By FILIPE DE FREITAS GONÇALVES*

Considerations on the book by Júlia Lopes de Almeida

1.

Memories of Marta, by Júlia Lopes de Almeida, is a typical example of a bourgeois novel. The young protagonist is born into a poor middle-class family in Rio de Janeiro who find themselves destitute after her father dies of yellow fever. The decline is immediate: the young woman and her mother move into a slum and start to live with the rabble of the time, that is, people who had to do manual labor to survive. What drives the plot is Marta's desire to overcome the challenges imposed by life through individual merit and work.

The feelings she describes throughout her memoir are typical of the hero of a bourgeois novel: envy and invective against social injustices that need to be overcome. Her individual talent for study ensures that she is finally able to leave the precarious situation in which she lives with her mother, first as her teacher's assistant and then as a civil servant.

The desire for individual autonomy and non-dependence is explicitly expressed by the girl: “I have achieved an independent position; I will not need anyone’s support”.[I] Added to this is her romantic ambition, which is expressed romantically. The young woman develops a fixation with a boy who keeps looking at her one day at school and, later, more significantly, with a relative of her teacher, Luís, whom she meets on a trip to de-stress.

The second case, which is more developed, is a reality check for the young woman and introduces into the novel the type of romantic flirt who is disallowed by the narrative perspective. The plot thus combines two fundamental elements of the bourgeois novel: marriage for love and the desire for social advancement through merit. The two aspects are combined: marrying for one's own sake and achieving a position of prominence in the world are two sides of the same individual self-affirmation so typical of the 19th century.

But that is not the whole story, as it should be. Let us imitate Roberto Schwarz's argument about the Lady, by Alencar;[ii] it can help us characterize the text. On the periphery of the central drama represented by the bourgeois heroine is the world of favor, cronyism and Brazilian sociability. But since this is not a novel, but a soap opera, the periphery is also the center: what seems to be the victory of schooling and merit is also the result of relationships of cronyism and favor.

The one who seems to fully understand this dynamic is the young narrator's mother: she clearly knows that her daughter's position depends on her connection with the teacher D. Ana, and she constantly turns to her for help with her daughter's physical and mental health issues; she knows that the favor of someone important is not dispensable, as her daughter would like, and insists that she go to an audience with the Empress in search of protection; she knows that, despite her position, a suitable marriage would be one that would give her daughter security and correspond to her social position and not a romantic delirium of self-affirmation.

What the narrator presents to us as a kind of endless struggle for social overcoming is, as a whole, in its form, seen as part of Brazilian sociability. Some important conclusions must be drawn from this. The first is that the way in which the narrator presents her dilemmas to us, even though it cannot be taken at face value, must be considered in the process of interpreting the book. In other words, it must be considered why a non-bourgeois conflict appears as a bourgeois conflict in the process of its remembrance.

The vogue of literary fashions would be one explanation, just as a certain ideological falsification of the heroine herself is another. Both are true, but they do not seem to me to solve the problem because this discursive junction is a practical fact of Brazilian life. If the elucidation through the affiliation of texts is partly true, it does not solve the imbroglio. In other words, the psychology of the heroine is an element that must be considered for its specific weight, because, despite the possible ideological falsification through which she presents her story to us, her profile is, in itself, part of the universe of Brazilian sociability.

The feeling of constant humiliation and its somatizations are a significant part of her individual features. Social subalternity imprints on her character, at the same time, something fragile and intimidating. She is constantly on the verge of breaking due to the challenges imposed by her situation, but she also insists on remaining firm in the fight necessary to overcome it, which is achieved by the somewhat unhealthy relationship that is described between the character and her studies, to which she dedicates herself in an exaggerated manner, partly to compensate for her inferiority and partly to swallow the humiliations of everyday life.

None of this can be taken in an abstract way, because, at bottom, what is being discussed here is the question of work. Both our heroine and her mother are working all the time and their suffering is, in this sense, very different from that of most heroes in the European bourgeois novel. Firstly, because, in part, they are not, in fact, working, but are lower-middle-class subjects who want to rise socially.

