More women in the literary imagery of Cassandra Rios

Abstract

Adding to recent efforts of feminist criticism to rescue the literary work of Cassandra Rios from obscurity – an author banned in Brazil during the military regime of 1964-1985 and since then stigmatized as “pornographic”–, this article describes some of the strategies employed in two of the writer’s best-known novels – A paranoica (1952) and Tessa, a gata (1968) – to denounce the violence suffered by women within the traditional patriarchal family. Regarding the images themselves, the work draws attention to the allegorical nature – in the first of these novels – of the confessional intimacy established between the narrative’s protagonist, Ariella, and the fetish-image of a nude woman depicted in a bronze statue; this statue is carefully described in the literary text and, in our reading, encapsulates the profusion of images of women – frequently lesbians – displayed across the pages and covers of Cassandra’s books.