Úrsula: Intersecções no romance inaugural de Maria Firmina dos Reis

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the novel Úrsula (1859) by author and teacher Maria Firmina dos Reis, a writer who lived most of her life in Guimarães, in the provincial area of Maranhão. She was one of the forerunners of the Black-Brazilian Literature and one of the first black intellectuals in Brazil. The author founded one of the first mixed schools in Brazil and is recognized as one of the pioneers in denouncing the slave system, through Úrsula, which was published by Tipografia do Progresso. In the book’s first edition, which she signed as ‘uma maranhense’, Maria Firmina dos Reis already denounced a common resource used to make women writers invisible in the nineteenth-century: hiding their authorship, as in the works of Nísia Floresta Augusta, Narcisa Amália, Amélia Rodrigues, among others. The novel’s prologue also reveals other strategies that nineteenth-century used by women authors to enter the enunciative space. Úrsula calls into question the values of the nineteenth-century slave society, in addition to questioning the notions of a patriarchal society. The author was silenced in the Brazilian literature for more than a century, until her debut novel was revisited in 1975 by Horácio Almeida, responsible for publishing its second fac-símile edition. The work of Maria Firmina dos Reis was silenced from the literary canon for a long time, and only recently has her writing and trajectory been remembered by scholars who study the Brazilian author and her production. The narrative inaugurates the subjectivity of black characters within prose in Portuguese. And Úrsula establishes a milestone in Brazilian novels, calling into question racial and gender notions in nineteenth-century Brazil. To support the research, we will use the studies of Miranda (2019), Machado (2019), Lobo (2014), Duarte (2009), Muzart (1990), among others