Práticas amorosas e normas socioculturais nas narrativas epistolares de Emilia e Joaquim Fontes (1890-1895)

Abstract

This research analyzed the practices of love in Sergipe in the XIX century based on the experience of the couple Emilia and Joaquim Fontes, who bequeathed in the letters published in the literary work Luz na tormenta (1948) by Emilia Fontes, the love story lived by the two. We also understood how sociocultural rules controlled the practices of love in in the XIX Brazil, as well as the impressions built by Brazilian society of that century on the norms that regulated these practices. We also perceived femine behavior in the face of sociocultural rules that controlled the practices of love in Brazil in the XIX century. We use as main source the literay work Luz natormenta. We talk with the theories of Bourdieu (2002), Certeau (1994), Elias (2005) and Pais (2007) to understand that everyday life is marked by the coexistence of normativity and contingency, by a kind of unstable equilibrium of order. We found that Sergipe Emilia Fontes had a good part of her life controlled by the forces of a patriarchal power and, defying social conventions, opposed and resisted the rules that governed the loving practices of her time, employing procedures that favored her loving relationship with Joaquim. Therefore, we consider these positions of opposition and resistance to the norms presented by Emilia as a vestige of change in the behavior of the Aracajunian society about the norms that guided the practices of love in the late XIX century.