Escritos discentes em literaturas de língua inglesa by Letra Capital Editora

Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro Leila Assumpção Harris Organizadoras

PPGL/UERJ Escritos discentes em literaturas de língua inglesa Volume X Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras UERJ – Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Copyright © Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro e Leila Assumpção Harris (Orgs.), 2017. Todos os direitos reservados e protegidos pela Lei 9.610 de 19/02/1998. Nenhuma parte deste livro poderá ser reproduzida por meio impresso ou eletrônico, sem a autorização prévia por escrito da Editora/Autor(es).

Editor: João Baptista Pinto Capa: Rian Narcizo Mariano Projeto Gráfico/Diagramação: Luiz Guimarães Revisão: Dos Autores CIP- BRASIL. CATALOGAÇÃO NA FONTE SINDICATO NACIONAL DOS EDITORES DE LIVROS, RJ P958 PPGL/UERJ escritos discentes em literaturas de língua inglesa: volume 10 / organização Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro, Leila Assumpção Harris. - 1. ed. - Rio de Janeiro: Letra Capital, 2017. 136 p. : il. ; 15,5x23cm.

Inclui bibliografia ISBN 978-85-7785-569-8

1. Literatura em língua inglesa - História e crítica. 2. Cultura - Brasil. I. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras UERJ - Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. II. Salgueiro, Maria Aparecida Andrade. III. Harris, Leila Assumpção. 17-46839 CDD: 302 CDU: 316.77

Letra Capital Editora Tels.: 21 2224 - 7071 | 2215 - 3781 www.letracapital.com.br

SUMÁRIO

Apresentação Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro e Leila Assumpção Harris

The two mothers: motherhood/motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother Aline Fernandes Thosi

Os moldes sociais do século XIX Anna Katharine Lamellas Pinto Homem

Metamoirs: pornographic (auto)biographies and plural identities Barbara Lima Madsen

From Druids to the Kirk: Religion in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song Carolina de Pinho Santoro Lopes

Decolonizar multiplicidades: literaturas indígenas de expressão inglesa Fernanda Vieira de Sant’ Anna

Struggling with ourselves: the constructed body as an amalgam of human inner issues in DoAndroids Dream of Electric Sheep? and BladeRunner Francisco Magno Soares da Silva

O desejo democrático e a imaginação narrativa nos Estados Unidos: Nussbaum, Whitman e Morrison Janderson Albino Coswosk

Textual and contextual signs disclose an unreliable narrator in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho Luciano Cabral

Christina Rossetti: The Journey of a Soul: Feminism, life-writing and memory in Rossetti’s later work Marcos David Bastos de Paula

“She exists merely as a debt to be paid”: violence and compulsory heterosexuality in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel Here Comes the Sun Natália Affonso de Oliveira Assumpção

When the clothes do not make the man: Aids, sexuality and identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother Patricia Bellas Raiz

102

Queer as folk: Harry/Harriet’s radical resistance as a non-binary person in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven Priscila Catalão

110

Trauma and narrative in The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat Priscilla da Silva Figueiredo

118

The narrative act in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala Valeria Silva de Oliveira

126

“The family I grew up in”: Jamaica Kincaid’s critical gaze upon Antigua in My Brother Walter Cruz Caminha

APRESENTAÇÃO

com grande prazer que apresentamos o décimo volume da publicação destinada à divulgação da pesquisa e de trabalhos em curso produzidos por discentes da Especialidade em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa do PPGL/UERJ. A partir de 2016, a publicação até então intitulada Seminário de Pesquisa Discente do Mestrado em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa passou a incluir alunos/as do Doutorado em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa, iniciado naquele ano. Os quinze artigos que compõem o presente volume – de autoria de mestrandos e doutorandos das turmas de 2016 e 2017 – atestam não só a participação ativa dos discentes da Especialidade como também a diversidade de temas contemplados em suas pesquisas. Estão representadas nos artigos as duas Linhas de Pesquisa do CNPq de docentes da Especialidade, a saber, “A Voz e o Olhar do Outro: questões de Gênero e/ou Etnia nas Literaturas de Língua Inglesa” e “Literatura e Comparativismos”. A apresentação de trabalhos inéditos (em línguas inglesa ou portuguesa) assim como o uso das normas técnicas adotadas pelo PPGL reforçam o incentivo à produção discente; a supervisão das orientadoras, sugerida no convite à participação, estimula a cooperação entre docentes e estudantes. Em um ano extremamente difícil para nossa UERJ, a publicação deste livro só foi possível graças à perseverança de docentes e discentes da Especialidade e ao apoio irrestrito da Coordenação Geral do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras. Nossos sinceros agradecimentos. Maria Aparecida Andrade Salgueiro Leila Assumpção Harris Organizadoras MLLI & DLLI – PPGL/UERJ

