The transformation of an ally into a ruthless adversary
Carmen Dolores thus entered a polemic with which the main intellectuals of her time were passionately involved. In the Academy, many immortal names were in favour of the spelling reform. Salvador de Mendonça was one of the first members of the institution to openly oppose it. In her column in
O País,
1 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 12 May 1907, p. 1. the chronicler sought the opinion of another author of immortal status, Carlos de Laet, on the matter. Laet was a respected and experienced polemicist who had just returned to journalism with a column in the
Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1891–2019). The response came in the form of an open letter to Carmen Dolores, very well written and with arguments similar to those of the columnist. At the beginning, however, he treated the proposal with irony, hinting at the objective of self-promotion of the proponents and, to the best of his knowledge, even of the detractors of the proposal, which included the addressee:
The Academy has done well: it now has something that it can talk about, and gives reason for others to talk about it.
Reformers appear all the time, and the most famous are not always those who ensure the most and best reforms. Sometimes it only takes some trifling matter to bring fame to a man… or a woman, for that matter.
2 The journalist was possibly referring, somewhat obliquely, to Carmen Dolores’ campaign for divorce. Carlos de Laet, ‘Carta’, Jornal do Brasil, 19 May 1907, p. 2.At the end of his letter, Laet took advantage of the matter of the spelling reform to indirectly address the republican regime, to which he was unabashedly opposed, and the democratic principle, of which he refuted:
[I]t will be another uprising that I do not intend to join. I respect my compatriots’ opinions, but cannot see why they do not respect mine. Nor have I ever been impressed by this argument of the majorities, so democratic, so modern and so perfectly asinine. […] a rebel in politics, I would also be a rebel in spelling, which has been much easier and less dangerous.
3 Carlos de Laet, ‘Carta’, Jornal do Brasil, 19 May 1907, p. 2.Carmen Dolores thanked him for his support a week later and, in her next column,
4 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 9 Jun. 1907, p. 1. in an exchange of pleasantries, she greeted Laet, who had defended the residents of the morro da Favela, who found themselves threatened with eviction by the local authorities. The following month, however, she was forced to leave the niceties aside and oppose the
Jornal do Brasil contributor who, in a new open letter, this time to the lawyer Mirtes de Campos, had ironically criticised her lecture in favour of divorce at the Bar Association. Laet judged the ‘doctrine of divorce’ as irreconcilable with the teachings of the Church and sharply criticised Mirtes de Campos’ statement about convents, which, in her view, were a haven for hysterics and addicts. The journalist irreverently brandished women lawyers as a ‘fad of the day’, similar to that of monster hats and the spelling reform, and expressed his dissatisfaction with the ‘feminist pedantry’ that was leaving homes abandoned and made women the rivals of men.
5 Carlos de Laet, ‘Carta’, Jornal do Brasil, 23 Jun. 1907, p. 2.At least for the sake of consistency, Carmen Dolores could not refrain from responding to the staunch monarchist. She avoided refuting all his arguments on the grounds that the letter was not addressed to her and that she had already stated that she refused to discuss divorce from a religious point of view, but she said she felt obliged to respond to certain ‘allusions’ in the letter that could affect her ‘humble personality’. For Carmen Dolores, feminism did not have the power to ‘tear gentle wives from any home that was well-supported by a competent head, just as the divorce law will never force someone who considers themselves happy to divorce’. The chronicler defended women’s right to ensure their own survival through work and to provide for their families, just as many teachers did. She did it herself, as she confessed: ‘today I take great pride, […] in supporting with honesty and worth, all alone, my home, my whole family, exclusively through the efforts of my woman’s pen’. Carmen Dolores completed her argument by pointing the weapon of irony back at the famous ironist from the
Jornal do Brasil and condemning the prejudiced basis of his argument: ‘Perhaps it would be preferable, would it not, Dr. Carlos de Laet, if in order to avoid pedantry, which incidentally would be far from me, I took refuge in the back yard, washing and ironing’.
6 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 30 Jun. 1907, p. 1.On another occasion, Carmen Dolores became involved with another brief controversy not only with Laet, but also with the most prominent representatives of Catholicism in Rio de Janeiro. In July 1908, an episode took place in Candelaria that pitted the Church against fervent supporters of the republican regime. At the funeral service of a naval school student, the vicar would not allow the national flag to be draped around the coffin, claiming that symbols of political factions could not be used in the church. What bothered the Church the most about the national flag was that it had its origins in positivism, an openly anti-clerical doctrine. The case, controversially classified by the press as ‘disrespect to the flag’, was debated in parliament and gave rise to a student march that passed in front of newspaper headquarters, demanding that they adopt a strong stance against the alleged offence against the symbol of nationality.