Two examples: both Raphael de Valentin and Rastignac, the Balzacian heroes from The Skin of the Onager quality the father Goriot, are middle-class individuals who aim to have a prominent position in society and are far, to say the least, from the world of degrading work to which our heroine is subjected. Second, even in cases where these heroes are closer to the world of work, the society represented does not relegate manual labor to the condition of enslaving animalization that is typical of Brazilian society. In other words: even when they work, the work is not as degrading as what we see here.

There is also a clear difference in relation to the universe of José de Alencar, since, while in his novel there is the universe of degrading manual labor from which everyone seeks to escape, in its plot it is not work that is the element of social ascension, but marriage or inheritance. What I hope to be highlighting is a certain specificity of the character's psychology given the specific nature of his social position.

Although it cannot be easily included in the list of naturalist texts, Júlia Lopes de Almeida's novel already belongs to the universe of representation of problems that need to be worked on in conditions of degradation and dehumanization that were popular with Émile Zola's novels. In the Brazilian case, the specificity is once again nuanced, since work, in these parts, has a very different meaning from that of mainstream naturalist of the time. The psychology of young Marta, as well as the specific nature of her ideological falsification, is that of the poor who find their place in the sun, even if this depends on sacrifices and physical and mental exhaustion. 

Let us bear in mind before drawing another conclusion. What we have seen is that the plot, which takes the form of a classic bourgeois plot, is not, in fact, a bourgeois plot, but is presented in this way by the narrator who masks through it the relationships of favor that in fact drive her social ascension. The narrator's feelings, presented as bourgeois feelings, should also not be interpreted in this light – or not simply – because they imply a process of overcoming in a context of degradation that simply does not exist in the case of the bourgeois novel and whose appearance in our literature was, at the time, unprecedented in the terms proposed.

The ideology of the self-affirmation of the poor fighter so in vogue today can help us understand the psychology of our heroine (or vice versa, depending on your interests). The driver of iFood who believes he is an entrepreneur of himself, or the Uber who sees himself as an independent entrepreneur is perhaps a key to understanding the novel. On the one hand, his feeling of individual self-affirmation comes from the sensation – most of the time true – of complete social abandonment: since the protection structures do not reach him in his subjective and community demands, he is left with no choice but to take his life into his own hands. Although the first sentence of the statement may be true in most cases, the second is false in all of them. Even if he believes in such a phantasmagoria, the exhausting work routine will not take him anywhere; on the contrary, it will intensify his social illness and his need for reaffirmation through work.

Here we are in the inner life of our character, socially ill and constantly in need of immersing himself in work, both from an objective and subjective point of view. Simply put, his psychology is ideology through the falsification it promotes (in literature: the bourgeoisification of the novel) and the truth of his social being (in literature: the framing by work).

It should be said, in passing, that this mixture is present in the work as a whole and can be blamed on the author. The book has something of an exploration of real psychological processes that involve the poor in constant need of affirmation in a hostile context and ideological defense of work and schooling as paths to emancipation. Several arguments could be made in relation to this mixture, but it seems to me that, as it is configured, it is a defect, because it leads the work to embark on the falsification of reality and not on its critical unveiling, which would guarantee it true emancipatory breath.

The narrative of relative success lends weight to the liberal and industrious ideology that was prevalent at the time, instead of exposing its practical ineffectiveness. The conciliatory ending is accurate in this regard: it accepts as a satisfactory solution the simple re-envisioning of the heroine in the world of favor through cronyism (even if at the cost of exhausting work), instead of taking the protagonist's impulses for freedom and independence to their ultimate consequences. The problem is that this solution would be equally false, which creates the short-circuit that only Machado's novel resolved at the time.

The falseness of the solutions does not come from talent or ability, but from the practical matrix to which Brazilian society subjects creative potential: what hinders all solutions is, in the end, the fact that at the time there was no, nor was there on the horizon, a working society. The solutions are inappropriate not because of the writers, but because of Brazilian life, which, at the time of publication, was still dealing with slave labor and the difficulties of the emergence of a labor market that would allow for social advancement outlined in bourgeois terms.

