FEMALE VOICES IN MEMORIES OF MARTA

THE FEMALE CONDITION IN ALMEIDA'S NOVELS

Abstract

Women have never been absent from history, but their voices have been silenced by anthropocentric and universalising discourses. In line with this, power and gender relations have generated in human thought the myth of the weaker sex, which has perpetuated itself over time and contributed to the silencing of female voices. Based on this, this work seeks to analyse the female condition in the work Memories of de Marta (1899) by Júlia Lopes de Almeida. Thus, through a literary study, we highlight in this article the condition of widowhood represented by the protagonist's mother, the difficulties experienced by women from the lower classes, and the context of education presented by the protagonist of the novel. Thus, as a bibliographic study, a critical reading was carried out of materials that provided theoretical support for the work of interpretation, in particular the theoretical postulates of Beauvoir (1949), Duarte (2016), Saffioti (1976), Tedeschi (2012), Uekane (2010), Wollstonecraft (2020), among others. It is concluded that Memories of Marta (1899) contributes to the understanding
of the history of women on the national stage by giving them a voice in her novel, becoming central to literature by presenting a first-person female narrative voice. In this way, the work brings women's voices to the fore at a time when silencing and erasing them in the field of writing was common.