That same week, the Second Brazilian Catholic Congress was taking place in the Royal Portuguese Reading Room (Library). On the third day of the event, the count of Afonso Celso gave a speech, comparing the Church to an army in the middle of a campaign, as its organisation should be characterised by ‘discipline, hierarchy, obedience, bravery and the desire to sacrifice oneself for the glory of the flag’.
7 ‘O caso da bandeira’, O País, 30 July 1908, p. 4.A few days later, in ‘A semana’, Carmen Dolores described that speech as essentially ‘dangerous’; she saw it as an instigation for the Church to march ‘over all the barriers, all the freedoms of a country that doesn’t know how to defend anything’, transforming Catholicism into a ‘religion of hatred and domination’.
8 In November 1907, in Correio da Manhã, Carmen Dolores criticised Afonso Celso for a speech he gave at the Santa Isabel school in Petrópolis, which ended with the statement that the only true religion was ‘Catholic, Apostolic, Roman’. The columnist considered that this manifestation was the result of religious intolerance and was typical of ultramontanism. Carmen Dolores, ‘Ideias que esvoaçam’, Correio da Manhã, 28 Nov. 1907, p. 1. In relation to Congress, the columnist said that its main objective would be to ‘crush the last resistance of some spirits that remain rebellious against the formidable clerical yoke’, which was intended to be imposed on the whole country and which challenged ‘even the governmental powers of the Republic’. Carmen Dolores thus openly referred to the Candelaria episode, which was, in her opinion, the result of actions that had been carried out by ‘voracious clerical ambition’ and had rightly aroused indignation among parliamentarians and students.
9 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 02 Aug. 1908, p. 1.For the chronicler, Brazil was becoming a ‘land of priests’ and Petrópolis a ‘centre of hypocritical and absorbing piousness’. Both in Rio de Janeiro and in the mountain town, ‘religious colleges and new Jesuit institutions were being established day by day, suffocating all honest efforts at private education’, and there was already talk of a Dominican university. This was all a result of the arrival in Brazil of clerics expelled from other countries.
10 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 2 Aug. 1908, p. 1.The answer to Carmen Dolores would be printed in the very same newspaper; by this time, it was
O País that was publishing Carlos de Laet’s ‘Microcosmo’ on Wednesdays. Laet sarcastically called his colleague his
confreira (implying a sister in a nunhood) and defended the orders and congregations that, in his opinion, had been expelled from France ‘by the haughtiness’ of the Republican government. For Laet, religious educational institutions were gaining prestige through their competence and were not being imposed on anyone ‘either by force of arms or by official coercion’.
11 Carlos de Laet, ‘Microcosmo’, O País, 5 Aug. 1908, p. 1. The mention of imposition by arms likely referred to the Republic, established by a military coup, not least because Laet had recalled in his text that in 1897 printing presses linked to monarchist propaganda and Catholicism had been burnt down after a failed assassination attempt on President Prudente de Morais, who had crushed the insurrection in Canudos.
In her reply, Carmen Dolores claimed to be honoured to be called a confreira by Laet, but said ironically that she may have been such a sister in journalism, but ‘never in religious establishments’, sources of ‘privileges and prestige’ for her antagonist. Her choice of a career in journalism was dictated by the need to work and thus capitalise on her main qualities, without taking prejudices into account:
Is it my fault, after all, if I was not educated by the textbooks of convents or religious institutions, learning how to make sweets and biscuits, how to curtsy well in lovely
parloirs, how to recite fables in French and how to know the exact value of social hypocrisy and of praying in flowery chapels, by which to govern my life?
12 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 9 Aug. 1908, p. 1.Calling herself a God-fearing Catholic, who submitted to God’s dictates, Carmen Dolores made a point, however, of showing her opposition to the proselytism of sectors of Catholicism:
To demand […] Mr Laet, to demand the other fanatical sectarians of the Church, that I accept all the abuses of the clergy, all their injustices and despotism, falsehoods, invasions, monopolies and commands, as the faithful expression of God’s will – ah! I will never do this! If this is my crime, I confess to it and am proud of it.
13 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 9 Aug. 1908, p. 1.The chronicler also refuted insinuations that she was a republican, saying that her political beliefs could be summarised as nostalgia for Emperor Pedro II.
14 In her study of Carmen Dolores’ collaboration with O País, Risolete Hellmann (2021, p. 211) stated that she had found no ‘evidence’ of the columnist’s opposition to the Republic. She would, however, oppose a hypothetical reign of Isabel, who, in her opinion, once sovereign, would ‘protect clerical absolutism in the same way, or even more so, that the republican government also protects it’.
