Os homens do Teatro de Nelson Rodrigues em face à sexualidade e ao amor

Abstract

The thesis discusses how the men in Nelson Rodrigues' theater deal with sexuality, alterity and love. It is argued that Rodrigues' dramaturgical work offers a foundation with which it’s possible to explore desire’s tragic dimension. For a long time, men were not considered an issue to be discussed and, even today, it is less frequent to find studies on men than on women. Based on Rodrigues’ body of work, the general objective is defined as to analyze the fantasies that support the male position regarding sex and love, such as they are discussed from the psychoanalytic perspective, through some of the male characters of Nelson Rodrigues' theater. More specifically, the objectives were: to locate how the aesthetic project of Nelson Rodrigues' theater reveals aspects of unconscious fantasies; explore, with the play Álbum de Família [Family Album], the theme of the subjectivity constitution process and its consequences for sexuality; situate the occurrence of the defense against castration; extract representations that reveal aspects of the male characters’ fantasy in relation to female characters; and to investigate the characters’ mishaps in recognizing the alterity represented by the feminine. These three objectives were achieved through the appreciation of the plays Os sete gatinhos [The seven kittens], A mulher sem pecado [The woman without sin] and Toda nudez será castigada [All nudity shall be punished]. The psychoanalytic method is adopted, seeking to extract testimonies of the unconscious from the plays. The main theoretical references are the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, exploring the themes of the Oedipus complex, castration, fantasy, desire, sexual difference and alterity through them. In the discussed plays, the inevitable participation of castration in the love dynamics between men and women and the frequent incidence of sexual mismatch were found. This is shown through incestuous desires, to which the approximation to realization causes either madness or death; through the men’s impotence against the women's desires’ manifestation; and through the refusal to recognize women's subjectivity, degrading them. At the end of the research, it was concluded that the male Rodriguean characters’ misfortunes are triggered by the embarrassment when confronted with an alterity and by difficulties when dealing with the angst that results from the desiring condition.