Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822

Conclusion. Closing the Colonial Era

{ ConClusion } Closing the Colonial Era O ver the course of Brazil’s colonial history, women faced numerous and sometimes insuperable barriers to their full expression as religious persons. In the earliest conception of the colonial enterprise, women’s presence was portrayed in otherness, representing theotherness of America itself.The alien continents nurtured alien women who signified the others, the Amazons, cannibals, and—finally— witches of the Old World transposed to the New. These restrictive images reduced women to a status outside of their own self-understanding, and, with so few written accounts of their responses to the invasion, I have had to rely primarily on men’s documents, letters, books, and reports to reconstruct women’s religious lives, perspectives, and activities during the long years from 1500 to 1822. The challenges for women in the colony began long before its shores were breached by the Portuguese imperial power, for the Catholic Church and Portuguese elite classes had already constructed the fundamental expectations for women’s lives, including religious and social norms. When Pero de Caminha wondered at the nudity of Brazilian Indian women in 1500, he articulated the first demands for women in the Land of the Holy Cross; women were to be bound by the imported codes for morality and honor in all of their characteristics and behaviors, from their clothing and comportment to their occupations and daily activities. Few native Brazilians and few witches reflected the characteristics of honorable women, for few were modest and submissive, with an impeccable reputation for chastity —and none were elite white women of respectable ancestry.The ideals perpetuated by the Portuguese empire and religious officials granted prestige and precedence to married women of illustrious families, and those estimable rewards might have been available to women of lower classes if ConClusion { 229 } only they, too, paid with their lives the rather steep costs of honor. The historical records, however, leave little indication that enslaved or mixed-race women could meet those costs, overcome the social and religious limits, and be deemed honorable. Family wealth or personal virtue gained some respect for a handful of devout and chaste women, but the social distinctions required for the attributes of honor lay primarily in generations of nobility and in demonstrable family accomplishments or religious purity, so that the male writers of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries had little to add to the historical record but the failures and shortcomings of women. In the first chapter, I examined the stereotypes of compliant and resistant women composed during the early colonial encounters with indigenous Brazilian women. From innocent and vulnerable maidens to vicious anthropophagous hags, the images utilized to portray women were not new sketches but drewon centuries of iconographyabout the “other”positioned to oppose and define the civilized Western Christian man. Explorers, conquerors , stateofficials, and Catholic missionaries could scarcely believe, let alone record, what they saw in the New World. As their astonishment left them wordless, motifs of sylph-like maidens, innocent virgins, wily Amazons , and frightening cannibals filled in the gaps.Yet the choice of symbols to present and represent the Brazilian women was not haphazard; instead, the symbols served distinctive purposes for establishing the imperial state and holy motherchurch in the colony. Docile and compliant women were more likely, I would suggest, to be assimilated into the Portuguese cultural empire, just as the accessible coastal regions of Brazil seemed to permit easy entry for the invaders. And as the outsiders struggled through the impassable interior forests and encountered genuine resistance, so their reports emphasized the otherness of women—as inhuman, degenerate, violent creatures whose eventual submission would fulfill the divine promise. Brazilian Indian women had few opportunities to express their own responses to the encounters with the European colonists, and the sources permit us few authentic moments from their lives. Missionaries or colonial officials did not evangelize indigenous women merely for their own sake but for the service and submission to their husbands, church, and state, and did not consistently describe their responses. Women themselves left no direct records of their experiences as “others” in the early colony, and attempts to discover some trace of their reactions are thwarted by the bias of the sources.To whose voices should we attend? The Tupinambá women who gloated over Hans Staden’s imminent demise? His contempt for the indigenous women along with his expectations of their evil intent could { 230 } Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and...