Júlia Lopes de Almeida: escritora, mãe e esposa laureada nas páginas de A Violeta (1920-1934)

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the representations of Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934), the writer of essays, short stories, chronicles, and plays, who was at spotlight in the press and in the literary circles in the beginning of the 20th century, in the periodical A Violeta (1916- 1950). A Violeta is one of the features of the Gremio Litterario Julia Lopes, founded in November 1916 in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, Brazil. The temporary scope of this research starts in 1920 and finishes in 1934, due to the numerous mentions to the name of Júlia Lopes de Almeida, as for her consecration as a reference for Brazilian Literature (De LUCA, 1999); to her engaging within the feminists’ claims; and also to her transatlantic publishing. From the 157 issues of A Violeta, among the years 1920 and 1934, 99 were found at 3 archives - The Digital Newspaper and Periodicals Library from The National Library (FBN), The Mato Grosso Public Archive (APMT), and The Personal Collection of Yasmin Nadaf (AYN). The assets of Júlia Lopes de Almeida, highly estimated at this research, were accessed at the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), which holds the Filinto de Almeida file. Filinto de Almeida was Júlia Lopes’ husband and one of the founders of the Academy. In addition, the contact with the documents under possession of Júlia Lopes’ family was important to cross- check the writings in A Violeta with the writings of and about her family. In this sense, other sources were gathered, such as the writer´s books, her family´s writings, the mentions of her name in the press, besides hers and her family´s personal documents. The theoretical framework is supported by the studies of Salomoni (2000;2005), Telles (2012), and Fanini (2016), which portray Júlia Lopes as a subject matter; those which investigate A Violeta, mainly Nadaf (1993) and Costa (2018); ones that foster the female writing, notably in El Far (2000), Eleutério (2005) and Woolf (2014); and also Pallares-Burke (1998) and Magaldi e Xavier (2008), whose works comprehends the educational dimension of distinct texts, as it is in reference to A Violeta. In terms of methodology, Chartier (2012) and Ferreira (2015) are selected to approach the representations in Literature; the micro-history, as developed by Revel (1998) and Ginzburg (2007), besides the cross-checking of different sources, as exposed in Burke (2011). The results of this research indicate the representations of mother, wife and female writer as the ones elected by the editors of A Violeta when referring to Júlia Lopes de Almeida. Under the guidance of women´s education, the editors of A Violeta devoted themselves to the character modeling of its readers, by selecting and even removing certain excerpts of Júlia Lopes’ works, to meet their purposes. Although the framing of the writer under these paradigms did not reflect the totality of her intellectual trajectory, they indeed cooperate to the fostering and dissemination of her works through other places, which, according to this paper, contributed to establish her image in the Brazilian Letters.