Two rings, only one fetter

the novel Celeste and the parliamentary debates on divorce at the dawn of the brazilian First Republic

Abstract

Celeste is a naturalist novel from 1893, written by the author from Rio Grande do Sul, Maria Benedita Bormann, under the pseudonym Délia. This novel addresses female sexuality at a time of silencing, denial, and control over the sex and pleasure of bourgeois women. Celeste mobilizes medical and scientific explanations for human behaviors, which are classified and medicalized in light of the science of the time. Furthermore, this work exposes marriage as an abominable social institution that inevitably leads to family unhappiness. In this article, I intend to discuss, from a historical and literary perspective, how female sexuality and the issue of marriage are portrayed by a writer who seemed to advocate for the legalization of divorce in the early years of the First Republic. My goal is to analyze the novel from the context of its production and the social position occupied by its author. To do this, I use as research sources the periodical "A Notícia," a newspaper where Bormann worked as journalist and where Celeste was published as a folhetim, and with which her novel dialogue with other fictional and non-fictional texts. I use the concept of intersectionality to discuss the proximity between the gender and racial violence employed as rhetorical images in the literary discourse of the novel and other texts with which it dialogues.