The two mothers: motherhood/motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

Aline Fernandes Thosi

Jamaica Kincaid`s My Brother is a non-fiction memoir which deals not

only with the themes of love and loss but also with the themes of power and dominance within the context of colonialism, postcolonialism and imperialism in the Caribbean. Throughout the narrative, the notion of ‘home’ along with the notion of belonging for diasporic subjects is defied. It shows an unapologetic account of the narrator`s often negative appraisal of her Caribbean birthplace and of her complex relationship with her mother. The illness and death of the narrator`s youngest brother, Devon, affected by AIDS in his thirties, makes her return home for repeated visits and, consequently, brings back a violent flood of memories and unresolved issues from the past. Kincaid follows unpredictable mechanisms of memory, challenging the supposed linearity of time and the limits of space. She may refer to the same event at different moments throughout the narrative, and each time the event will be told in a different way, to add new meanings to it. For example, the maternal figure is represented differently depending on the perspective of the narrative focus: at different moments, she is either her mother or her brothers` mother; she is nurturing and oppressing at different times. The idea of both motherland and motherhood feels unsettling for the narrator. There is a relation of power/powerlessness which can be mirrored with her motherland`s troubled colonial past. As Avtar Brah states, “The same geographical space comes to articulate different histories and meanings, such that ‘home’ can simultaneously be a place of safety and terror” (BRAH, 1996, p.1). Hence the aim of this paper is to investigate (1) the understanding of home for diasporic subjects; (2) the relationship between the narrator and her mother; (3) the possible analogy between the narrator`s mother and her motherland. The narrator in My Brother lives with her family – husband and children – in Vermont, but her brother`s illness draws her back to Antigua. 9

According to Cliff Beumel and Derick Smith, “As the reader is introduced to the island, themes of decay and sterility – so typically associated with Devon – pervade Kincaid`s description of the island. […] Like her brother, Antigua`s ills are incurable; the island is caught in an irredeemable decline” (BEUMEL; SMITH, 2006, p.106). The critical way in which the narrator depicts her homeland represents a problematization of the notion of ‘home’ for diasporic subjects. According to Brah, “not all diasporas inscribe homing desire through a wish to return to a place of ‘origin’” (BRAH, 1996, p. 193). Thoughout the book, the narrator reveals memories from her childhood. Her troubled past in a family she at times does not recognize as her own is depicted and the reader becomes aware of the reasons why the narrator feels so disturbed back ‘home’. In her childhood, the birth of three brothers put pressure on the already slender family income, and what had seemed like a good place to live turned into misery for the girl who was then growing into a young woman. The relationship with her mother, who had to deal with undesired pregnancies and an old unhealthy poor husband, became troublesome. In his Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad, Stuart Hall starts questioning the notions of ‘home’ and ‘belongingness’ in the Caribbean. Hall explains the reason why questions of cultural identity in diasporas are so troubling for Caribbean people: “The land cannot be ‘sacred’ because it was ‘violated’ – not empty but emptied. […] What we now call the Caribbean was reborn in and through violence” (HALL, 1999, p. 5). This critical questioning is a key element to understanding the narrator`s relation to her motherland. The history of slavery and exploitation permeates the island where the narrator grew up and the remains of this history also contribute to the narrator`s difficult relation with Antigua: We walked up a road, past a monument to commemorate a slave who had led a revolt. The monument was surrounded by a steel fence and the gate was locked; the fence made of steel and the locked gate weren`t meant to be part of this particular commemoration to this slave`s heroism (KINCAID, 1997, p. 90).

