Abstract
The chapter argues for a contextual reading of female characters in relation to the resurgence of feminist activism in contemporary Portugal, from the late 1960s through the 1980s, informed as it was by broader currents of thought drawing from the avant-garde’s engagement with Marxist post-structuralist perspectives informed by linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis. The six novels constituting Saramago’s self-admitted first phase, from Manual of Painting and Calligraphy to The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, are the object of analysis. Aside from exposing the contradictions of the stereotypical roles assigned to women in revolutionary struggles, Saramago’s engagement with embodied, sexualized feminine difference is the crux of his ongoing critique of masculine-normed Enlightenment reason. Ultimately, it confronts the pervasively tyrannical, dehumanizing meanings attached to women in the Judeo-Christian Western tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Losada (1996), Real (1996), Berrini (1998), Madruga (1998), Carreira (2001), Ferreira (2001, 2008), Bishop-Sanchez (2010), Baltrusch (2012) and Charchalis (2012). Emphasizing their role in plot development, Saramago asserted that “it is their presence, what they do and what say what signals that with their appearance something is going to change” (qtd. in Céu e Silva 2008, p. 108). All unattributed translations from the originals in Portuguese are of my responsibility.
- 2.
In The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Saramago puts the issue in the following tongue-in-cheek terms: “The utmost care has to be taken in the use of words, never using them before the epoch in which they came into the general circulation of ideas, otherwise we shall immediately be accused of anachronism, which, amongst the reprehensible acts in the terrain of writing, is only second to plagiarism” (HSL 248–49).
- 3.
My approach here aims to be in tune with the “histoire des mentalités” perspective that Saramago appears to be following in tune with Georges Duby’s work, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980–1420, published in the original French in 1976, and in Portuguese translation by Saramago in 1978, with the title, O Tempo das Catedrais: A arte e a sociedade 980–1420; reedited in 1993.
- 4.
For example, the lives of women in the context of family life; rights of sexuality and reproductive rights ; the androcentric ideology of language; stereotypes in education, advertising and so on; prostitution and pornography.
- 5.
I have in mind the contrapuntal analysis introduced by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1994) to describe a methodology that brings to light colonized lands and peoples when reading metropolitan novels that may not refer to them at all but in which the reality depicted depends upon the existence of a colonial economy.
- 6.
“I’m convinced”—he noted—“that the harmony between the novel’s right hand and the essay’s left hand (if you permit me the metaphor) has been, if not total, at least satisfactory” (qtd. in Halperín 2003, p. 47).
- 7.
Among the many instances in which Saramago (or one of its critics) distinguishes between the first and second phases of his work, the author famously stated, “it is as if until The Gospel I was describing the statue, that is, the stone’s surface, and from Blindness on I had learned how to get inside the stone. This as a metaphor about what began to concern me was the human being and the question of ‘What is a human being?’” (qtd. in Céu e Silva 2008, p. 123).
- 8.
Important feminist voices gathered around “Poesia 61” included Luiza Neto Jorge (1939–1989), Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão (1938–2007) and Maria Teresa Horta (b. 1937).
- 9.
The notion of “woman as colony of man,” cited in the book directly and indirectly, is the running topic of The Fourth World Manifesto: An angry response to an imperialist venture against the women’s liberation movement, by Barbara Burris presented originally at a conference in Toronto in 1971.
- 10.
- 11.
Isabel da Nóbrega , born into a family of the high bourgeoisie, had been the partner since 1954 of one of the most prolific and influential critics of the time, João Gaspar Simões (1903–1987). Saramago ended his relationship with her only in 1986 due to the appearance in his life of Spanish journalist, Pilar del Río (b. 1950), whom he married two years later.
- 12.
Teresa Cristina Cerdeira da Silva (2000) has argued for an understanding of Saramago’s strong female characters in terms of compensation for what the April 25, 1974, revolution failed to accomplish, namely, to do away with the long-standing sexist, womanizer culture that kept women socially and politically marginal.
- 13.
This and the following references to the history of feminism in contemporary Portugal are based on Chapters 26 (pp. 305–06) and 27 (pp. 312–14) of the edited book, New Iberian Feminisms. See Ferreira (2018).
- 14.
