Deus. Pátria. Família: uma leitura contemporânea de As meninas, a partir dos ideais fascistas na ditadura militar brasileira

Abstract

As Meninas, a novel by Lygia Fagundes Telles, published in its first edition in 1973, presents us with three young university students living in a Catholic boarding school, during the context of the Military Dictatorship. In this environment, Ana Clara, Lia and Lorena share their dreams and concerns about their own lives. This work, read almost fifty years after its first publication, opens the possibility of new interpretations of the conservative symbols that led to the consolidation of the 1964 Military Coup. regime, the author works on new ways of perceiving how God, Fatherland and Family are inserted in Brazilian society from the 1960s to 1970s. In this work, we seek to establish how the institutions and conservative ideals that underpinned the military's coup initiatives escape the imaginary of morals and good customs in elements and plots created by the member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and laureate of the Camões Award (2005). Thus, it is necessary to analyze the images projected regarding the popular imagination that the Catholic boarding school, where much of the narrative takes place, could refer to the incarceration/cloistering of the main characters of the novel and is out of line with this perception as it is a space of resistance and libertarian practices regarding the government. authoritarian regime in force in Brazil, in 1968. Allied to this, work on the historical, social and philosophical issues linked to the intervention of the Catholic Church regarding the guidelines related to human rights. We will also investigate the contemporary cultural production to the facts narrated in the novel, mainly through cinema, poetry, music and plastic arts, which corroborate the development of a national identity in the image of a homeland that resists oppression and censorship through counterculture. Finally, with Lorena, Ana Clara and Lia, we will understand the dynamics of the disciplinarity of female bodies, how their behavior goes against public and private interests and how feminine and feminist agendas take shape in the lives of women created by Telles. It is also important to consider the construction of characters to analyze class issues.