As mulheres são o diabo (review)

This volume consists of five essays of literary criticism by individual authors intended for an academic readership. As indicated by the title of the collection, "diabolic" women in literature is the focus of the volume. The first four essays, as detailed below, offer different interpretations of this literary motif with varied degrees of success. The fifth essay examines the representation of the sea in the work of Florbela Espanca.

The first essay of this collection, "Alfonsina Storni e o discurso desbocado da loba" by Alai Garcia Diniz, exemplifies Storni's marginal position as a pioneer in feminist discourse through an analysis of the she-wolf in her poetry. It is intriguing to see an essay on Argentine literature included in a volume on Portuguese literary texts. Since there are no introductory remarks by the organizer of the volume, the reader can only wonder what criteria prompted the inclusion of this particular essay.

The next essay "A cabeça de Sá-Carneiro na bandeja de Salomé: uma imagem da mulher na obra do poeta dos abismos," by Cláudia Amorim, is an analysis of images of women as representative of destruction and death in the work of Sá-Carneiro. The second section of this essay is of most interest for the purpose of the volume: it examines the mythical figure of Salomé in Sá-Carneiro's poetry, translating the poet's fascination with the dancer as an image of perversion, far removed from the primitive icon of Christianity. Though the first part of this essay is a literary review, on the whole the analysis is well researched and a valid contribution to the volume.

The third essay included in this volume "Representações diabolizadas da mulher em textos medievais," by Maria do Amparo Tavares Maleval, analyzes the stigmatized profile of the woman-witch through the examination of several pertinent texts from the medieval to the early modern period. This socio-historical approach to literary texts describes how the image of the witch was culturally established as the cause of all evils of men and nature. In relation to the theme of the volume and the other articles, this essay is one of the most interesting and well-balanced, even though parts are a summary of previous published studies by the same critic.

The fourth essay "Sob o stigma do mal: a mulher e a cidade na obra de Cesário Verde," by Marina Machado Rodrigues, discusses the representation of women in Cesário Verde's poetry in relation to the city/country axis that permeates his poetry. Cesário's interpretation of urban women is almost always archetypical, and points to the differences existing between social classes. Reverting back to biblio-biographic details of the late 1870s/early 1880s, Machado Rodrigues focuses on Cesário's affinity with the countryside and how his personal circumstances directly influenced his verse. Though the material of the first section in this article is not entirely new, the final analysis is nicely accomplished with pertinent examples and critical sources.

The next and last essay, "Florbela Espanca e duas memórias do mar," by Simone Pereira Schmidt, exemplifies the engendered concept of the sea in Portuguese literature, from the medieval cantigas in which the sea is the recurring symbol of the feminine poetic voice's feelings and desires to the seaborne images of male adventures of travel and conquest. She concludes that in Espanca's poetry the sea is not that of maritime heroes and navigators, but of quiet, submersed voices found at the margins of this masculinist poetic history. Though this essay is nicely written and presents some interesting ideas that tie the work of Florbela Espanca to the well-established tradition of Portuguese poetry, its inclusion in this volume is rather bizarre as there is little connection between this study and the theme of the collection.

An introduction or preface to the volume would have certainly been useful to situate the essays and provide an explanation as to the genesis...