As Susheila Nasta observes, “Kincaid`s ambivalent relation to a troubled colonial past combined with her diasporic location in the United States has further complicated her perspective, her persistent desire to revisit, reframe, and re-imagine the buried ‘truths’ of her personal history” (NASTA, 2009, p. 65). As the narrator returns to her homeland after many years abroad and visits different places, the reader is introduced to Antigua as being a neglected 10

The two mothers: motherhood/motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

place: “[…] because Antigua is a place like that: parts for everything are no longer being made anywhere in the world; in Antigua itself nothing is made” (KINCAID, 1997, p.29). The land which was once colonized seems even more abandoned and neglected when she returns: There was a deliberate planting of willow trees, planted, I suspect, a long time ago, when Antigua was still a colony and the colonial government would have been responsible for the running of the hospital. It was never a great hospital, but it is a terrible hospital now, and only people who cannot afford anything else make use of it (KINCAID, 1997, p.14).

Her brother was one of these people who could not afford anything else. He was in this hospital where not even the drugs that would help him with the virus were available. On the one hand, the narrator blames her brother for not having taken care of himself and for having led an irresponsible life. On the other hand, she suggests that the island was not a fruitful place for its people. When revisiting a memory from her childhood, she recalls one of the moments she became aware of the troubles of her motherland: “It was then I decided that only people in Antigua died, that people living in other places did not die and as soon as I could, I would move somewhere else, to those places where the people living did not die” (KINCAID, 1997, p.32). The mixed feelings the narrator has while recovering memories from the past is openly portrayed. While she passes her brother`s former school, she remembers how her mother had told her it was in this school Devon had made friends with people who were bad company and that it was while attending this school that he became involved with crime; she passes by a funeral establishment which the reader can relate with the theme of death that permeates the book; she passes by her grandmother`s house whom she describes as a nice person, although she soon tells the reader she does not know what has happened to her grandmother; and so on. These memories show the reader what the relationship between the narrator and her motherland is like. Despite being a diasporic subject in the United States, the narrator entitles the foreign country as her ‘home’ when she comments: “And then just as I was leaving to return home to my own family on an early-morning flight, he, along with the other patients [...] were lined up in the hall to be weighed on an ancient but accurate-seeming scale” (KINCAID, 1997, p.54). After that moment, the narrator learns her brother`s health is improving. Even though her brother was getting better, she told him she would come again to see him. She longs for her new ‘home’ and feels distressed in her homeland, but she Aline Fernandes Thosi

does not cease to think about her brother, which may be mirrored to the fact that she still had not fully dealt with her own issues from the past. The narrator does not deny her origin but has a critical view upon her ‘home’. She often calls Antigua her home, but also makes it clear for the reader that she does not belong there: “I had lived away from my home for so long that I no longer understood readily the kind of English he spoke [...]” (KINCAID, 1997, p. 12). Cliff Beumel and Derik Smith comment that “Although she has constructed an alternative and seemingly independent reality in a removed space, the moment she returns to her original ‘home’ the repressed desires that animate her existance emerge” (BEUMEL; SMITH, 2006, p. 102). The narrator admits that only by removing herself physically and emotionally from her family and consequently from Antigua can she prevent psychic collapse: “I am so vulnerable to my family`s needs and influence that from time to time I remove myself from them. I do not write to them, I do not pay visits to them. I do not lie, I do not deny, I only remove myself” (KINCAID, 1997, p. 20). Wendy W. Walters suggests that “[…] in the absence of any recoverable singular homeland of origin, the diaspora itself – a plurilocal (also imagined) community of peoples politically self-identified within its scope – represents a home” (WALTERS, 2005, p. xvi). Hence, it is clear that the narrator invests her narrative with a political critique of the notion of ‘home’ and struggles with the return due to this critical reading of the island. As Stuart Hall claims, “To return to the Caribbean after any long absence is to experience again the shock of the ‘doubleness’ of similarity and difference” (HALL, 1990, p. 223). In the process of returning to her homeland several times, the narrator also seeks to solve internal issues regarding her family in Antigua: I returned home safely, and my family was glad to see me. I called my mother. It was in the middle of winter and I missed the warm sun and I missed my brother, being with him, being in the presence of his suffering and the feeling that somewhere in it was the possibilty of redemption of some kind, though what form it could take I did not know and did not care, only that redemption of some kind would be possible and that we would all emerge from it better in some way and would love each other more. (KINCAID, 1997, p. 58).