In fact, the solution found by Machado de Assis was precisely to change the perspective of the narrative itself, avoiding the problem around which there was no possible synthesis. It is of no small importance that a more satisfactory resumption of this problem would only be found from the 1930s onwards, that is, when national life finally found itself confronted in practical terms with the problem of the poor and their belonging in Brazilian society.

Another consequence that must be drawn from this contradiction between the bourgeois center and the (not so peripheral) Brazilian-style periphery is a certain sense of randomness in the plot as a whole. Here the ideological character of the whole is evident: the story that Marta tells us has no typical value for Brazilian society. What is typical, for our heroine, is the fate of her friend from the slum, Carolina. The only thing that determines the centrality given to the plot is, in the end, the author's own desire for that story to be told. The sense that the plot is random comes, therefore, from the ideological bias of the narrative towards affirming the values ​​of work, schooling and the social emancipation of the poor.

2.

As a kind of reinforcement of the ideological character of the plot, there is a certain religious, moralizing or monarchist language that permeates the narrative and functions as a mechanism for its explanation. An example: “With what pride I think of the unwavering concern that Brazilian women generally have for their beloved children! They never reject them, they work or die for them; with a heart full of love, let us forgive them for the errors of education they impart, and let us bless them for what they love and for what they suffer.”[iii] There is something of this also in the narrator's impressed expression when she sees the Empress coming towards her: “Good God, it was her!”[iv]

The sentence is interesting in its context, because it allows the protagonist to reveal a substratum of her social and individual formation that she consciously seeks to deny as part of the ideological work of affirming work and education as a path to emancipation: she goes to meet the Empress practically because her mother obliged her to. This tone of the novel can still be seen in Carolina's altruistic and sacrificial character.

The stuffy, monarchist atmosphere is reminiscent, once again, of something from José de Alencar, but updates the language to make it coexist with the new liberal values ​​of the 1880s and 1890s. The mix is ​​unique because it is contradictory: the narrator's conformist language transforms her properly bourgeois dilemma of dignity rather than emancipation, but the ideological values ​​that are in motion (work and schooling) point in another direction.

This disjunction can help us understand the perspective of the narration: Marta, established in her life as a tenured teacher who works at Engenho Novo, married to a good man who guarantees her a certain level of protection, sees her story from the point of view of relative winners, that is, those who won not because they realized their desire for liberation and independence, but because they knew how to find their place in the social order.

This is a narrative from the point of view of the poor included who, as FHC recalled in 1996, constitute neither the totality nor the majority.[v] The ideological point of view is the justification of individual and unrepeatable victory, which gives a new face to randomness: it is a necessity of a social world in which the project is the unviable splitting of organicity. The conformist language of the text fits well with this point of view, which is a mixture of self-indulgence and self-deception.

In the edition published in the newspaper, the author includes a final page that was excluded from the book edition and that, in my opinion, sheds much light: “Two years passed and I had a daughter; she was the first ray of light to illuminate my home, longing for my mother! The child had incredible similarities to her and, when I kissed her, I often thought, as a consolation, of the theory of the transmigration of souls and said to myself: – Who knows if in this beloved little body, small and tender, there is not that great immaculate soul of the saint who left? My daughter absorbed my spirit, tired of suffering, entirely; she was the enchantment, the rapture of my days. Her father adored her, she adored her father, and the three of us lived in the sweetest harmony: I, resigned, my affectionate husband, and our daughter, our beloved Cecília, always happy! For her and for her I wrote these monotonous but deeply sincere pages. In them I put my life; In them I noted all my feelings, good or bad; in them I leave you a sublime example, which I could not emphasize as I should, but which is the best and most sacred of memories – the kindness of the grandmother.”[vi]

The ambiguity of the passage highlights the nature of the revision carried out by the author at the two different levels of composition that we have identified. The situation of the young Marta has now changed: she has a daughter and lives happily with her husband. Her situation, however, is characterized by resignation: she resigns herself precisely because she has abandoned the emancipatory liberation impulses of her youth.

