Emma, Louise and the others, or the bovarism in Portugal and Brazil

Abstract

The author uses the traditional methodology of literary history, making references to the critics of the myth and phantoms and the history of ideas. Based on the ideas of the theorists and writers of the West (George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Vladimir Nabokov, Frederic Brown) and prominent Polish scholars (Maria Janion, among others), the author analyses the notion of le bovarysme within the realm of tragic „romantic dream taken out from romantic oeuvres” (MJ). The moral collapse of Emma Bovary and Luiza Mendonca as the heroines of Gustave Flaubert and Eca de Queiroz (in the novel Cousin Bazilio, 1878) would have a relation with the exhaustion of the pattern of the romantic poetics of dreaming (la reverie) and with undertaking by the Portuguese and Brazilian writers of the tasks outlined before the realistic literature „of a thesis” –what is summoned up is the thesis of the susceptibility of a woman to adultery. The Lusopohone metamorphoses and continuations of Emma Bovary are in a close relationship with the literary creation of Eca de Queiroz (in the novel in question and in the tale In the Windmill) as well as of Machado de Assis – the predecessor of the Brazilian realism and of numerous writers who use Portuguese and Spanish in Europe and Latin America.