She was only a woman
Before furthering our investigation, it is relevant to discuss an extract from Virginia Woolf’s lecture, later converted into the famous essay A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. Woolf and Almeida were contemporaries, albeit from different generations. Despite the temporal and geographical gap, the English writer’s analysis of the limitations imposed on eighteenth and nineteenth-century women writers serves as a gateway into contemplating similar difficulties faced by Brazilian women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Woolf suggests a way of reading female-authored novels that perceives how the work is instilled with responses to external pressures:
One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was ‘only a woman’, or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man’. She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the centre of it. And I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Susan Gubar and Mark Hussey (eds) (Boston: Harcourt Inc., 2005), p. 73.The English fiction writer’s invitation is inspiring: to perceive in the interstices of works by women the reaction against persistent tutelage, against expectations and advice about the production and social participation of women intellectuals; to hear and interpret the ‘tone of voice’ through which the reaction to this tutelage is revealed. This outside intervention – advice, warning, censure, reprimand – does not always leave a trace; perhaps that is why Woolf referred metaphorically to its effect, representing it as a perforation, a scar, a flaw capable of spoiling the work from within.
According to her conjectures and analyses, many women novelists produced bad works precisely because they tried to conform to the standards demanded by those who guided, censored, or judged them. Woolf singles out just two of the thousands of novelists who, in her opinion, managed to turn a deaf ear to the persistent tutelage of women’s writing:
Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone [Jane Austen and Emily Brontë] entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue – write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronizing, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too-conscientious governess, adjuring them.
2 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 74.Although inspired by Woolf’s invitation, our intention here is to reconstruct the scene and the conditions around women’s literary production, avoiding the risk of peremptory judgements, which tend to value a few selected works and discard piles of others like rotten fruit. Relating our investigation to the History of Literature, it seems essential to read the works produced by women with a view to understanding them internally and understanding the power games within which they were produced. It is inevitable that the analysis will be evaluative to some degree, even if this is not the primary objective.
In Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s texts, the attempt to avoid reproducing some of the moralisms of her time anticipates Virginia Woolf’s opinion of female-authored novels that responded to external pressures. Both refer to a flaw, to something that corrodes the work from the inside. In the words of the Brazilian writer: ‘novels made with a concern for morality, as well as immorality, are always bad, flawed, unworthy of a writer and an intelligent reader.’
3 Almeida, ‘Leitura para moças’, p. 1. And in the English writer’s metaphor: ‘And I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them’.
4 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 73.On a scene as sparsely populated by female figures as was the Brazilian literary field at the turn of the century, the conquest of a space in the newspaper was followed by another challenge, another battle: keeping hold of that space.