These same impulses will be characterized below as her “bad feelings”: envy of the rich girl and her doll, indignation at the situation in which they live, humiliation at living in poverty and exclusion, anger at having her economic situation as a clear impediment to her romantic involvements – all of this is now seen as the set of “bad feelings” that she placed alongside the good ones. Now, these feelings are exactly what took her forward and characterize her as a bourgeois heroine, but they are now disowned from the point of view of religious and moralizing language.

All of this is summarized in the sanctification of the mother figure, who would have sacrificed everything for her daughter. She overextends herself at various times in order to provide young Marta with the physical and mental conditions to pursue her career as a teacher. She is selfless, but also sensible, as we have seen from her practical and conscious adherence to the universe of favors. She is also the true cost of her daughter's relocation process: she works herself to death so that the girl can achieve her position in life. Her Christian goodness is also matched by her daughter's piety after her death.

Comparing this with the plots of the European novel, think of Rastignac's uncompromising wickedness in relation to the situation of his family, who work themselves to death so that he can follow his Parisian rise in the father Goriot; think, also, of the young Pauline who sacrifices herself in the name of the intellectual and amorous delusions of Raphael de Valentin in The skin of the onager. The bourgeois hero, however, is merciless to the end; otherwise he would not have the strength for his complete self-affirmation. This is exactly what our heroine lacks and what characterizes the stifling of her emancipatory impetus. A certain feeling of pity is implied in the plot of the novels we have cited, but it is not dominant; on the contrary, in order for the form of the novel to be realized, it needs to be supplanted by the new values ​​that mark the bourgeois world.

But the passage can and should be read in another light: it reveals a significant part of the psychology of the exhausted, yet victorious, poor man. The feeling of filial piety is transformed, still in religious language, into a kind of projection of the grandmother onto her granddaughter. A peculiar sense of family is glimpsed here, one that is based on the communion of sufferings. The relationship between mother, daughter and granddaughter is marked by the sharing of sufferings; it is true that it appears religiously interpreted, but this does not change the underlying fact of its material counterpart.

On the contrary: the very religious attire that this feeling of family wears is typical of the lower classes. This should not obscure the fact that such a feeling, if it is coined in practical relationships of sharing suffering, is a significant part of that same pole of Brazilian sociability, which encompasses it from its material base to its ideological appearance.

The text's shortcoming is that it does not adequately address it, that is, it interprets the mother's own psychology in a uniform and shallow way. By simply sanctifying her, instead of problematizing her motivations and actions, instead of problematically incorporating the religious language that this family feeling of sharing the suffering, the text becomes "alencarized" and opts for a solution that flirts with backwardness.

Let's look at the issue this way: the solicitor Miranda, whom Marta will marry, is a man in his “forties”[vii] who is interested in the ironing lady's daughter based on some of her letters that he reads. The mother's speech, in fact, indicates a certain malice in the breach of trust between the two by having shown a stranger texts that were addressed to her: “(…) my pride as a mother advised me to make that indiscretion… I knew for a long time what kind of man Miranda is: I have worked for him for ten years, you see… he has never paid me badly, he has never complained or complained, he has always been a gentleman, as if he could guess in me the principles that I had”.[viii]

The pride she felt for her daughter advised indiscretion, but in the following sentences, pride is soon reframed by the interest in pairing her daughter with a client who, although considered a “gentleman”, was also a good payer and had never complained. The mother herself indicates the inappropriateness of her age: “he may be too old for you, but he would be an excellent husband, serious, honest, and delicate…”[ix]. In her rationalization of the situation, the narrator informs us that he fell in love with the letters he had written under the influence of Luís's love (his true romantic involvement) and that reading them “awakened in him the idea that Marta would be worth something in a domestic home…”.[X]

The mother continues to weigh the pros and cons of marriage, seeing, on the one hand, the inappropriate age of a man in his late fifties for her daughter in her early twenties, but considers that, in addition to the qualities already mentioned, he would have to be “delicate”. What the adjective points to is the possibility of violence in a marriage in which the inadequacy was greater than she could ascertain. The mother’s kindness, as we can see, is more nuanced: she acts as a kind of matchmaker for her daughter, seeking out and enticing the groom she finds suitable given the circumstances.

