Na sala de Aula. is itself linked to subconscious aspects, and reappears in Délia to represent the titillating games with her brother. Álvares de Azevedo was one of the poets who represented Byronism in nineteenth-century Brazil. According to critics, he masterfully acclimatised to the macabre, nocturnal, and ghostly style found especially in English Gothic literature and German Romanticism of the late eighteenth century, although also expressed in French literature. The Brazilian Romantic poet combined all this with feelings of melancholy and eroticism that conveyed to his readers an existentially harrowing attitude towards life, the synthesis of which, according to Antonio Candido, is linked to the romantic pair ‘Love and Death’.
8 Antonio Candido, Na sala de Aula, p. 52. Antonio Candido produced a masterly body of work on the critique and sociology of Brazilian literature, including examination of the work of Álvares de Azevedo and other romantic and non-romantic writers, in several books published in Brazil and abroad. His magnum opus was entitled Formação da literatura brasileira – momentos decisivos (Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 2000), in two volumes. For more on the life and work of Antonio Candido, see the summarised biography of the Brazilian Society of Sociology by Alexandro Henrique Paixão and Mariana Chaguri, <http://sbsociologia.com.br/project/antonio-candido/> [accessed 18 Jan. 2024].In Sofia’s case, this romantic theme reappears in her relationship with her brother, the bearer of forbidden love and the cause of her death, as we read in the excerpt from the short story highlighted above. It is a fraternal and very intimate moment, which deals with the erotic experiences of a young woman capable of ‘seducing the angels’, here seen as a representation of her brother.
The passage from the story is worth reading again:
The moment her brother came to meet her, Sofia would disappear in a frantic dash, leaving the young man terrified, begging her to stop and swearing he would never again ignore any of her wishes.
She would wait for him, collapsed on the grass, pretending to have fainted, with her eyelids tightly shut, while Artur called out in distress, his voice ragged with desperation.
Then Sofia would burst into merry laughter, spring up with vivacity, and cover her brotherʼs pale cheeks with kisses, compensating him with endless affection for those frights and for his indulgence of her eccentricities.
9 Maria Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), ʼSensitivaʼ, Contos por Délia (1887–1892), Alexandro Henrique Paixão and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (eds), p. 96.The intimate and bucolic scene continues, and Sofia declares that she feels enormous pleasure in these sadistic games with the poor young Artur. The fact that they are very close, fond of one other, and open to the sister’s experiences of madness, is proof of the intimacy that this sibling affection allows. The eroticism is due to the excitement that the event causes in Sofia, a woman who is considered nervous and somewhat crazy, mad with passion for a man and his woes.
The narrator tells us that the character loves platonically,
a man who was the target of much hatred, whose life amounted to a tapestry of struggles and disheartenments. I would love him madly, driven by that spirit of contradiction which lies at the heart of the feminine character, and by that infernal pride which compels me to compensate him, with all my tenderness, for every slight that wounded him.
10 Maria Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), ʼSensitivaʼ, Contos por Délia (1887–1892), Alexandro Henrique Paixão and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (eds), p. 97.One might assert that this is a femininity complex that Délia presents to us in an unprecedented manner through the keyword ‘feminine character’. It represents the strength of a woman who emerges in the text from the characterisation of an opposite element to the feminine: the male sex. The male elements would be endowed with a fragile and melancholic virility, symbolic of attraction and forbidden female passion.
As a side note, this way of presenting the female character through the logic of opposites is reminiscent of the ‘binary opposition’ form found in the Byronism of Fagundes Varella, for example. Already cited here for his
conte fantastiques, we should now revisit this author to consider the Gothic style he adapted in Brazil, especially in his poetry full of ambivalent feelings towards desired objects: the countryside, women, the sky, the storm, and their opposites, such as the city etc.
11 Alexandro Henrique Paixão, ‘Sobre a cidade no romantismo brasileiro’. Baleia na Rede, VIII (2011), p. 149. Délia constructs an opposition between Sofia’s idealised man – a figure marked by fragility – and Sofia herself, whose character embodies fearlessness. Where the man is paralysed by his disappointments, Sofia, despite her moments of sadness (particularly in the story’s closing passages), resists becoming similarly diminished. Her strength endures, and her romantic disposition seems drawn, perhaps unconsciously, to this vulnerable masculinity – a dynamic that subtly complicates conventional expectations of gender.
