A autonomia feminina nos contos de Guiomar Torresão

Abstract

In nineteenth-century modernity, women began to occupy more public spaces and jobs, however, the division of tasks and the sexual segregation of spaces were still widespread. Based on the life trajectory and writing of Guiomar Torresão with themes about women's freedom in choosing their husbands, the right to education and a profession, we analyze the way in which female characters were worked in some short stories from the works Rosas Pálidas ( 1877), A comédia do amor (1883), Idílio à inglesa – Contos modernos (1886), As batalhas da vida (1892) and Flávia (1897) seeking a break with the patriarchal and conservative molds imposed on women in nineteenth-century society. We started from the hypothesis that the selected stories, whose preferred readers were women, also helped to defend feminine transformations, freeing women from the private sphere. In this way, the objective is to understand how the emergence of new moral values and social transformations contributed to short story writing with representations of women in the private and public spheres. The examples of professionalization that could lead women to liberation from educacional ignorance and on the path to independence, in addition to favoring Guiomar Torresão's own situation as a literary professional, are also present in this study