There are signs of a gray area in her behavior; she acts without regard for her daughter's fidelity when she shows her intimate letters, and she considers in a more or less open way the possibility of mitigating the violence to which the girl would be subjected. This is to say nothing about the fact that solicitor Miranda, most likely, wins her over by treating her with some distinction, guessing the not miserable principles of that miserable woman.

The sentence also raises another possibility: could the solicitor Miranda have enticed the mother's trust in order to eventually win over her daughter, who is twenty-five years younger than him, for marriage? The text does not allow us to say yes, and perhaps it does not even allow us to ask the question with such a strong level of crudeness, but it is precisely in this impossibility that the book's blockage, its "alencarization" lies: the real interests, the effective movements of the subjects are not figured, constructed by a confrontation between their ideological form (in this case, religiously conceived dignity and goodness) and the concrete dynamics of society.

The very reference to José de Alencar here is unfair to the Ceará native: his narrative tends to be much more direct and ambivalent in relation to the characters' desires than what happens in a novel by Júlia Lopes de Almeida.[xi] If there is “alencarization”, it is reduced to psychological and social tension.

3.

As should be evident, the reading I am doing is not “culturalist”, that is, it is not interested in understanding how stereotypical images of subordinate groups are constructed and then proceeding to deconstruct this set of reductive images, originating from an authoritarian, colonialist society, etc. What interests me is the way in which the author tries to give artistic form to social content and, more specifically, the meaning of the errors committed in the process.

The content, as I have tried to show, is not obvious, but it concerns a certain psychological configuration, typical of a slave society. Let us remember the argument once again: Marta is a mixture of a certain heroism necessary to succeed in life under such adverse circumstances and a certain fragile character that comes from the almost always insurmountable blows she receives from fate. The movement of the novel revolves around these two terms, not in a kind of alteration, but in a self-implicated intertwining.

The determination to succeed in life is counterbalanced by circumstances, and circumstances are changed by the determination to succeed in life, in a cycle that, obviously, ends without any significant social changes, but with a change in the relative position of the narrator within the universe she created. This content is new in relation to the whole of Brazilian romantic novels and, if I'm not mistaken, to Machado's novel itself.

What seems to exist is content in search of a form. Let's put it that way. The character's social appearance is well characterized, as are his most striking psychological traits; what is missing is a form capable of giving adequate outlet to this content, that is, of not reducing it to ideology. Let's try to characterize the author's attempt to draw consequences from it.

Júlia Lopes de Almeida's book is a novella. The novella is a short genre that places a single conflict at the center of its representation, determined by a single group of characters, without the need for a broad social characterization. In every way, it is the opposite of the novel. György Lukács tells us that the novella form usually appears in cases of the emergence of a new sociability (the beginning of the development of the bourgeois world: Boccaccio) or in cases of the exhaustion of certain social forms (the case of the decline of the capitalist world at the time: Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad).[xii]

It is an extreme form of expressing that which is not yet, but may become, or that which can no longer be. Precisely because it is an extreme form, the novel would always be characterized by the reduction of narrative elements to the essential. The case of the expansive characterization of the social universe is exemplary: it cannot happen, in the first case, because this world, which may yet become, does not exist and, in the second case, because the world that does in fact exist has no human significance.

Júlia Lopes de Almeida's text aims to be a novelistic in nature, but it is imperfect in almost every aspect. The conflict is centered on the story of Marta and her mother, but there is a certain counterpoint between the fate of the girl and that of her slum companion, Carolina; the universe of favors appears as a characterization of the social world in which the conflict develops; the conflict of social ascension appears dismembered and reflected, at least, in the love issue.

The problem is that, to be characterized as a novel, everything that in the case of the novel represents too much development will end up meaning too little development: the social world is not completely unfolded, the character's conflict is not nuanced in other possible and typical destinies, etc. It is, therefore, an imperfect novel.