Her return to her motherland within the context of her brother`s illness gives her the opportunity to revisit and critically analyse the notion of ‘home’. As Brah reminds us, “[...] the concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins while taking account of a homing desire, as distinct from a 12

The two mothers: motherhood/motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

desire for a ‘homeland’. This distinction is important, considering that not all diasporas sustain the ideology of ‘return’” (BRAH, 1996, p. 16). The narrator portrays herself as always seeking to escape her mother`s absolute control and oppression. And as anyone who is subjugated, her ultimate fantasy is to escape completely. The most expressive picture she paints of her home is mostly determined by her relationship with her mother. Reflecting on her brother`s life throughout the narrative, the narrator explores the turn her life could have taken if she had not been able to remove herself physically and emotionally from the matrix of both the biological mother and the motherland. She learns about her brother`s illness over a phone call from a friend of the narrator`s mother. At that moment, the narrator reveals, mother and daughter were going through one of their periods of not speaking to each other and she was in her house in Vermont, completely involved in the welfare of herself and her husband and children. Two worlds thus immediately clash: one inhabited by the love and rapport of family life, the result of personal choice, and the other full of conflict, chaos and pain, a world that was not chosen. The reasons for her harsh feelings towards her mother seem to be disclosed: “You and I do not get along, I am too well, I am not a sick child, you cannot be a mother to a well child, you are a great person but you are a very bad mother to a child who is not dying or in jail [...]” (KINCAID, 1997, p.32). Through a recollection of memories, the reader has access to the image of an almost cruel mother opposed to the one of a nurturing figure, ready to sacrifice herself for the well-being of her offspring: But this too is a true picture of my mother: When he was ill, each morning she would get up very early and make for her sick son a bowl of porridge and a drink of a fortified liquid food supplement and pack them in a little bag and go to the hospital, which is about a mile away and involves climbing up a rather steep hill... (KINCAID, 1997, p. 14).

The mother`s contradictory behaviour is explained by her self-centered nature which prevents her from dissociating her children`s needs from her own. Although she seems to truly love them, she never questions her actions and thus ends up causing them harm: “It never has occurred to her that her way of loving us might not be the best thing for us. It has never occurred to her that her way of loving us might have served her better than it served us” (KINCAID, 1997, p.16). The figure of the mother symbolizes the relationship between colonizer/colonized also inscribed in her motherland: “It is when her children are trying to be grown-up people – adults – that her mechanism Aline Fernandes Thosi

for loving them falls apart” (KINCAID, 1997, p.17). In this moment of the narrative the reader can detect the colonial logic which permeates her motherly love. This “love” can be described as a desire for mastery, such as the oppressive control employed by a colonial ruler. The narrator tells the reader about the moment when her mother was visiting her in Vermont. They had an argument during which she asked her mother whether she had meant to cause her so much pain and whether she was sorry. The woman had replied, with her usual self-confidence, that she was never wrong and that whatever she had done, she had done for a good reason. This reminds us readers of colonizers` excuse that all the exploitation of a land is done for a good reason too. The annoyance she feels in her mother`s presence disturbs her even when she is in her new home, the home she has chosen and constructed with her new family. The same annoyance she feels when visiting Antigua. The narrator`s resentment towards the memories she has of a childhood distressed by her own mother reflects her negative feelings towards the island`s conditions as well. The narrator does not portray herself as belonging to her homeland. She sometimes does not feel part of the family either: “I think of my brothers as my mother`s children” (KINCAID, 1997, p. 25). At given moments Antigua is defined as her home. At times, she feels uncomfortable in Antigua with the family fate had given her and claims Vermont is her home, with her husband and children: “I wanted to run away, I would scream inside my head, What am I doing here, I want to go home” (KINCAID, 1997, p. 27). As Brah problematizes, “Where is home? On the one hand, ‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of locality”. (BRAH, 1996, p. 192). What is more, throughout the narrative, the figure of the mother shifts from being the narrator`s mother to her brothers` mother. The same way the narrator feels about her motherland. The incident of her mother’s burning her books and the fact that the narrator later became a writer represent a sort of resistance from the powerless subject in question. This event – as many others such as her mother asking her to leave school to take care of her younger brother – made the narrator want to escape from her mother`s oppression. By doing so, by distancing herself from her abusive mother, the narrator also moved away from the island which had a history of oppression of its own. That distancing enabled the narrator to provide the reader with a critical account of her motherland. Walters states that “Focusing on the link between displacement and narrative, I suggest displacement creates a distance that allows writers to encode critiques of their homelands, to construct new homelands, and to envision 14

