Socially Rooted Authoritarianism in Lygia Fagundes Telles’s As meninas

Abstract

Lygia Fagundes Telles’s novel As meninas portrays the oppressive social atmosphere of Brazil’s authoritarian military dictatorship in a way that few other novels accomplish. Though the novel eschews the documentary romance-reportagem mode famously adopted by other writers from the period, As meninas provides a poignant expression of the psychological and emotional burdens caused by living under an authoritarian regime. While presenting the interior/psychological lives of three young women through a unique tri-voiced, stream-of-consciousness narration, the novel unveils and examines the stereotypes and gender roles assigned to women in Brazilian society at the time. In doing so, the novel resists patriarchal authoritarianism where it most insidiously remains ingrained: the social structure of the family.

Few Brazilian novels express the feelings of alienation and oppression experienced during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–85) more intensely than Lygia Fagundes Telles’s original work As meninas.¹ Published in 1973 at the end of a particularly repressive two-year period, As meninas offers a powerful critique of patriarchal authoritarianism as manifested in political, social, and family contexts. Set in the 1960s, the novel depicts the lives of three young women marked by the morality and constraints of a patriarchal world. Fathers do not appear physically in As meninas—there are no father-tyrants, or even mother-tyrants, who strictly control their daughters’ lives—yet patriarchal shadows loom large over the young protagonists. In the context of a highly politicized moment when the dictatorship was tightening its control over Brazilian society,² Telles’s novel emerges as both a product of and a reaction to the sociopolitical circumstances of its genesis.

In her foundational study of Telles’s work, Renata Wasserman notes that As meninas “reveals the pressure of politics upon a fictional form that had generally been seen as immune to politics” (“The Guerrilla in the Bathtub” 51). Wasserman forcefully argues for reading As meninas as an exploration in the constraints of social mores and artistic form (genre) in response to “extra-textual politics” (63). Still, the novel is more than a mere political piece reflecting the historical conditions of the 1960s and 70s; in fact, it avoids explicit critiques of the government that might have warranted the censorship imposed on other writers during the period.³ By examining the violence and legacy of patriarchal authoritarianism in Brazilian society, the novel provides pointed political commentary, yet the novel implicitly suggests that the military dictatorship was by no means the origin of patriarchal oppression in Brazil. Rather, it was a symptom of deeper social currents. In this sense, As meninas offers an indirect form of resistance by attacking the underpinnings of the dictatorship. By offering a glimpse into the private lives of three young women struggling to negotiate the limited roles assigned them by society, the novel addresses universal concerns regarding women’s roles and agency, as well as their dreams, desires, and happiness. The novel thus resists the patriarchal underpinnings of the dictatorship where they most insidiously remain ingrained: the social structure of the family.

As meninas stands as one of Telles’s most accomplished works of fiction because of the view it offers into the complex historical moment of Brazil’s military dictatorship.⁴ Telles herself has said in an interview: “Veja o caso de As meninas, por exemplo. Está lá, cravado nas minhas personagens, um instante da maior importância para a História do Brasil. É o registro, é o meu testemunho de uma época” (qtd. in Cadernos 32–33). The novel’s treatment of Brazil during the late 1960s has led a fellow writer from the period, Ivan Ângelo, to identify As meninas as one of the important texts challenging the military dictatorship: “Vivíamos constrangidos pelo regime militar e Lygia ousara publicar um romance, As meninas, em que uma das heroínas é militante política” (qtd. in Cadernos 18). Yet despite the political engagement of one of its characters, the novel offers little documentary evidence of the dictatorship’s abuses—with one significant exception that will be discussed later. The novel eschews the model of the romance-reportagem—a journalistic narrative mode that prioritized objective and realistic descriptions—adopted by many writers at the time in response to the government’s censorship of the news media (Pellegrini 125). Rather than providing a realistic catalogue of political abuse, the legacy of As meninas remains its poignant expression of the psychological and emotional burdens caused by living under the pressures of a patriarchal authoritarian regime. As the narrative reveals the intimate lives of the three female protagonists, the focus rests not on the state and the dictatorship but instead on the family and the deeply systematic cultural and social conditions that have oppressed women and turned fathers into tyrants. While unveiling the psychological trauma caused by patriarchal structures and discourse, the novel considers the choices and paths available to three very different young women brought up within these structures as they seek to move beyond their private and family traumas towards a post-authoritarian future. Thus, beyond the particular historical circumstances of the military dictatorship, As meninas has retained continued relevance as a moving coming-of-age story and exploration of the traumatic effects of patriarchal authoritarianism.