The imperfection of the novel, which characterizes the formless aspect assumed by the content, must be considered in terms of its positive significance: there is neither a society that ends nor another that begins, although the need is for both processes – that the slave society of favors ends and that a society of labor begins. Neither of these two things is happening: the society of labor is being established without supplanting the world of favors, which, of course, alters both terms of the relationship. This is exactly what the form of the imperfect novel points to, which becomes, in addition to a defect in form, a mechanism for understanding the very sociability that is formed.

Characterizing the imperfection further, we could say that, corresponding to the quasi-novel aspect (the other side of the quasi-novella), is precisely the liberal ideology that seems to drive the narrative. The perfection of the novel would be, in this sense, the unveiling of a world that can no longer be, which would demand a much more scathing vision of the universe of favor than that crystallized in the work.

This is because, given the historical conditions, the new social form was not, in fact, on the horizon, which would leave the novel with the possibility of revealing the inhumanity of the past. This would obviously imply removing from the narrator any sugarcoated vision of her own life, which would transform the text into something other than what was actually written. This other text, in fact, was never written in the terms in which the author posed the problem, leaving Machado's irony as the ultimate artistic solution, which, aware of the impossibility, directs its sarcastic gaze to what is actually happening, that is, to the pole of the social elites who were truly active in maintaining the social order.

The imperfect novel therefore corresponds to the perfect form of Machado's displacement of the novel from its time to the problems of the periphery. But this is only half true, because the specific content, the psychology of the poor configured by the author, unless I am mistaken, has no equal in Machado's novel, that is, it would constitute a new figure beyond his fictional universe.

Social ascensions in Machado de Assis are either the result of marriage (Capitu) or luck (Nóbrega) or manipulation (Palha), but never of work or overwork. In Artur Azevedo, we have pure and simple animalizing brutalization with different degrees of significance (João Romão). The figurative case, unless I am (probably) mistaken, is unique: not social ascension in the sense of enrichment and social prominence (João Romão), but simply the average stabilization of life achieved through exhausting work.

Instead of the delusions of grandeur that sometimes appear in the mother's visions of injustice against a past of prominence, the simple stabilization of life. There is most likely something delirious in the plot (its character of simple and pure ideology), but it does not seem to me that it does not also have its moment of truth, even if only in the mere projective ambition: that a destiny of this order were possible. The imperfection of the form clearly states the fact that this possibility is prohibited, or, at least, that nothing is being done towards its realization – except, perhaps, the writing of the novel.

*Filipe de Freitas Gonçalves He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).

Reference

Julia Lopes de Almeida. Memories of Marta. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2024, 136 pages.https://amzn.to/3D27qiG]

REFERENCES

CANDID, Antonio. Formation of Brazilian Literature: decisive moments (1750-1870). Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2013.

CARDOSO, Fernando Henrique. “The regime is not for the excluded”. Folha de São Paulo, October 13, 1996. Available at: Folha de S.Paulo – “The regime is not for the excluded” – 13/10/1996.

LUKACS, George. Solzhenitsyn. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971.

SCHWARZ, Robert. To the winner, the potatoes: Literary form and social process in the early Brazilian novel. São Paulo, Editora 34, 2012.

Notes

[I] Julia Lopes de Almeida, Memories of Marta, P. 106.

[ii] Roberto Schwarz, To the winner, the potatoes, chap. 2.

[iii] Julia Lopes de Almeida, on. cit., P. 104.

[iv] Ibidem, P. 98.

[v] Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “The regime does not belong to the excluded”. Folha de São Paulo, October 13, 1996. Available at: Folha de S.Paulo – “The regime is not for the excluded” – 13/10/1996.

[vi] Julia Lopes de Almeida, op. quoted, p. 125.

[vii] Ibidem, P. 106. 

[viii] Idem, ibid.

[ix] Ibidem, P. 107.

[X] Same, same.

[xi] See Antonio Candido, Formation of Brazilian Literature, P. 540-548.

[xii] See George Lukács, Solzhenitsyn, P. 7-10. 

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