The two mothers: motherhood/motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

new communities” (WALTERS, 2005, p. viii). We do not know for sure – neither does the narrator – whether this critical thinking would have taken place had she stayed in her country of origin, for she might have been, as her mother claims, the mother of inumerous children with different fathers; she might have followed a different path other than the one she had chosen for herself. (KINCAID, 1997, p.33) Back in Antigua, the narrator struggles to cope with her mother and at a certain point even refuses to eat the food she cooked: “It was while my brother was ill and I began to visit him (I did not take care of him, I only visited him and took him medicines, his mother took care of him) that I decided not to eat any food she cooked for me [...]” (KINCAID, 1997, p. 131), though the narrator claims she had not decided that out of anger. She recalls a moment in her childhood when her mother would chew the food for her, and that the act of not eating the food her mother cooked for her was a sign of separation. This distancing from her mother is similar to her distancing from Antigua: she refused to be a part of the oppression and so she invented a new reality for herself elsewhere. The narrator concludes her narrative by bringing back once again the memory of her mother setting her books on fire because she had not taken care of her younger brother properly. However, this time she adds the information that she will keep trying to rewrite these books until they are perfect and not damaged by her mother`s outrage. She will try to rewrite her story by dealing with her past memories until she can solve her inner troubles with her past. It was because I had neglected my brother when he was two years old and instead read a book that my mother gathered up all the books I owned and put them on a pile on her stone heap, sprinkling them with kerosene and then setting them alight; I cannot remember the titles of these books, I cannot remember what they were about (they would have been novels, at fifteen I read only novels), but it would not be so strange if I spent the rest of my life trying to bring those books back to my life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind (KINCAID, 1997, p.221).

Jamaica Kincaid`s work develops themes such as alienation and exile, childhood and the passage into maturity, the centrality of female figures and the conflicts produced by a history of abuse and cultural dominance. The conflict between mother and daughter goes beyond both the personal and the social spheres to construct a larger political metaphor. Due to the fact that the conflict is set in the specific context of the Caribbean, dominated by poverty

Aline Fernandes Thosi

and racial divisions, the narrative involves social concerns as well. There can be found a parallel between maternal power and imperial power. In the paralellel formulations of motherhood and colonialism, the conflict between an overbearing mother and her self-assertive daughter may be read as a larger metaphor for the conflict between the motherland and the colony. The narrator thus starts a new life as a diasporic subject in a place she has decided to adopt as her home. She returns to her motherland in order to help her family, but she does so critcally and reflects upon her own life whilst observing her brother`s process of dying. Although she establishes a new home abroad, she still comes back to help her brother and ends up digging memories from her own life which leads her to raise awareness about her conflicting relationship with her mother and with her motherland. These issues are not fully resolved with the death of her brother and her return to her new home and new family. On the contrary, the narrator expresses her willingness to continue working on those memories from the past. The same way she could never completely forget her mother in spite of her abuse, she could never forget her motherland in spite of the scenario of past abuse either. Thus, she keeps on critically revisiting it through her writing.