The novel’s three protagonists, Lorena, Lia, and Ana Clara, meet and become friends while living away from home in a boarding house managed by a convent in São Paulo. Their similarities, however, end there, for they come from diverse backgrounds and manifest fundamentally distinct temperaments and attitudes. Lorena comes from a formerly wealthy, land-owning family. Her father has died and her mother manages the declining remnants of the estate. The family’s money has not entirely run out, though, and Lorena lives comfortably and supports her friends financially when needed. Though enrolled in law school, Lorena spends her days dreaming of M. N., an older married man and gynecologist by profession. She fantasizes about having an affair with him, yet the extent of their relationship remains limited to a few passionate embraces and letters. Lia, also a student, is from a bourgeois family from Bahia, and notably her German father appears to have a mysterious past and harbors Nazi sympathies. In São Paulo, Lia joins a militant student activist group and she falls in love with another young revolutionary named Miguel. Following Miguel’s arrest and exile, Lia’s commitment to the group intensifies as she seeks to be reunited with Miguel. Ana Clara, for her part, emerges as the most volatile of the three girls, and of the three, her background seems the most tragic: she has never known her father, and her mother was forced into prostitution. As a child, she experienced hunger and physical abuse, including rape. Because of Ana Clara’s near indigent circumstances, the nuns of the convent have taken her in and helped her enroll in college, where she studies psychology. After falling in love with a drug dealer named Max, Ana Clara herself becomes a drug addict, in part to escape the suffering she has experienced. She dreams of living a bourgeois life, of becoming a model, and she considers marrying a lecherous dentist—an idea that simultaneously repulses her—in order to obtain economic and social stability.

The novel’s striking narrative seamlessly intertwines three distinct first-person narratives, which allows the reader to see the inner workings of each young woman’s consciousness. Though not separated by chapter or section breaks, pronounced differences in tone and expression allow the reader to recognize the shift of narrator quite readily. This tri-voiced narrative thus endows each character with a sense of immediacy and presence in the text. Rather than moving from one character to another, or from one event to another, in a purely linear fashion, the narrative foregrounds the simultaneity of the protagonists’ experiences. The narration’s three interior voices grant the reader access to each girl’s private thoughts, dreams, and emotions. Notably, we also become aware of their distressing feelings of isolation and desire for human contact—which give the novel a poignant and sadly ironic dimension because of the apparent closeness of the girls’ friendship and the way in which the novel itself has intertwined the girls’ running narrative. They share proximity, and their lives (and voices) are intertwined, yet they remain emotionally and psychologically isolated, a painful sign of the failings of patriarchal structures to provide security and social bonds.

The composite narrative structure expresses the complicated nature of each girl’s identity and social position. In fact, one of As meninas’s greatest strengths is its unwillingness to fall back on stereotypes—whether stereotypes originating from within the framework of the traditional family or those emerging in reaction to the family. The novel refuses to typecast its characters. For example, Lia’s father, the Nazi-sympathizer who in another novel might represent the totalitarian patriarchal figure par excellence, here actually appears as a good and caring father; though still a distant one given that he lives in Bahia far from Lia’s life in São Paulo. In a similar way, the main characters cannot be reduced to mere caricature (Lorena as pining romantic; Lia as militant student activist; Ana Clara as unstable drug addict). Instead, the novel dismantles these stereotypes by examining each girl’s conflicted feelings about the roles she has turned to in reaction to the stifling and limited identities assigned to her by her family and society. The novel questions each girl’s idealized, revolutionary, and progressive ideals and demonstrates how her choices do not necessarily lead to escape, freedom, and happiness. Peggy Sharpe notes that this characterizes much of Telles’s fiction: “Despite their strength and sheer courage, these characters are usually unable to complete the process of metamorphosis that would free them from their solitude, decadence, and the lack of identity” (79). One of As meninas’s haunting aftereffects derives from the fact that despite the protagonists’ unusual courage in resisting societal pressure and oppression, their resistance appears to fail in some crucial way.

This tragic failing finds expression in As meninas through a rhetorical strategy that Elaine Showalter calls “a ‘double-voiced discourse’ that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant” (201). In this way, As meninas reproduces the so-called traditional voice of Brazil’s patriarchal heritage while simultaneously showing how this heritage has failed the main characters. A careful examination of each protagonist’s identity and thoughts demonstrates the degree to which the text interrogates the dark side of Brazil’s traditional morals; that is to say, the vestiges, ruins, and remnants of patriarchal social structure.

