O subversivo feminino na figura da vampira: um estudo comparativo dos contos “A nevrose da cor”, de Júlia Lopes de Almeida, e “Os demônios de Renfield”, de Natalia Borges Polesso

Abstract

Being a woman implies a complex network of cultural, social and political crossings within a patriarchal system. This subjugated identity threatens when established standards of conduct are broken, giving rise to subversion in the social sphere. Such transgressions can arise from symbologies in the writings of women who dare to discuss the female condition. This is what the brazilian writers Júlia Lopes de Almeida, a writer of the 19th and 20th centuries, and Natalia Borges Polesso, a contemporary author and researcher, do. The parallel between them occurs through the short stories “A nevrose da cor” (1903) and “Os demônios de Renfield” (2015), respectively, which employ the vampire character as a metaphor to address relevant themes such as sexual freedom, power dynamics and female desire. Thus, this work aims to analyze and describe comparatively the composition of the narrative structure of the two works, by means of the ruptures with female models and subversive symbols, highlighting their approximations and their distances. The methodology consists in the comparative method and close reading of selected excerpts for a detailed vocabulary and semantics analysis. The theoretical contribution relies on Butler (2022; 2023) to deal with gender subversion, Cixous (2022) and Woolf (2022) on the feminine condition in the culture, history and literature, Cohen (2000) and Lecouteux (2005) on the vampire figure, Jeha (2007) for the definition of moral evil, Chevalier and Gheerbrant (2015) for the analysis of the symbols, among other researchers and theoreticians relevant to the study and the other themes addressed. As a hypothesis, this study proposes that both Almeida and Polesso, with their female narrators, wrote their works using the vampire as a metaphor to subvert conceptions and assumptions of what it means to be a woman through symbolisms and transgressions inside and outside the literary text. The research reveals that the authors use symbolic elements to represent female figures out of a binary standard — such as blood, desire and the feminine —, threatening the dominant social organization. Therefore, it is concluded that the stories, despite the distance of time and content, dialogue to address the subversive feminine from the perspective of vampirism, bringing to the discourse themes about women’s rights, power spaces, and transgressive sexuality. Finally, the present work thanks the Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (Funcap) for its sponsorship during the research.