15 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 9 Aug. 1908, p. 1.A few days later, in his ‘Microcosmo’ column, Laet denied that he had been granted any privileges or benefits by the Church and declared that he was just a teacher at the São Bento (St Benedict’s) school, and was paid only for the classes he actually gave. After a lengthy defence of the Inquisition, the horrors of which had been mentioned by Carmen Dolores as the historical result of religious fanaticism, Laet concluded his text with an allusion to his opponent’s beauty that was somewhere between praise and insult, hardly compatible with Christian virtues:
In the fifth canto of the Iliad, Venus, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite, appears wounded by Diomedes … But he’s in no danger whatsoever. She ascends to the clouds, and from Jove, all smiles, she receives some kind advice: ‘Daughter, the labours of war are not for you; others are your cares and attributes …’ And soon the small wound was closed.
In this little
Iliad of ours, honourable
confreira, I don’t know if I was Diomedes, but in any case, you are as invincible as Homer’s Aphrodite.
16 Carlos de Laet, ‘Microcosmo’, O País, 13 Aug. 1908, p. 1. Carmen Dolores responded with what she announced would be her last intervention in the controversy, which she recalled had been triggered by her criticism of the words of the count of Afonso Celso. She did not believe that the novelist had kept quiet ‘in order to give the floor with the right of insult’ to Laet. The columnist thus justified the unilateral closure of the controversy:
[T]he Jesuit gift of sophistry, which would lead Mr Laet even to disagree that the great Galileo had been persecuted by the Inquisition in Rome for discovering that the earth moves – this gift makes any controversy impossible. What’s more, in my case, the same writer’s ferocious impulse is now leading him into terrain that I’m not used to treading and where I leave him alone, with his malevolent, discourteous insinuations, plus the indulgences that the Church affords him for such sixteenth-century malignancies.
17 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 16 Aug. 1908, p. 1.Dolores concluded by pointing out the contradiction between Laet’s ostentatious contempt for women’s intellectual work and the project to re-establish the monarchy under Isabel. According to the chronicler, Laet was counting on the former imperial princess being manipulated by Church groups: ‘beneath the scorned feminine clothing, a livery of futility and ignorance, a formidable black cassock for which the esteemed stylist yearns’.
18 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 16 Aug. 1908, p. 1.The following week, on 23 August 1908, the O País columnist mentioned the controversy again, despite her promise to remain silent on the matter, but only to thank the letters of support she had received from inner-state Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and the then federal capital. Three days later, Laet doubted the existence of such letters and tried to justify the acrimony with which he treated his opponent:
We should bear in mind that, under her beautiful phrasing, Her Excellency is not always pious towards the people she deals with; and that in a recent writing (the one that gave rise to our brief conversation) she was quick to talk about the hypocrisy of the families in Petrópolis who hide vices under the cloak of religion, satisfying themselves with the Jesuit’s blessing… One who writes such things, it seems, has no greater right to the attentions of their adversaries; and it was quite unique to wield such an aggressive pen and use the fan as a shield and invoke the prerogatives of her sex in the heat of debate. A lady who is anti-clerical, a champion of the right to divorce, a sociologist and a philosopher needs to be less susceptible to the part of her individuality that is turned towards the public and which, by the same attitude, is provoking attacks. To do otherwise would be iniquitous for the victims, yet another class privilege, a despair for passers-by.
19 Carlos de Laet, ‘Microcosmo’, O País, 26 Aug. 1908, p. 1.In her column the following Sunday, Carmen Dolores defended herself against the accusation that the letters did not exist, and said that she had given them to the editor of the newspaper for anyone who wanted to see them. She added that her answer could not be formulated in Laet’s style, which she zealously described:
Mr Laet’s argument consists of spouting untruths with an air of triumph, ringing his own bells, lighting his own firecrackers; and, if the untruth is debunked, immediately moving on to something else, attacking under another pretext, jumping up and down, laughing sarcastically, pretending that he finds the rival inept, a mockery, and that his ferocious superiority will soon crush them with heavy-handed, frightening discourtesy.
20 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 30 Aug. 1908, p. 1.The chronicler also repudiated the attempt to intrigue her with the families of Petrópolis, which was unsuccessful due to the fact that the majority of good people lived in the mountain town, where, in her opinion, ‘religious arrogance’ was trying to establish the foundations of a ‘religious aristocracy’. Carmen Dolores protested against this claim:
By what right? Is Petrópolis by any chance a feudal burg of the church? Has the Archbishop bought it? In the nostalgic times of the late Emperor Pedro, the magnanimous, everyone lived in peace in this pleasant place, without distinctions of beliefs, because there was freedom of conscience: today we are in the regime of fanaticism and the appetites of pride, disguised under the cloak of religion – hence the discord between brothers that I point out.