Lorena and the Emptiness of Marriage

Lorena, the character whose voice opens and closes the novel, most immediately seems connected to Brazil’s conservative, patriarchal tradition. As noted above, Lorena Vaz Leme comes from a land-owning, upper-class family. Refined and educated, Lorena loves and often quotes Latin. Her manners and carefully constructed image, however, overlay an anxious preoccupation about her family’s tragic decline. Over the course of the novel, she reveals that the accidental shooting of one of her brothers by another brother has been a significant factor contributing to her family’s downfall. This tragedy apparently drove her father to commit suicide. Traumatized by his own guilt, the surviving brother withdraws from society. With no one to administer the finances, the family finds itself forced to sell its rural estate and begins to break apart. Lorena moves to São Paulo to study while her mother lives off the family’s dwindling assets.

Lorena’s attitudes about marriage and family expose the moral decline of the family as an institution in mid-twentieth-century Brazil. Though Lorena’s own family hovers on the edge of disintegration and hardly seems to offer the protection and support that society traditionally ascribes to families, Lorena clings to the belief that the institution of marriage will bring stability to her life. For example, Lorena pins her future happiness on a relationship with an older man she refers to only as M. N., a gynecologist who is already married with five children. Lorena fixates on the idea of marrying M. N. and even fantasizes about his wife dying of leukemia. She idealizes marriage as the source of both peace and happiness and the solution to her emotional instability. In contrast, Lorena’s militant and progressive friend Lia deplores the idea of marriage as old-fashioned and oppressive: “Quem mais quer se casar, Lorena? Quem? Só os padres e as prostitutas. E um ou outro homossexual, entende” (Telles, As meninas 70). Nonetheless, in spite of Lia’s outspoken criticism, Lorena responds internally:

Quis dizer: eu, eu! Adoraria me casar com M. N., não existe uma idéia mais jóia, queria me casar com ele, sou frágil, insegura. Preciso de um homem em tempo integral. Com toda a papelada em ordem, acredito demais em papel, herdei isso da mamãezinha. Agora ela esnoba a papelada antiga mas é tarde, os arquivos não estão nas gavetas, estão na cabeça.

(70)

Lorena asserts she has inherited from her mother a belief in the institutional power of marriage. Referring to the documents proving the family’s existence, Lorena states, “não estão nas gavetas, estão na cabeça.” But although she comes from an elite family, and despite her privileged position as a law student, which would seem both to provide her with social capital and to serve as the basis for self-confidence, Lorena feels fragile and insecure. Rather than providing support and comfort, the traditional family as an institution emerges in the novel in accordance with what Nina Auerbach elsewhere generally describes as a “fragile repositor[y] of cruelty, illusion, and death” (265). Lorena initially looks to marriage as the foundation for identity, believing that as long as marriage eludes her, she will flounder in inactivity and self-doubt; hence her yearning for not merely a relationship with M. N. but the marriage certificate in hand. Here, in a moment of double-voiced clarity, Lorena fails to see what is clear to the reader: marriage as institution and documentation alone will not fill the hollowness of her own emotional insecurity. Despite Lorena’s belief to the contrary, the papelada (the marriage certificate) cannot compensate for the affective failings of the institution of marriage.

As the novel progresses, the control marriage exercises over social behaviors and financial stability becomes more oppressive and more pronounced. In response to this oppression, Lorena develops a self-awareness that her own preoccupations lie not so much with marriage as with sex and her own virginity. During the course of the narrative, Lorena—except in one singular moment—never leaves her room and spends most of her time in the bathtub of her private room, brooding over her love life and virginity, fantasizing about making love, and pining over M. N. and his lack of attention towards her. At one point, she rehearses a previous conversation in which Lia interrogates her about her love life:

Lia:

Por acaso faz parte de algum desses movimentos de libertação da mulher?

Lorena:

Também não. Só penso na minha condição.

Lia:

Trata-se então de uma jovem alienada?

Lorena:

Por favor, não me julgue, só me entreviste. Não sei mentir, estaria mentindo se dissesse que me preocupo com as mulheres em geral, me preocupo só comigo, estou apaixonada. Ele é casado, velho, milhares de filhos. Completamente apaixonada. Lia: Uma pergunta indiscreta, posso? Você é virgem?

Lorena:

Virgem. …

Lia:

Quer dizer que não são amantes. Será ousadia minha perguntar o motivo?

Lorena:

Ele não quer. Nem me procura mais, faz um montão de dias que nem me telefona.

Lia:

Mas trata-se de um impotente? De um homossexual? Se não me falha a memória, ouvi qualquer coisa sobre filhos, não ouvi?

Lorena:

Ele é um gentleman.

