VIOLANTE: COELHO NETO’S TRANSGRESSOR

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes social transgression in Coelho Neto’s novel Turbilhão. It focuses on the character Violante, a poverty-stricken girl who becomes a luxury courtesan; she disrupts the codes of the society in which she finds herself, and rises through the socio-economic ranks, transgressing the ideal of bourgeois womanhood. Set in 1906, at the beginning of the 20^th century, this novel was written and published in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s Belle Époque (1889-1922), a cultural movement that happened there during the First Republic. Coming from Europe, based on the influence of French culture and the experiences of modernity, this movement brought individuals new ways of thinking and acting in society. Women began to rethink their social conditions within Brazil's patriarchal system. Despite the fact that the Belle Époque was a cultural project of the bourgeois and urban class of Brazil’s federal capital, this movement brought to literary art new ways of portraying the individual and the changes that society was experiencing. The storyline, behavior and actions of the characters in Turbilhão reflect some of these changes. Violante, described as a “willful” and “rebellious” woman, has free will and desires freedom. This enables us to reflect on women and society’s status quo. This is a bibliographical and qualitative, critical-analytical study, based on works by Coutinho (1997), Freyre (1995), Bosi (2013), Beauvoir (1967), Foucault (1999), and others.

Keywords: Coelho Neto; Turbilhão; Violante; social transgression; Rio de Janeiro’s belle époque.