Introduction
Júlia Lopes de Almeida, born Júlia Valentina da Silveira Lopes and known to her admirers as Dona Júlia, was born in Rio de Janeiro on 24 September 1862. In 1902, a journalist from the
Gazeta de Notícias (Rio de Janeiro, 1875–1956) wrote of her novel
A falência (1901): ‘frankly, we really cannot see anyone at the present time who surpasses her in the genre to which she is most dedicated, except Machado de Assis, the master’.
1 Júlia Lopes de Almeida, A falência (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia A Tribuna, 1901); The Bankruptcy (London: UCL Press, 2023). A copy of the first edition, with the author’s dedication, is available at: <https://digital.bbm.usp.br/handle/bbm/2440> [accessed 9 Oct. 2023]. A.G., ‘Portugal e o Brasil’, Gazeta de Notícias, 28 Apr. 1902, p. 1, <http://memoria.bn.br/pdf/103730/per103730_1902_00118.pdf> [accessed 29 Dec. 2023]. The story of Júlia Lopes de Almeida effectively illustrates the exclusion of women from the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL). Although she was considered for the inaugural list in 1896, her name was disregarded due to the ban on including women in the institution. According to Venâncio Filho, Lúcio de Mendonça, who sought national representation for the Academy, advocated for the inclusion of Almeida, as well as other prominent female authors like Narcisa Amália de Oliveira Campos and Francisca Júlia da Silva, the latter proposed as a correspondent. In a series of articles titled ‘Cartas Literárias’, he presented a list of forty names deemed worthy of being founders of the ABL, including Almeida. However, only men were accepted as founders. In another article titled ‘As três Júlias’, published in the newspaper
República in 1897, Mendonça lamented the exclusion, highlighting the literary quality of Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Júlia Cortines, and Francisca Júlia, and expressing sadness over the lack of space for female voices in the Academy.
2 See AlbertoVenâncio Filho, ‘As mulheres na Academia’, Revista Brasileira, 12, 49 (Oct./Nov./Dec. 2006), pp. 7–43, <www.academia.org.br/abl/media/RB%20-%2049%20-%20CULTO.pdf> [accessed 29 Dec. 2023].Almeida was incredibly prolific. She published eleven novels, as well as chronicles, short stories, plays, poems, children’s stories, and manuals for young women. Her writing bears witness to the dramatic transformations of her time: the abolition of slavery and its consequences, the end of the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) and the turmoil of technological and social changes that changed Rio de Janeiro, where the writer was born and died at the age of seventy-one on 30 May 1934, beyond recognition. A lesser-known facet of her extensive work is her fashion column, ‘A moda’, which emerged at a time when O País (Rio de Janeiro, 1884–1934) was already an established part of the Rio de Janeiro press scene and boasted several well-known contributors, such as Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, who regularly sent chronicles from Lisbon (Chapter 1), and Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), who, as discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, contributed with the novel Angelina and twenty-five short stories. The aim of this chapter is to examine how the fashion press crossed over with the mainstream press through Almeida’s fashion column. This was published for more than nine years and signed under the pseudonym Ecila Worms, driving an expansion of fashion discourse from women’s magazines into the daily newspapers.
The editors had invited Almeida to produce a column with the aim of diversifying the newspaper’s content directed at women. When she began the series in 1892, Almeida was already a well-known and respected name as a fashion chronicler, having written for the illustrated magazine
A Estação (Rio de Janeiro, 1879–1904) between 1888 and 1891. Over the nine years that readers of
O País followed the series, which featured in the newspaper on 106 occasions between 24 February 1892 and 16 August 1901, the writer’s identity was hidden behind the pseudonym. I argue that she adopted the pseudonym to create a fictional chronicler with her own personal and literary characteristics, and to justify the prescriptive tone and professorial feel of her texts. Furthermore, the use of a pseudonym allowed the writer to maintain parallel series of chronicles in
O País. Much less patriotic than Dona Júlia in the ‘Dois dedos de prosa’ chronicles, in ‘A moda’, Ecila Worms defends French cultural hegemony and fashion as a trickle-down process, driven by the principle of ostentation and imitation. I will discuss how Almeida balanced references to everyday life in Rio de Janeiro with self-references taken from fashion periodicals, constructing a doubling of reality, as suggested by Luhmann (2000).
3 Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of Mass Media, Kathleen Cross (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity Press [2000], repr. 2007). The writer builds a unique reality in ‘A moda’ through a process of selecting written clothing and image-clothing (Barthes, 1990) from illustrated newspapers. With great humour and irony, she played the role of mediator between European fashion and the female readership of the mainstream press in Rio’s
Belle Époque.
4 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, Mathew Ward and Richard Howard (trans.) (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).