(Telles, As meninas 159)

The interview highlights the distinct difference between Lia’s social and political engagement, which will be discussed further below, and Lorena’s personal, self-centered concerns. Lorena does not worry about the women’s liberation movements that Lia so rigorously believes in, nor even women’s rights in general, but rather her own condition. Yet, far from the simple-minded and prudish narcissist that Lia believes her to be, Lorena does not maintain her virginity for the reasons Lia assumes. At a later point, she reflects on one of her mother’s oft-repeated warnings: “O tesouro de uma moça é a virgindade,’ ouvi mãezinha dizer mais de uma vez às mocinhas que trabalhavam na casa da fazenda. Como nunca mais fez essa advertência, calculo que o tesouro só era válido para aquele tempo. E para aquele gênero de mocinhas, filhas de colonos ou órfãs” (197). Virginity, according to Lorena’s mother, should be treasured as an economic value, and Lorena appears to recognize the socio-economic forces that undergird it. Lorena explains this so-called traditional perspective on virginity as a function both of historical moment—suggesting this attitude was perhaps only justified during an earlier period of time—and class—indicating that this attitude only applied to girls from lower-economic households. Lorena suggests with this comment that as Brazilian society has progressively changed, the economic value placed on women has likewise changed, given that the roles to which women have typically been limited have changed. This is a change marked by a population shift from rural to urban zones and also by increasing educational opportunities and even legal advances for women.⁵ Nevertheless, although Lorena dismisses the traditional attitude about virginity that explicitly ties economic value to women’s bodies, Lorena’s own affirmations reveal that by seeking to preserve her virginity, she is participating and in effect legitimizing the patriarchal system that controls and marginalizes women. Thus, while Lorena expresses a keen critical awareness of the values embedded in traditional views of marriage and family, Lorena’s personal beliefs and actions remain deeply conditioned by these patriarchal attitudes.

Lia and Revolutionary Contempt for Sexual Mores

Much like Lorena, Lia also has faced nearly identical pressures and anxieties from her family regarding marriage and gender roles. Lia’s family wants her to receive a diploma, a document valued by society as a tangible sign of upward mobility, much like the marriage certificate Lorena’s mother worries about. And, like Lorena’s family, they expect Lia to follow traditional patterns and step into traditional roles. It is interesting to note, too, the way in which Lia’s family’s concerns are tied to certain places: the engagement party occurs in the parlor, the wedding happens in the Church, the grandchildren multiply with the entire family living in the same house. For Lia’s parents, the traditional morality of the family is not just concerned with propriety but with property. In this sense, Lia’s father is irritated over the “apartment-building curse” not only because it signifies the changing nature of families—large, extended families cannot easily live together in the tight quarters of an apartment—but because it also indicates urban degradation and lowering property values, an upsetting socioeconomic step backwards in the minds of Lia’s parents.

This anxiety over both property and propriety, and in particular sexual morality, eventually provokes Lia to leave home. And, in fact, her affiliation with an anti-government revolutionary group originates in her contempt for the traditional socioeconomic values of her parents. Later in the novel, Lia finds herself on a clandestine assignment in close quarters with a novice member of the militant group. Lia uses the code name Rosa, while her inexperienced associate’s code name is Pedro. As they pass the time, their conversation centers on the oppressive demands of their families. Pedro, for example, confesses how his family reacted when they learned of his involvement at an anti-government demonstration: “Acho que tenho mais medo da gente lá de casa do que da polícia. Meu irmão mais velho faz parte daquela onda de tradição e família, você precisa ver como ficou histérico” (Telles, As meninas 131). Hearing this, Lia responds by confessing that she left her parents and moved to the city because of a scandalous relationship she had with one of her girlfriends: “Foi um amor profundo e triste, a gente sabia que se desconfiassem íamos sofrer mais. Então era preciso esconder nosso segredo como um roubo, um crime” (128). After a time, however, Lia states that the relationship turned sour because of the constant secrecy and the pressures they felt from their families: “Não éramos amantes mas cúmplices. Ficamos cerimoniosas. Desconfiadas. O jogo perdeu a graça, ficou amargo” (128). Both of their families panicked as they realized the nature of the relationship: “Meu pai percebeu tudo e ficou calado. Minha mãe teve suas adivinhações e ficou em pânico, queria me casar urgente com o primo. O vizinho também servia, um viúvo que tocava violoncello. Fez tudo pra me agarrar pelo pé mas catei meu nécessaire e vim” (128). Fearful of the social repercussions that her homosexual activities might produce, the family tries to marry off their daughter. They want to control and limit her behavior, but Lia refuses and leaves.