- 15.
A good example is found in the scene where Gracinda Mau-Tempo, embracing her father just released from prison, sizes up Manuel Espada, who had also been a suspect of subversive activities, and, with the matter of fact interpellation, “Hello, Manuel,” initiates what is going to be their life together. “[A]nd anyone who thinks more is required is quite wrong” (RG 155).
- 16.
While the man is expected to go outside the home to get paid work, the wife is expected to account for and excuse the family provider for the debts incurred in buying food items. The anonymity of the couple hypothetically discussing this situation in bed is telling: “stop asking me, and she will say, I’m not asking for myself, the baker wanted to know when we could pay off our debt, such wretched conversations” (RG 190–91).
- 17.
The historically pervasive role of women as mothers of men fighting for a just collective cause shows up in the narrative of underground subversive activity that begins when men find themselves without work. From women waking their husbands to go meet their comrades (RG 197–200) to the drama of looking for their whereabouts in the local prison (RG 231–32) and, subsequently, to their emotional visits with the political prisoners in the fort of Caxias (RG 251), wives and daughters are positioned in the role of mothers of the revolutionaries.
- 18.
See Barradas (1996) for an illuminating study of the “supportive” role to which women were limited in the underground activities of the Portuguese Communist Party in the 1940s.
- 19.
Ricardo Reis is one of the heteronyms of Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). He tends to compose odes in a classic Greek style. In Saramago’s novel, he is a medical doctor returned to Portugal after living in Brazil for several years.
- 20.
That the hotel servant, Lídia, refuses to get paid for her continued services once Ricardo Reis moves into the furnished apartment is symptomatic of how the latter figures somewhat closer, cynically, to what would be a family home. Would-be wives do not charge for domestic tasks, including sex.
- 21.
Marcenda’s losing movement of her left hand after her mother’s death , three years before (1933), is suggestive of the crippling effect that Salazar’s New State had on the (bourgeois) Republican feminist women movements.
- 22.
Lenin , for example, repudiates women’s complete sexual liberation as being contrary to the interests of communism , since it poses a threat to the future of the Soviet family (Fauré 1986, pp. 382, 388).
- 23.
As the “three Marias” so ably put it (even if English translation does not do it justice): “The Woman: the man’s wealth, his image and likeness, his plot of earth, his inherited estate” (Horta et al. 1994, p. 83).
- 24.
Kristeva introduces in this study her theory of the “semiotic” as a signifying practice. It is not superfluous to note that her examples are male avant-garde poets of the late nineteenth century, namely, Lautréamont and Mallarmé .
- 25.
The composition, humorous in style, plays with the opposition between “em saia,” referring to the intimate clothes in which the troubadour would have seen the Senhora, and “em guarvaia,” the luxurious clothes that he would expect to receive from her as a token of recognition for his love .
- 26.
In relation to the dog, there is also the intertext of the Greek myth of Cerberus , the multiheaded dog that guards the underworld and whom Heracles must kill without any weapons.
- 27.
I’m referring here to the Lacanian concept of the Nom du père, to whose double sense of “nom”—“no” and “name”—Kristeva abides.
- 28.
“for no journey is but one journey, each journey comprises a number of journeys, and if one of them seems so meaningless that we have no hesitation in saying it was not worthwhile, our common sense, were it not so often clouded by prejudice and idleness, would tell us that we should verify whether the journeys within that journey were not of sufficient value to have justified all the trials and tribulations” (SR 222).
- 29.
I mention the date of the French translation, by Payot in 1978, simply because that is what most likely was accessible to educated Portuguese readers.
- 30.
The prosecution was greatly encouraged by the treatise, Malleus Maleficarum, known in English as The Hammer of Witches, published by the Catholic monk, Heinrich Kramer , in Germany, in 1487, and thought to be the most widely read book after the Bible until the Enlightenment. See “Malleus.”
- 31.
This notion was coined by Jacques Derrida (1978) as part of his critique of the metaphysics of presence. It had a decisive impact on post-structuralist (French) feminist conceptions of language, difference and the “feminine .”
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Ferreira, A.P. (2018). Saramago’s Axiology of Gender Difference. In: Salzani, C., Vanhoutte, K. (eds) Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_9
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