Representações de preceptoras na obra de Mário de Andrade - conto e romance (1923-1944)

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the representations of women preceptors contained in the novel To Love, Intransitive Verb and in the posthumous short story “Behind Ruão’s Cathedral”, by Mário de Andrade, in an effort to understand what the respective central characters, preceptors Fräulein and Mademoiselle, have to reveal for verisimilitude about the life and condition of foreign women who worked as teachers in the homes of wealthy families in São Paulo from 1923 to 1944. It is, therefore, a historiographical study inserted in the field of History of Education, in the dimension of Culture’s historians (BURKE, 2008; DARNTON, 2010; GINZBURG, 2016), using the theoretical support and the concept of representation (CHARTIER, 2002) regarding the critical capacity towards history to allow interpretive constructions. Also noteworthy are the contributions of Bakhtin (2014, 2020), Candido (2019), Ferreira (2020), Sevcenko (2014a) and Voloshinov (2019), to understand that literature is rooted in the society in which it was produced and, as a cultural and historical element, it is liable to be transformed into a source by historians of the present. Considering the provocations of a plural Mário for the history of education, the thesis followed an interdisciplinary path when asking which representations of women teachers are present in the aforementioned works and to what extent they reflect and refract reality. Thus, it was found that the theme of non-school education, through the bias of foreign tutors, did not escape the attention of the modernist author who gave unity to both works, including in educational matters. If, on the one hand, “Ruão” shows a teacher in decline, without identity, past, a maiden out of time, carrying the burden of repression, enunciating a troubled mind that needs to flatter her students from São Paulo society as a means of survival; On the other hand, “To Love” reveals the alterity of idealized teaching, but subverted in Fräulein, and shows the ignorance on the part of the São Paulo elites regarding education, reduced to an ornamental character. Women, in turn, are exposed as a simple object, old age as a phase of insignificance, legal norms as an instrument to maintain interdictions.