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The Gender of Essay: Gilda de Mello e Souza and Victoria Ocampo

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Abstract

This paper discusses the challenges experienced by women during the 1930s and the 1950s in order to be acknowledged as intellectuals. In this context, our aim is to understand how the Brazilian essayist and university professor Gilda de Mello e Souza (1919–2005) was able to succeed, despite her gender disadvantage, in a field then dominated by men. The article retraces Gilda’s trajectory and analyses her decision, made while she was still young, to abandon fiction writing in order to produce academic essays – located midway between art and science. Next it compares her decision with the one made by Victoria Ocampo. Both women privileged the essay as an expressive form. Comparing them allows us to contrast the possibilities of insertion and recognition of women situated in two distinct South American intellectual fields. The comparison also helps elucidate the differences and similarities between the cultural and intellectual landscapes of the cities of São Paulo and Buenos Aires with regard to gender, class and schooling.

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Notes

  1. Some excellent works that combine an anthropology of symbolic forms with a social history of culture are Auerbach (2003, 2007), Baxandalll (1988), Bourdieu (1992), Braudel (1994), Charle (2008), Schorske (1980), Williams (1982), Casanova (2011), Sarlo (1988), Miceli (2007, 2018).

  2. See, Andrade Macunaíma. Translated by E. A. Goodland. New York: Random House, 1984.

  3. At that time known as the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Languages.

  4. The citation, taken from the English version of Tristes Tropiques (1961), translated by John Russel, omits one of Lévi-Strauss’s most often quoted and acerbic phrases concerning the impression left by the students. He writes, “dans leur cas, il faudrait parler de mode plutôt que de cuisine,” since they did not read the works in the original language and considered ideas to be instruments of prestige.” As a consequence, the anthropologist continued, “partarger une théorie connue avec d’autres équivalait a porter une robe déjà vue; on s’exposait à perdre la face” (Lévi-Strauss 1955, p.115). This initial impression is attenuated at the end of his account of his experience at the University of São Paulo, after naming the best students that he had, among them Gilda de Mello e Souza, in order to emphasize what he learnt from them. In his words, “they taught me how precarious are the advantages conferred by time. I think of what Europe was then, and of what it is now; I realize that you have made intellectual advances, in the last thirty years, of a kind which one might expect to take several generations; and I see how one society dies and another comes into being” (Lévi-Strauss 1961, p.108).

  5. All the references and quotations in this paper relating to her thesis are taken from the book O espírito das roupas: a moda no século dezenove/ (The spirit of clothes: fashion in the nineteenth Century) (Souza 1987). Before being published as a book, Gilda´s thesis was published in an academic journal in 1951 (Souza, 1951).

  6. Machado de Assis was a literary critic, poet and playwright, but best known as an author of short stories and novels. Born into a poor family, the grandson of freed slaves, he is widely recognized as one of Brazil’s greatest writers. Founder and first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, his most prestigious works are Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Quincas Borbas (1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899). Cited by Harold Bloom as the greatest black writer in Western Literature, the first work on him outside Brazil was written by the scholar of Greek and Latin literature, Helen Caldwell, The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis (University of California Press, 1960) – an important study that had an impact on Machadian critics and provided a reference for later works on the author by Antonio Candido, “Esquemas de Machado de Assis” (In: Vários escritos. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977), and Roberto Schwarz, Ao vencedor, as batatas (São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1977) and A Master in the Periphery of Capitalism (Duke University Press Books, 2001). For more information, see too John Gledson, Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), Richard Graham (ed.) Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer (University of Texas, 1999) and Kenneth David Jackson, Machado de Assis: a literary life (Yale University Press, 2015). Recently, 76 short stories by the author, numbering 960 pages, were translated into English: see, Assis 2018, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. Foreword by Michael Wood. New York: Liveright, 2018. My thanks to João Victor Kosicki – a sociologist of literature who is writing a doctoral thesis on Machado de Assis – for the bibliographic information and for the summary of the literary criticism published on the author in English.

  7. For a comprehensive analysis of Gilda’s interest in fashion in relation to the rest of her work, see Bárbara Pires (2019).

  8. Originally published in 1995 in the journal Novos Estudos Cebrap, this essay was included in Gilda’s book A idéia e o figurado (The idea and the figurative: 2005). All the quotations in this article have been taken from this book.

  9. Victoria Ocampo is one of the most researched women in Latin American intellectual history. I cannot provide a summary of all of the works; instead I shall focus on Sarlo’s book to understand the paths that led Victoria to choose the essay as her primary style of writing. This section of the article is also based on the work of Doris Meyer (1990), Sylvia Molloy (1996, 2010), Irma Vélez (2006), Maya Roux (2015), Judith Podlubne (2019), Tatiana Santos (2013) and Sergio Miceli (2018).

  10. For a wide-ranging analysis of the relation between regimes of movement – provided by travel – and the formation of knowledge, see Fernanda Peixoto (2019).

  11. Florestan Fernandes constructed a powerful intellectual project centered on the analysis of the formation of bourgeois society in Brazil and its structural foundations. But unlike the most important members of the Clima Group, including Gilda de Mello e Souza, he executed this project through a specialized, academic language, guided by the ideal of scientificity. Far from being just a formal question, his style of exposition and explanation of social phenomena comprised one of the central elements for the creation of the identity of sociology as a discipline in Brazil and its practitioners at the time. Taking essayism as a synonym of amateurism, or showing that “the essay and the literary form were committed to an establishment view of Brazilian culture,” Florestan engaged in a symbolic fight at the level of language with the aim of legitimizing sociology in the São Paulo intellectual field (Pontes,1998, p. 147).

  12. The formation of the field of fashion in Brazil, with everything it involves (stylists, models, photographs, magazines, critics, higher education courses in fashion, scholars of the subject), made possible the absorption and legitimization of the theme studied by Gilda. Speaking of fashion, discussing fashion and writing about fashion ceased to be considered an intellectually frivolous pastime. Furthermore, O espírito das roupas was published the same year that the first university course in fashion was created in the country, launched at the Santa Marcelina Faculty in São Paulo in 1987.

  13. This is the highest academic title within the academic structure of university of São Paulo. It is usually conceived to a selected small group of the most acknowledged professors.

  14. For further details, see Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda (2015), Pontes 2016a, b and Pontes and Miceli (2014).

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Funding

This study was funded by CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico), (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), Brazil.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

    Heloisa Pontes

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Pontes, H. The Gender of Essay: Gilda de Mello e Souza and Victoria Ocampo. Am Soc 51, 362–380 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09446-0

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