Like Lorena’s, Lia’s reaction to the family’s moral values is to move out and distance herself from her family. But once separated from their families, their behavior is quite different. In contrast to her perceptions of Lorena’s conservative behavior, Lia believes in experimenting all that life offers, and although she chooses a heterosexual lifestyle, she is angered by the fear that her family, that society, expresses over sexuality. She relates, “Minha tia-avó ficou tão avariada com o peso do sexo que se escondeu num convento, virou freira. Uma outra tia que gostava de polêmica fez tantas que acabou puta. O mesmo medo, o mesmo medo. Se a gente não tivesse mais medo” (133). Lia argues that this fear originates in the morality of the family and is what has led to the problems of society. She believes that freedom, justice, and social equality will only be achieved when individuals are able to conquer their fears and promote love in all its forms.

Ana Clara and the Yearning for Stability

Similar to her friends Lia and Lorena, Ana Clara experiences a heightened sense of sexuality, which has been conditioned by the value of virginity within patriarchal morality and by her poor socioeconomic origins. Unlike her friends, Ana Clara never knew her father and her mother was forced into a life of prostitution to survive. Ana Clara was beaten as a child and raped as an adolescent. She learns early in life that she is valued primarily for her physical appearance, and, consequently, she is more keenly aware than Lia and Lorena of the power her sexuality affords. Without financial resources or the support of her family, Ana Clara utilizes her good looks and sexuality to survive and improve her financial and social stability. Though her boyfriend is a drug dealer, and though she herself becomes an addict, Ana Clara places her hopes in a future marriage to a wealthy physician who takes interest in her. Ana Clara believes this relationship will provide her with the money and status she so enviously sees in Lorena’s and Lia’s lives. Yet, the thought of this older doctor repulses her, and she refers to him as the “escamoso,” the scaly one. The possibility of this relationship is contingent, however, on her being a virgin, and so Ana Clara considers having an “operation” to restore her virginity:

Aí é que está. Fico virgem, pomba. Caso com o escamoso destranco a matrícula e faço meu curso. Brilhante. Nas férias viajo pra comprar coisas ele já disse que adora viajar aquele. Ah que coincidência porque eu também. Operação fácil. Loreninha me empresta. Vai comigo. Generosa a Lena. Então. Sempre me tira das trancadas.

(Telles, As meninas 45)

Here, similar to the way in which Lorena understands the economic value of sexuality, Ana Clara likewise reveals acute awareness of the way society has objectified and defined women’s sexuality. It is by no means incidental that Ana Clara’s other hopes for making money center on a career in modeling. But Ana Clara’s response to these societal demands is both pragmatic and progressive, albeit highly idealized. Knowing it is the only resource she has that is valued by society, Ana Clara determines to utilize her sexuality to her favor whenever possible. In fact, as Renata Wasserman notes, she refers to the operation of repairing/reconstructing her virginity in the terms of a public works project: “virginity-restoration, spoken of as if it were an urban renewal project, ‘mending the South End’” (Central at the Margin 93). If she undergoes the operation, this will allow her to marry, which will in turn enable her to return to school and finish her degree. This marriage will furthermore give her social and financial mobility and purchasing power.

Though Ana Clara understands the way she is valued by society and how she can use her sexuality to her own advantage, she hesitates to embrace marriage as an economic and social system. This is due in part to the fact that she does love her boyfriend, Max, in spite of his own pitiable social status. This is a love that to her seems ultimately irrational, since Max can offer her no future mobility or social advancement. Furthermore, her situation is complicated when she realizes that she has become pregnant. After making this discovery, she cries silently to herself, “Max, estou grávida. Que é que eu faço que é que eu faço” (Telles, As meninas 84). The desperation that leads to this lament also causes Ana Clara to contemplate seeking an abortion, which she sees as the only way whereby she can attempt a return to a virgin-like condition so as to be able to marry the “scaly one” and acquire the security and status she so desires. In a poignant distortion of the way a woman’s right to choose is formulated today, Ana Clara feels pressured to seek an abortion not as an expression of her own individuality and freedom but because of the monolithic weight of a society in which her worth—as an unmarried young woman—is determined solely by her virginity. Under the weight of this pressure, Ana Clara hesitates and remains uncommitted to any course of action. Just as Lorena and Lia independently both eschew the roles imposed on them by their families and society, Ana Clara also resists giving in to the roles that society has determined for her.

