Mulher invisível: uma análise da representação do tema da invisibilidade da mulher na literatura e no cinema

Abstract

The book A vida invisível de Eurídice Gusmão (2016), written by Martha Batalha, presents the story of a middle-class woman, married, mother of two children, but dissatisfied with the restriction of her identity, life and duties to this domestic environment. Thus, unable to explore and use her many skills, beyond the life of a housewife, married woman and mother, Eurídice loses herself in an invisibility that reveals the patriarchal society of the golden years around the middle of the 20th century. The author, in a letter addressed to readers at the beginning of the book, expresses her intention to tell “the story of our grandmothers”, which can be understood as the life of women within a patriarchal system in the aforementioned period. Based on Batalha's work, a film directed by Karim Aïnouz with a similar title was released in 2019. Unlike the book, however, the film redistributes the narrative focus between the lives of Eurídice Gusmão and her sister Guida Gusmão, making the plot a drama about two women who continually search for each other throughout their lives. Despite having shared the same house and the same family as Eurídice in her early years, Guida finds herself in a much less comfortable situation from a structural and financial point of view, having to deal with the consequences of her choices throughout her life. This work proposed to comparatively analyze the representation of the invisibility of 20th century women in two works. Thus, we sought to analyze how the film translation alters this representation proposed by Batalha, with regard not only to the traditional white middle-class family model, but also to other women in situations of marginalization and discrimination, given the standards of the time. To this end, theoretical foundations from Translation Studies were used, mainly through Stam (2008), Cattrysse (1992), historical studies on women's lives in the golden years through Pinsky (2004), in addition to studies on cinema by Martin (1995) and on the representation of characters based on archetypes by Mark and Pearson (2003). The results showed that the film adaptation expands the diversity in the representation of the invisibility of women in the golden years in Brazilian society through the following resources: 1. the focus on key female characters, excluding many other stories presented in the novel and, in a certain way, subordinating the presence of male characters around women; 2. a contrast between two main axes, Eurídice and Guida, one within the pattern predicted and valued by social expectations and the other outside of it. Thus, the director of the film translation deepens the stories of the main characters and eliminates the story presented in the novel.