A personagem feminina nos romances de Maria Peregrina de Sousa: ambiguidades e dualidades

Abstract

It is not an easy task to research about Portuguese female writers from the Nineteenth century. The biggest barrier is the lack of sources, which is mainly due to the role that the women played in the 1800s society. Without political rights and restricted to private areas, these women should always be dependent on men. By entering in an area that does not belong to them, it is understandable that the women who dared to assert themselves as writers have done that using the principle of anonymity. This is the case of Maria Peregrina de Souza (1809-1894). She had a deep involvement in literary periodicals of that time, in which she published novels, poems and folk tales, using pseudonyms such as "Uma obscura portuense" (a porto obscure), "Mariposa" (Moth) or her initials, "D. M. P." Through a dialogue with History, we study the works Retalho do mundo (1859), Maria Isabel (1866), Henriqueta: romance original (1876) and Pepa (1846). We also edited the last one. Our objective is to investigate, in those works, how the discourse of the common sense is, sometimes, confirmed and, sometimes, destabilized, and how some characters could have bypassed the social prohibitions. By bringing this "porto obscure" to light, we intend to reflect how a female writer thought about her reality and how this reflected in her writings.