Dismantling Gendered Stereotypes

Though Lorena, Lia, and Ana Clara exhibit strikingly different personalities and backgrounds, they are alike in this respect: they cannot easily be defined according to the standard roles of society and much less by family structures. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why As meninas has so forcefully entered the canon of Brazilian literature: the novel refuses to reduce its characters to mere clichés and instead explores the complex realities behind social stereotypes. In fact, the text’s three-voiced narrative structure continuously undermines not only the stereotyped images we as readers might have of the three girls, but it also undermines the images they have of each other, revealing that the three protagonists are themselves not immune to our human proclivity to typecast. For example, at the opening of the novel, Lorena views Lia as a passionate militant, but one whose passions will eventually mellow with age: “Vejo Lião uma mãe gordíssima e felicíssima, sorrindo meio irônica para as passadas guerrilhas, juvenilidades, meu senhor, juvenilidades!” (Telles, As meninas 62). In a similar vein, Lorena later reduces herself and her two friends to three ideas (love, money, and revolution): “Se eu não falasse tanto em fazer amor, se Ana Clara não falasse tanto em enriquecer, se Lião não falasse noite e dia em revolução” (113). Nonetheless, despite such typecasts, each girl’s running interior monologue challenges her outward appearance, creating a disconnection between the way they are viewed by others (and consequently the expectations that others have of them) and the way they identify themselves.

The novel’s three-voiced narration also allows the author to bring conflicting positions and arguments to bear on one another. While the interior logic of each girl’s arguments and positions seems sound, it is often called into question when they dialogue with others. For example, late in the novel Lia visits Lorena’s mother to receive some money as a loan. Before entering the house, Lia chats with the family’s chauffeur about his children. After the man mentions the joy his son gives him, Lia asks about his daughter, and the conversation turns to education and women’s rights. While the chauffeur represents precisely the structure and values of the traditional family that so alienate and irritate Lia, he also challenges the practicality of her ideals, calling them “luxuries” available only to girls from rich families. In fact, when viewed from the context of the novel as a whole, the chauffeur’s fears are emphasized to the reader by Ana Clara’s existence as a “poor girl” who, according to the chauffeur’s logic, teeters on the brink of tragedy because she refuses to embrace the traditional roles dictated by society. Though spoken by a family patriarch concerned about preserving the family order, the chauffeur’s comments nevertheless suggest how Lia’s ideals might fail someone like Ana Clara.

Nor is Lia a static stereotype of militant opposition. During a particularly emotional conversation with the Mother Superior in which Mother Alix asks Lia about her involvement with her revolutionary group—and the group’s violent measures—Lia confesses that her ideals are changing.

Não, Madre Alix. Confesso que estou mudando, a violência não funciona, o que funciona é a união de todos nós para criar um diálogo. Mas já que a senhora falou em violência vou lhe mostrar uma—digo e procuro o depoimento que levei pra mostrar o Pedro e esqueci.—Quero que ouça o trecho do depoimento de um botânico perante a Justiça, ele ousou distribuir panfletos numa fábrica. Foi preso e levado à caserna policial, ouça aqui o que ele diz, não vou ler tudo: Ali interrogaram-me durante vinte e cinco horas enquanto gritavam, traidor da pátria, traidor!

(Telles, As meninas 146)

Lia proceeds to read Mother Alix the full deposition of the brutal torture of a young man who had been arrested. This emotional scene is significant for several reasons. First, it is the only documentary moment of the novel, the only moment when the narration turns away from the intensely private inner lives of the three protagonists to denounce and expose openly the state-sponsored torture then occurring in Brazil. In terms of the narrative strategy of the novel, the stark presentation to the reader of this painful testimony not only serves to denounce the activities of the military government but also heightens our understanding of the intense and agonizing psychological conditions motivating Lia, and, by extension, Lorena and Ana Clara. For Lia, this is also a decisive personal moment in which she challenges the authority of the Church and the patriarchal system symbolized by the Mother Superior by rising and speaking truth to power: “Não consigo mais ficar sentada, me levanto. Assumo o risco” (146). At the level of metanarrative, this risk is emblematized in the novel’s very publication.

After reading the deposition, however, Lia finds herself speechless when Mother Alix reveals that she knows the case well and has been meeting with the imprisoned man’s mother and has in fact petitioned the Church’s hierarchy to intercede on his behalf. Just as Mother Alix’s impressions of Lia remain uncertain, Lia discovers that she too has typecast Mother Alix. Before they separate, the Mother Superior asks, “—Posso lhe dar uma epígrafe? É do Gênesis, aceita?—Pergunta e sorri. Sai da tua terra e da tua parentela e da casa de teu pai e vem para a terra que eu te mostrarei. É o que você está fazendo—acrescentou. Hesitou um pouco:—É o que eu fiz” (148). Time and again the novel dismantles the stereotypes and surface identities upon which so many social relationships are constructed to reveal the political, historical, economic, and social complexities of individual lives. Just as the Mother Superior is more revolutionary and socially engaged than Lia would have ever believed, Lia does not harbor the violent revolutionary intent that others would ascribe to her. In a similar vein, Ana Clara is not a pastiche of an addict motivated purely by money, and Lorena is far more thoughtful and intelligent than Lia gives her credit for. In fact, at the conclusion of the novel it is surprisingly Lorena and not Lia who ultimately finds the courage to take action toward the story’s resolution.

