Experiência e escrita feminina no século XX sob o olhar de Katherine Mansfield e Marguerite Duras

Abstract

This thesis presents an analysis of writings by Katherine Mansfield and Marguerite Duras, writers of the early and late twentieth centuries, respectively, who, bringing together memory and fiction, represented women’s writing and experience in a century marked by two wars and profound social transformations. To this end, the corpus consists of Mansfield’s memorialistic texts Diaries and Letters and Duras’s War Notebooks and Other Texts and Writing, as well as the fictional works Bliss, by Mansfield, and The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, by Duras, in dialogue with other texts that illuminate the themes addressed. Initially, we revisit their childhoods and family experiences (especially motherhood), observing how these primary relationships shaped these women and how they problematized the roles expected of them. In the field of affective relationships, we encounter characters who, moving from innocence to sensual maturation and subverting conventional relationship models, expressed their desires and found happiness in non-traditional relationships. As a theoretical framework, the corpus is analyzed in light of feminist criticis, especially gynocriticism, as well as theories of memory and life writing, demonstrating how the literature of these two women, with different styles and in distinct contexts, engages in dialogue on themes involving women’s lives. Through this redemptive form of writing, we observe how literature helped women survive the crises of the twentieth century and recount part of the history of the past century from their point of view defying norms to survive the uncertain period and bequeathing to us, women of the Twenty-first century, important reflections on the struggles we still need to face.