Romance, autobiografia e modernidade nas seminovelas de Gilberto Freyre

Abstract

This work intents an iterpretation of Gilberto freyre’s two novels – the seminovels Mother and son: a brazilian tale and its sequel, O outro amor do Dr. Paulo – and do so in three major axes: Examining what is in them of novelistic, of self-biographical ando of essayaistic. The texts of the novels are historically contextualized, compared with major events in the author’s life and with other of his works. We tried to identify wich motives appear more often in these novels, and how they are approached. In this way, we try to establish if the seminovels are in accord with the remaining of Freyre’s corpus or if they a a peculiar portion of this same corpus. We also try to set an understanding about the way Freyre’s fictional writing relates to his writing of History. We seek to understand how Freyre uses literature to represent Brazil, and at the same time to think about the complex slavery question, about racial prejudice and about the place of black people in our Society. Freyre also seems to include in his literature a plan to recover the immage of José de Alencar, that he chooses as a privileged interlocutor in the seminovels. We investigate how and why such a recovery is attempted by Freyre, and how this is also related to the need to think on slavery to then think the possibilities of our civilization.