Patriarchal Oppression in the State and the Family

While the political overtones in As meninas are more explicit at times than others, the novel’s critique of the decadence of patriarchal morality remains constant. Indeed, the first-person narratives of Lorena, Lia, and Ana Clara reveal the scope and extent to which patriarchal discourse has persistently shaped their identities and personal lives and, by extension, the institutions and structure of the society in which they live. This is an argument frequently made by Lia, as when she says to Mother Alix, “A senhora me desculpe, Madre Alix, mas Ana é o produto desta nossa bela sociedade” (Telles, As meninas 144). But despite their apparent lack of social engagement, both Lorena and Ana Clara also demonstrate the relationship between family values and how those values are appropriated and narrated by society at large. In this sense, As meninas painfully reveals how deeply patriarchal structures have been extended and replicated into the social fabric itself.

While avoiding a didactic tone, the novel’s subtle representation of patriarchal discourse suggests its insidious permanence and also the difficulty of contesting it, despite the at-times militant resistance mounted by figures like Lia. To a degree, As meninas accomplishes this through the very absence of the girls’ fathers. As mentioned above, when Lorena was young, her father committed suicide following the tragic death of one of Lorena’s brothers. In Lia’s case, because of her parents’ pressures for her to marry, Lia leaves the family and travels from Bahia to São Paulo, and her only contact with them assumes the form of a few brief letters and phone conversations. Ana Clara, for her part, has never even met her father and has no notion of his identity.

Cristina Ferreira Pinto refers to these father figures as decentered fathers, stating, “A descentralização do Pai como ponto determinante e valorizador da família reflete-se na apresentação … de elementos que expressam uma orientação diferente (ou o fracasso) do padrão estabelecido pelas Instituições sociais, isto é, pela Lei, pelo Pai: a promiscuidade sexual, o adultério, a homossexualidade e a impotência sexual masculina” (119). Accordingly, despite the physical absence of father figures, their far-reaching shadows have a profound impact on each girl’s sense of self. More so than Lia and Lorena, Ana Clara suffers beneath the tyranny of families, that is, the tyranny of family status. She is acutely aware of her lack of family because she has been taught that her value and self-worth are in part determined by her genealogical roots. For Ana Clara, not knowing the identity of her father is akin to having no identity herself. She is thus cast in a role that she is powerless to change. It is the tyranny of the birth certificate—a document that for those who have one (or the right one) affords access to the communal benefits society offers. Eager to change her status and be included in this world, Ana Clara invents various different stories to explain her missing family, yet these stories cannot change the fact that her birth certificate still indicates “father unknown.”⁶

For Ana Clara, the question of her unknown father lies at the root of her struggle to feel accepted socially, and she bristles at the fact that she is denied a legitimate place in society only because she has been labeled illegitimate. In the absence of her father, a point of origin who can legitimize her place in society, Ana Clara turns to the fact that she is white and to biology to legitimize herself. In doing so, she raises the question of Lorena’s and Lia’s possible mixed-race ancestry, suggesting that on the basis of skin color, she may have a more legitimate claim to high social standing than they do. Nonetheless, despite making this observation, Ana Clara recognizes that money and economic power hold far more weight than racial background and—both consequently and pragmatically speaking—her only hopes for obtaining social capital and legitimacy lie in the possibility of marrying the established doctor she inwardly loathes. This hope in the end is in vain, however, for Ana Clara’s life ends tragically from a drug overdose. Despite her best intentions, Ana Clara labored under the weight of a society that had marginalized her, a weight that proved too great for her to bear. As Lorena reflects, “Lião vive pregando que a sociedade expulsa o que não pode assimilar. Ana foi expulsa pela espada flamejante” (252).

