The texts of Maria Velho da Costa and Teolinda Gersão are inhabited by landscapes, archetypes and self-reflexivity configured in margins, peripheral zones, that simultaneously unveil the central place occupied by the female subject. The matter of the first section of this work, the concept of landscape hinges on the ones of archetype [the archetypal relation] and of self-reflexivity - both being respectively dealt with in the second and in the third sections of this work - through a co-ordinate they share: space considered in these three aspects, the physical, the social and the mental. Landscapes appear in a physical margin in relation to the centre inhabited by the subject that builds them. Embodied by female characters, the archetypes of the Amazon, the Witch and the Madwoman emblematize these characters’ being excluded from the social circle as they are being pushed off to the periphery, whether it be the wilderness or the lunatic asy! lum. Situated in the margins of the text, “beside” the would-be content of the work, self-reflexivity turns out to be a marginal place with regard to the centre, traditionally held by the diegesis. This study aims at analysing configurations of landscapes, archetypes, archetypal relations and reflections on writing within fictions that, while possessing a peripheral and marginal dimension, still manage to paradoxically contribute to rendering female subjectivities and identity quests sought by the Authors and the female narrators and characters whose central vitality unsteadies dichotomies and binary oppositions.
Reading the margins in the works of Maria Velho da Costa and Teolinda Gersão