The delirium of caged writing: an account of misogyny in colonial Brazil in Carta à rainha louca, by Maria Valéria Rezende

Abstract

In Carta à rainha louca (2019), Rezende's writing articulates the interest in a unique type of narrator, characterized by theorist Wayne Booth (1980) as unreliable, alongside the disruption of historical discourse. This paper aims to analyze how this interlocution occurs in the reading of misogyny in the eighteenth-century Brazilian period. To this end, it relies on the support of theoretical studies focused on the relations between literature and history. The guiding question is how literary imagination interrogates the past about the subjectivities that have been silenced, subjugated and violated by the prevailing patriarchal order since the prehistory of humanity, whose cruelty is intensified in the experiences of women affected by colonialism. Thus, through a process of reading and analysis of bibliographic typology, adopting a comparative methodological perspective between the aforementioned novel and the work D. Maria I (2019), by historian Mary Del Priore, we reach a possible answer. Through the use of ambiguity, irony and paradox, Rezende leads us on the account of the creation of a letter with an unusual form and content, filled with legible erasures. The defendant and sender have little to expect from the noble recipient; however, the experiences of these two Marias have much to reveal to present-day readers about the history of women's exclusion from positions of power.