Bibliographical references: BRAH, Avtar. Diaspora, border and transnational identities. In: __________. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting identities. London: Routledge, 1996. HALL, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In: __________. RUTHERFORD, Jonathan (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. HALL, Stuart. Thinking the Diaspora: Home-thoughts from Abroad. In: Small Axe 6. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999. KINCAID, Jamaica. My Brother. New York: Farrar, Status and Giroux, 2012. NASTA, Susheila. ’Beyond the frame’: Writing a Life and Jamaica Kincaid’s Family Álbum. In: Contemporary Women’s writing. Volume 3, number 1, 2009, pp. 64-85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. SMITH, Derik & BEUMEL, Cliff. My Other: Imperialism and Subjectivity in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother. In: __________. Linda Lang-Peralta (ed.) Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. 2006, pp. 96-112. New York, 2006. WALTERS, Wendy W. At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

The two mothers: motherhood/motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

Os moldes sociais do século XIX

Anna Katharine Lamellas Pinto Homem

“I have been thinking,” she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, “that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...” (Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy)

Após ler a citação acima, uma fala de Sue Bridehead, uma das personagens centrais de Jude the Obscure (Hardy, 1895), nós leitores podemos depreender que com o uso da imagem de um molde alheio à coisa em si – seja uma mulher, seja uma estrela – vem uma crítica de Sue às instituições sociais. Este capítulo pretende abrir essas instituições e mostrar por que Sue Bridehead, no final do século XIX, vai ter uma assertiva tão forte a respeito de sua identidade como mulher. Durante o século XVIII, o ideal de feminilidade já constituía um molde que fazia do casamento uma carreira de sucesso para as filhas das famílias burguesas. Esse ideal era representado por corpos magros, cinturas finas e aparência pálida e frágil. Ao mesmo tempo em que essa imagem era buscada, já existia também uma crítica à educação dada às mulheres. Em Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), escrito por Mary Wollstonecraft, a autora reflete sobre os direitos à educação das mulheres. Ela descreve a criação de uma mulher como completamente voltada para o objetivo de conquistar um homem, uma mulher separada do projeto Iluminista de uma educação científica. Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, OUTWARD obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for at least twenty years of their lives. (WOLLSTONECRAFT) 17

Esse tipo de educação as levava a se preocupar somente com a aparência externa e com o modo de se conduzir na sociedade, se moldando para os desejos masculinos como o maior objeto de troca no novo mercado. A beleza deveria ser valorizada acima de tudo, já que poderia garantir, com mais facilidade, que um homem cuidasse dela. Nesse sentido, a beleza era bem da economia burguesa que seria legada ao século XIX. Aos homens, infere Wollstonecraft em todo seu meticuloso ensaio, cabe então delimitar os valores que estabelecem a educação ornamental das mulheres, criando assim os moldes aos quais Sue se refere. Segundo Wollstonecraft, autores como Rousseau ajudaram a consolidar essa educação decorativa feminina, uma vez que exaltavam uma mulher artificial e frágil, fortalecendo seu papel social, como pode ser visto na citação a seguir. I must declare, what I firmly believe, that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners, from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, have contributed to render women more artificial, weaker characters, than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of society. (WOLLSTONECRAFT)

Wollstonecraft também compara a educação destinada a meninos e meninas: In the present state of society, a little learning is required to support the character of a gentleman; and boys are obliged to submit to a few years of discipline. But in the education of women the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment; even while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half-formed limbs never exhibit (WOLLSTONECRAFT)

Às mulheres eram negados os estudos formais, uma vez que seus objetivos tinham que ser se tornar mais desejáveis aos olhares masculinos. Em Jane Austen, podemos ver essa educação voltada para a busca de um casamento em Pride and Prejudice (1813). A figura de Mrs Bennet, mãe da protagonista, se preocupa em arranjar casamentos para as filhas e procura sempre colocálas em evidência ao tocar piano, cantar em uma festa para entreter, bordar. Em vários momentos, Austen ironiza essa educação decorativa dada às mulheres de sua época. No entanto, como no tratado de Wollstonecraft, na narrativa está cristalizado o lugar marginal da mulher na origem de uma nova modernidade: ela é objeto de todas as Instituições Iluministas, um corpo objeto do mercado, ou melhor, um corpo educado para ser simples e permanente objeto. 18

Os moldes sociais do século XIX