Lonely, silent, and submissive women
Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s occasional collaboration with the newspaper
O País included texts of various genres – letters, short stories, and chronicles. There is an open letter to the Parnassian poet Júlia Cortines, which acts as a public declaration of friendship, with hints of literary criticism about her work. In a nostalgic and deeply emotional tone, while enjoying the pleasure of her friend’s company, the chronicler laments the scarcity of lettered women in her midst: ‘It’s so rare and so good to find a woman who reads good authors and says beautiful verses in our language’.
1 Júlia Lopes de Almeida, ‘Carta a Júlia Cortines’, O País, 11 Jun. 1901, p. 1, <http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/178691_03/2665> [accessed 29 Sep. 2023].In this setting, which she perceives as sparsely populated, the writer gradually gains an air of authority in the field of learned women, being recruited to suggest (or prescribe) books for girls to read. Such is the case of the chronicle ‘Leitura para moças’ (‘Reading for young women’),
2 Júlia Lopes de Almeida, ‘Leitura para moças’, O País, 12 Dec. 1905, p. 1, <http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/178691_03/10530> [accessed 29 Sep. 2023]. in which she tells of having received a letter from a reader from Rio Grande do Sul, asking for book recommendations for his fiancée. The letter was not addressed to her inadvertently. Years earlier, Almeida had published the
Livro das noivas, the pages of which were filled with all sorts of recommendations for young married women.
3 Livro das noivas (literally Brides book) is one of Almeida’s conduct books mentioned in Chapter 2.In these and other letters, under the guise of fiction or the impression of truth, the crux is the public and private aspects of women’s lives: from intellectual sociability to family relationships, including the prescription of reading material for women. We shall return to that later.
More numerous than the letters are the short stories, the predominant genre in the first publications signed with the writer’s name, especially between 1884 and 1899. They feature profiles of women in moments of solitude and introspection. The main characters are alone, or solitary, either because of social ostracism, religious vocation, the death of family members, or the fact that they are passing through a moment of quiet and self-absorption. These short stories, such as, ‘A irmã Cristina’, ‘No muro’, ‘Carta de uma sogra’, ‘Duas almas’, ‘Junto de um túmulo de criança’, ‘A casa dos mortos’, and ‘O sino de ouro’, bring to the fore reflections by the female characters on their situation: coping with a bereavement, taking stock of the trajectory of their lives, the events that have befallen them, as well as childhood memories gaining new meaning in adulthood. Some of them are dominated by a moralising tone, as if fiction were at the service of a social morality pervaded by the praise of charity and poverty, associated with self-denial. Much of the children’s literature at that time also suffered from this problem; two of Almeida’s short stories published in O País were aimed at children. Furthermore, silence prevails in almost all the stories, to which the omniscient narrator ascribes meaning, infiltrating the women’s thoughts, reveries, and dreams, translating them into words and giving them some sense. However, this is not an intrusive narrator who reveals everything; rather than being transparent and unambiguous, she favours metaphors, symbolic and ineffable elements, possibly inherited from the symbolist and decadent literature of the late nineteenth century; in this way the writer represented some of the difficulties experienced by the women of her time. The symbolism and introspection prevalent in the stories certainly contrasted with the physical facts and descriptions that dominated the news.
As for Almeida’s chronicles, there is a blurred line between personal experience and fictionalisation. One of the main themes of her early chronicles, in the nineteenth century, was domestic life and the living in the midst of wealthy women. In six of these texts, not by chance included in Livro das Noivas (1896), there are tips on hygiene and housekeeping, gardening and growing vegetables, the art of receiving guests and other similar subjects, included in light narratives that may be accounts of true events, but seem fictional.
We are interested in this production because it played a key role in constructing the writer’s image, associated with social spaces and functions commonly attributed to women of the elite. After this more familiar face, we shall focus on others, forged over the course of her works.
Gatherings of bourgeois women are represented in the chronicle ‘Carinhosa hospitalidade’, in which a visit to a model hostess leads one of the characters to praise the way she perfectly runs a household endowed with resources and servants, selflessness, and charity:
There is not only instinct in this girl’s kindness; there are also reflections of very useful lessons. Her parents, although very wealthy, brought her up with the utmost severity and tenderness. Does the hospitality she has granted us not show precisely that? Does she by any chance have a lack of maids to send to bring water and liquor to the parlour? No!
Do you not notice her manner, at once gentle and stately? Why did she kneel at our feet to unbutton our boots? Her voice, her gaze, her gestures, everything about her seemed to celebrate our entry into her home! And if we happened to stay there for the rest of the day and night, we would always see the good Catarina with the same smile and the same contentment, opening her arms to us, flooding our souls with affection. What’s more, if instead of having comfort and being able to share it, she were poor, very poor, she would deprive herself of her bed or her bread to offer it to anyone who came to her for lodging, with the same smile, the same peace, the same contentment that we saw in her.’
4 Júlia Lopes de Almeida, ‘Carinhosa hospitalidade’, O País, 28 Aug. 1894, p. 1, <http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/178691_02/10560> [accessed 29 Sep. 2023].At the home of another newlywed, the chronicler visits room after room and listens to her comments on housekeeping and hygiene:
A white lace curtain adorned the bed, displaying Anita’s eye for elegance. She explained: ‘In a climate like ours, the bedroom should be kept very simple, so that the air circulates freely and lightly. Some people have a dressing table, with all the perfumes in the room. That’s dangerous. Smells produce migraines, nausea, dizziness, you name it! Before we enter the dining room, I want you to see the laundry room, which is also used for sewing … here it is.’
5 Júlia Lopes de Almeida, ‘Da sala à cozinha’, O País, 29 Jan. 1895, p. 1, <http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/178691_02/11860> [accessed 29 Sep. 2023].In this and other texts, the teachings focus on practical aspects of life, such as growing vegetables for oneself and for others:
Here’s the thing: very few people are interested in this! And she looked maternally at the vegetable patch, because look, my child, she went on, a good vegetable garden is a great thing for our home! I make money from it, give gifts to a lot of people and always offer a variety of meals. Greens are wonderful food. I don’t eat meat. Just the thought of having a poor animal killed for my enjoyment makes me lose my appetite.
6 Júlia Lopes de Almeida, ‘Horticultura’, O País, 18 Nov. 1894, p. 2, <http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/178691_02/11261> [accessed 29 Sep. 2023].One can see in this last excerpt that the character has motherly ways even when dealing with vegetables! This is one of her many virtues.
These texts and others are part of a tradition of conduct books aimed at women, common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that were usually aimed at ‘enjoining young girls to submissiveness, modesty, self-lessness; reminding all women that they should be angelic’.
7 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 23. These books contributed to creating a myth of femininity, which encompassed a list of virtues, including: ‘modesty, gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence, chastity, affability, politeness’.
8 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 23.