“Quase tudo neste livro podia ter acontecido como vai descrito”: literatura, história e representações do feminino em Mad Maria, de Márcio Souza

Abstract

Although it is a fictional narrative, the novel Mad Maria (1980), by Márcio Souza, has a keen historical-social character when it proposes to deal with the history of the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railway, at the beginning of the 20th century, in Rondônia, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, a construction that aimed to facilitate access between Brazil and Bolivia and the export of rubber from Bolivia. The present work intends to present the novel Mad Maria, from the approximation between Literature and History, having as main focus the female characters seen from the confrontation of their profiles with the patriarchal model of woman in a decolonial perspective. As a theoretical basis, we selected the following authors: Foucault (1999); Lukács (2011); Weinstein (1993); Pesavento (2000); Gondim (2007); Loureiro (2015); Benchimol (2009); Stuart Hall (2014); Bourdieu (2012); Woolf (2014); Beauvoir (2019), Souza (2019); Butler (2020); Hooks (2020). The feminine ideal disseminated by the literature presented an ideal of a woman submissive and passive in relation to men, considered superior and often portrayed as a heroic figure. In the case of the Northern Region, literary narratives can be a good source for a better understanding of this ideal of women, because they present the characteristics of female characters and their relationship with the patriarchal model prevailing through the intertwining of fiction with the History of the Amazon intensified by the presence of striking female characters and the way they are represented in the historical and fictional universe of the novel.