Whereas Ana Clara suffers because of her lack of family connections and consequently marginalized position in society, Lia’s problem is the inverse—her family’s bonds lay claim to her so strongly that she feels trapped and suffocated. The strength of these bonds is symbolized by her father, a German immigrant with Nazi sympathies. Lia’s father would seem to represent the authoritarian patriarchal father par excellence, yet in spite of his past political connections, he frustrates the patriarchal stereotypes as a loving and caring man who provides moral and financial support for his daughter. But Lia resists the demands her family’s love makes on her. For Lia, this type of love and loyalty hold clear political implications. For example, she highlights a passage from one of her books:

A Pátria prende o homem com um vínculo sagrado. É preciso amá-la como se ama a religião, obedecer-lhe como se obedece a Deus. Épreciso darmo-nos inteiramente a ela, tudo lhe entregar, votar-lhe tudo. É preciso amá-la gloriosa ou obscura, próspera ou desgraçada.

(58, italics in original

Her interest here is not only the kind of love individuals owe to their country but also the way in which individuals are bound to the state. While she does not explicitly connect this passage with her feelings for her family, the passage does cause her to question the nature of familial love and the limits of patriotism. She refuses the idea of love for the sake of love, or patriotism for the sake of patriotism, and she ultimately rejects the sentiment of blind patriotic love expressed in the quotation, though she might argue that her participation in anti-government activities is motivated by a love for a more abstract or idealized conception of Brazil rather than the image of Brazil represented by the current political regime.

On this point, both Lia and Lorena share common ground. They feel love for their families but simultaneously recognize the dangers of yielding to or even indulging in the decadent values their families represent. Instead, they both resist surrendering to the roles prescribed for them by patriarchal tradition and seek their own uncertain paths. Accordingly, the novel proposes a radical change for both family relationships and even society as a whole in which the family is not structured by the patriarchal head. As Lia explains to Mother Alix:

Um novo modelo de família vai surgindo, uma cujo cabeça já não é o todo-poderoso senhor da ‘aristocracia’ rural. Embora continue sendo o ‘chefe’ da família, o pai já não tem poder absoluto; a mulher, por outro lado, conquanto tenha visto novas oportunidades abrirem-se para ela, enfrenta ainda desconfianças e preconceitos enraizados em si mesmo e nos outros.

(118)

Conclusion

In a way, all three protagonists find themselves searching for a new foundation for identity in the gaping fissures of a fractured patriarchal society. The novel shows the way in which society has pigeonholed each of them into defined and marginalized roles: Lorena, the detached lovesick university student; Lia, the revolutionary; and Ana Clara, the drug addict. Even the novel’s title As meninas may suggest how society has infantilized these characters and circumscribed the possibilities available to them. Yet Lorena, Lia, and Ana Clara are not mere pastiche, and this novel does not celebrate a feminist alter-reality. Rather, As meninas reveals that although the young women hover within and around the stereotypical identities to which they seem to have been condemned by society, each of them resists these assigned roles.

Nevertheless, by revealing their inner struggles and yearnings, As meninas also subtly questions of the so-called feminist alternatives offered to women. In doing so, the novel avoids the model of other feminist novels, as Susan Quinlan and Peggy Sharpe note that “perpetuam convenções sócio-culturais já firmemente estabelecidas ao invés de criar tradições literárias novas” (16). As meninas criticizes the staid family structures of patriarchal morality but also examines what freedoms are left when those structures break down and the father fades as the authoritative origin of social morality. The alternative is not structureless. We still find each of the girls looking for happiness through heterosexual relationships. Yet for Lorena, Lia, and Ana Clara, the novel shows how the power dynamics of their relationships are not the same as those in the so-called traditional patriarchal model. As the girls yearn for this reconstructed happiness, society unfortunately appears unwilling to grant it, and thus the protagonists are forced to work from out of marginalized social roles, and tragically Ana Clara is unable to escape this position. Ana Clara’s death, which is prefigured in the novel’s opening pages, reflects the painful struggle all three girls must face because of society’s domestic decadence: “E estamos morrendo. Dessa ou de outra maneira não estamos morrendo? Nunca o povo esteve tão longe de nós, não quer nem saber. E se souber ainda fica com raiva, o povo tem medo, ah! como o povo tem medo” (Telles, As meninas 15). Yet, in the face of this fear and the tragedy of Ana Clara’s death, the novel’s moving conclusion offers a potent expression of hope. Ana Clara’s death, the result of a drug overdose, unexpectedly moves both Lia and Lorena to action in order to protect the nuns from police enquiries and investigation. After making the decision to lay Ana Clara to rest in their own way, both Lia and Lorena turn towards the future: Lia departs into self-imposed exile and Lorena returns to her university studies. The novel does not provide an easy resolution regarding future roles and paths that lie ahead for Lia and Lorena, yet both women ultimately take courage in the joyful possibilities of their own futures.