Multiculturalismo e legado literário: a identidade de mestiças em Rhys, Windle e Bernardo Guimarães

Abstract

At first hand, this thesis aims at observing the identitary construction of landowning multiracial women in Jean Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Janice Windle s True Women (1993) and Bernardo Guimarães s Rosaura: a enjeitada (1883), considering three distinct aspects: the emphasis on Multiculturalism in novels concerning interracialization in the 19th century; the protagonists attempt to pass as Caucasians before local elites and their repressed identification with the culture from lower classes. In this realm, I highlight interceptive and disjointing points between Bernardo Guimarães and the other authors, once the former discusses identity as a hereditary and national factor, and the latter ones interpret it as a free-willing and cultural construct. On the whole, this research shows how these three authors resist an 18th and 19th-century scientific discursive formation which envisaged the mestizo as a degenerated creature, with metabolic and ontological unbalance, and how they strive to advocate the image of the miscegenated on the world very idiosyncratically. Considering that Wide Sargasso Sea and True Women are rereadings of 19th century novels, the thesis also encompasses intertextuality in two different manners: on the one hand, it focuses on the intrinsic relations between the hypertext and the hypotext; on the other hand, it points out the likely relation between Guimarães and the authors Rhys and Windle revisit