21 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 30 Aug. 1908, p. 1.Her text was also a response to Celso, who had sparked the controversy with his speech at the Catholic Congress and who, a few days earlier, had used his column ‘Cotas aos casos’ in the Jornal do Brasil to deny that his words had any reactionary purposes or were calculated to encourage the persecution of dissidents from Catholicism or adherents of other religions. He also justified his silence because he saw Laet as a qualified advocate of Catholics and felt represented by his argument. He claimed, therefore, to have committed no ‘offence’ with his omission. After praising the style of the O País columnist, he said that he considered her ‘unfit, due to her origin and upbringing, for the rough and tumble of journalism’ and that he understood her work as a columnist in various newspapers as a dignified way of supporting her family. In other words, he implied that Carmen Dolores held a position incompatible with her social extraction and her gender, driven only by crude material needs. She should therefore have nothing to complain about:
A valiant worker of the pen, she is entitled to gentlemanly treatment, and is not refused by her brothers in arms, wielders of the same instrument of labour.
But, in fencing, fierce attacks are often matched by harsh, wounding blows.
That is what the brave game is all about.
Anyone who dares enter such a game must find them natural.
22 Afonso Celso, ‘Cotas aos casos’, Jornal do Brasil, 23 July 1908, p. 3.What he was trying to pass off as a gentlemanly deference to a lady was, as one can see, much more simply support for his brother-in-arms. At least the mellifluous text did not placate the indignation of the valorous chronicler who, once again, chastised the nobleman for his lack of courtesy:
I admire Mr Afonso Celso’s broad and unctuous spirit of conciliation, but I do not congratulate him for having it to that degree. If I were to see any man, even from my camp, malignantly mocking a lady with whom he was arguing, I would never applaud him.
23 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 30 Aug. 1908, p. 1.In Laet’s case, this was not just disrespect for a woman, but also disrespect for an entire family to which the polemicist had been close:
Furthermore, between me and Mr Laet looms the shadow of a fine young man, my son, who was a disciple and devoted friend of the man who now attacks me in a tone of ridicule. And if that unfortunate and dignified person had not been buried four years ago, it would not be just his shadow that would stand before my so spirited adversary.
Unfortunately, the dead cannot take action. That’s a guarantee for the living.
24 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 30 Aug. 1908, p. 1.Carmen Dolores could not, as a lady, use the sword or pistol in the field of honour, as would have been wielded by her son had he been alive; but she did have a well-trained and very sharp quill at her disposal for the effort she deemed necessary.
The following year, she would transpose her adversary into the serialised novel that the
Jornal do Comércio published in November and December and H. Ganier published in a posthumous volume in 1911.
A luta (
The Fight) actually incorporated some of the chronicler’s obsessions, such as the immorality of boarding houses, the corruptive act of flirting, the deleterious effect of fashion dictates on young women’s spirits, etc. It particularly absorbed the denunciation of an alleged cabal in Petrópolis against a school set up by a former priest, who became the victim of a widespread smear campaign.
25 Carmen Dolores, ‘A semana’, O País, 07 Mar. 1909, p. 1. The case was conspicuously recreated in the roman-à-clef and became a separate episode, with no links to the main plot, and featuring a single secondary character, Colonel Juvenato Sá de Miranda, lover of Mrs Adozinda, the owner of the boarding house in the Santa Teresa neighbourhood, and subsequent harasser of her married daughter, Celina, the protagonist of the narrative. This man, rich in financial resources and poor in scruples, had travelled up to Petrópolis, where he would offer the help of his well-stocked purse in a secret plan by pious women against a priest who had hung up his cassock, embraced Protestantism, started a family, and, still not content, founded a college that competed with similar Catholic institutions. The meeting between the plotters was attended by Camilo da Lira, who was characterised as ‘old, enraged and a master of theological sophistry’.
26 Carmen Dolores, A luta: romance (Santa Cruz do Sul (RS); Florianópolis: Ed. da Unisc; Ed. Mulheres, 2001), pp. 85–86. When he asked to speak, he enacted a ‘capoeira move with his bow legs’, and promised to collaborate:
‘I’ll show the crook the power of my rhetoric when I scatter it …’
‘With sarcasm and sophistry …’ interrupted a laughing voice.
The journalist leapt up, with sneering lips:
‘No, sir! With arguments drawn from my illustration, because I doubt anyone exists who understands better than I theology, history, science, everything … If I use irony, it is because the little pistol hurts, it hurts … And I know how to handle it – his smile chilling – yes, that’s right, I know …’.
27 Carmen Dolores, A luta: romance (Santa Cruz do Sul (RS); Florianópolis: Ed. da Unisc; Ed. Mulheres, 2001), p. 89.For the Rio de Janeiro public, the initials of the character’s name and his physical and moral characterisation left no doubt as to who was the target of the verbal caricature, and who the novelist judged to be unscrupulous and perverse in his misuse of words, and his use of capoeira footsweeps and headbutts.