The third keyword, ‘man and [his] woes’, emerges as the story’s atmosphere becomes charged with eroticism. Sofia’s excitement is evident as she describes her lover, energetic yet humiliated, in an emotional outpouring marked by self-gratification. The horse ride, a sexual symbol, and the simulated fall, an expression of pleasure, generate intense gratification within the narrative. This culminates in a climactic satisfaction that oscillates between the masturbatory and the unconscious. In the first instance, the text exposes the mechanics of fantasy and indulges in self-gratification, a practice condemned as sinful by ecclesiastical and patriarchal norms. In the second, the same desires are unconsciously projected onto the brother. Crucially, no explicit incest occurs; instead, familial passions are displaced onto an external figure: the idealised man, whose melancholy and faded realism mirror the brother’s traits. The fantasy of inviting this virile man into the home, arguing with him, deceiving him, devoting herself to him, replicates the dynamics of her brotherly relationship. This creates an implicitly forbidden, incestuous tension, woven into the protagonist’s psychological turmoil. Though never overt, this taboo aligns with Freudian depictions of repressed desires in modern societies.
12 Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 13) ([1913 and 1914] London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), pp. 1-161.We consider this to be the structure of feeling in this short story, namely the forbidden passions, this account of the humiliated but virile man in his imaginary situation. In Sofia’s description, there is almost a masturbatory satisfaction, as she repeats these fantasies incessantly on her horse rides; she imagines herself possessed by a great vital force that drives her to freedom and madness, to the point of wanting to die.
If we were in the seventeenth century, we would characterise this passage as an expression of the ‘cult of the passions’, discussed in times past by the German philologist Erich Auerbach.
13 Erich Auerbach, Le culte des passions. We must remember this was the fin de siècle, when Freudian psychoanalysis was beginning to surface as a novel scientific approach to neurological phenomena. We therefore prefer to combine Délia’s ideas both with these new thoughts of the time and with the topic of impossible passions, found both in the São Paulo press through Varella’s fantastic tales and in the eroticism indicated in Azevedo’s poetry, which features the theme of horse riding as a sexual symbol. Délia develops an excellent literary arrangement with the established traditions and with the new. By connecting her work to emerging psychoanalytic thought and identifying shared themes, we uncover her originality in portraying forbidden passions within Rio de Janeiro’s press, a portrayal that framed female madness as an expression of nervous sensitivity.
This brings us to another keyword highlighted in the passage: ‘nervous nature’. The nervous nature of women reflects a new epidemic: the madness sparked by forbidden, transgressive desires, as they eroticise family relationships. As illustrated in her short story ‘A histérica,’ Délia revisits themes of transgressive feminine passion through her protagonist Lélia, who directly contests Brazil’s patriarchal order. Here, Délia takes the narrative further, portraying Lélia’s bold immersion into European aristocratic circles and artistic bohemia, a defiance so radical it extends to male cross-dressing, framed as both an act of sexual emancipation and a subversive social manoeuvre. These narrative strategies crystallise what Délia terms the ‘feminine character,’ a construct that invites contemporary analysis through the lens of femininity complexes.
This question of the feminine character, or rather the strength of this character, appears in some of her other short stories, but we will highlight just one to stress this point. We refer to the short story entitled ‘Rosa e Branca’, which tells of the long and intimate friendship, filled with tender hugs and affectionate kisses, of two young women who discover themselves in love with the same man and are consequently confronted by their once again forbidden passion; after all, they cannot love and marry the same person. In this short story ‘womanly dignity’ emerges as the defining quality of Délia’s female characters, a strength of character that persists even as they navigate forbidden loves and suppress their most transgressive passions. In ‘Sensitiva’, Sofia favours death, while Branca, the most sensible of the friends, is convinced of the betrayal and tries to encourage her friend Rosa to preserve herself as a woman and maintain her self-respect in the face of an adventurous and deceitful man. The story ends with an invitation to the dinner table. We subsequently learn that the friends end up staying together, leaving in the air the uncertainty of whether one of them will give in to their passions or remain in the position of betrayed woman. Regardless, what prevails at the banquet is female friendship and the love between two women, who try to fight for their ‘womanly dignity’ by staying together.
Still on the subject of the feminine in Délia, it bears mentioning that it is not passive, as some conventions of romanticism had characterised it. Délia’s young women are active, haughty, dreamy, and obstinate. They are defiant challengers of social order and convention. Their strength emerges from their commitment to the ‘feminine character’, even as they grapple with their own overwhelming passions. This was quite unprecedented for the time, as the romantic fashion had transformed young women into delicate, defenceless, pure characters, the best example of which is Ceci, from the novel O Guarani (1857) by José de Alencar. Délia’s revision of the Romantic muse produces a heroine fractured by taboo desires – from brotherly fixation to homoerotic tension (as seen in Rosa and Branca’s dinner-party intimacy) – all rendered with deliberate psychological ambiguity.
Unconscious fantasies about family members are a very interesting chapter in the history of psychoanalysis. The so-called hysterical or nervous women, in the drafts written by Freud, were interpreted as women who were ‘victims’ of seduction or sexual abuse and were therefore exposed to specific sexual situations. As his studies deepened and the unconscious was explored to explain this phenomenon, we learn that, rather than a question of concrete experiences, it was one of erotic fantasies about family members or unknown men, fleeting lovers, which caused those nervous symptoms, the result of the delusions that forbidden passion provoked.
14 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.