Representação das vozes femininas no romance Úrsula, de Maria Firmina dos Reis

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the female voices that appear in the novel Úrsula (1859) by the Brazilian writer Maria Firmina dos Reis. Historically, these voices were silenced by the patriarchal century of the nineteen. However, in Firmin's fiction the characters' speeches take on political action, constituting a denunciation of the oppression to which women were subject in nineteenth-century Brazil. Therefore, this study is basically on some of the theoretical assumptions of Antônio Candido works, to understand the literary and cultural context of the time in which the novel was written and identify the characteristics from the literature of Maria Firmina.Furthermore, based on Alfredo Bosi (1992) and Spivak (2010), we intend to analyze, through the subjectivity of Úrsula and Preta Susana, the social place of subalternity assigned to them due to their gender, highlighting what their voice represented, and how the silence was broken through resistance, which transgressed the author and her characters, thus giving them a positive representation.