O Cabeleira entre a tradição e o cientificismo: a construção doherói sertanejo e o projeto educacional de Franklin Távora

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to examine the romance O Cabeleira by Franklin Távora as a key novel for the comprehension of part of the long process of formation of a national identity through literature, accomplished raised along the second half of century XIX. It also aims to highlight the perpetuation and up date of the substrata of the Portuguese medieval inheritance in our literary tradition, emphasizing the work of transformation and climatization of these substrata due to the critical appropriation made by the author. Távora’s creative imagination absorbed in the national repository, makes arise in O Cabeleira, medieval substrata in the construction of the outlaw hero, as well as in the structuralization of the tragic romantic history lived by the protagonist, in which love is faced as an atavic feeling, above of the good and of the evil, able to transform even the cruelest of the outlaws. However, the novel contemplates other intentions: besides divulging the “authentic national traditions”, the author tried to endorse the literary production in science and to defend the whole of education in the construction of a huge nation. Certain that natural science should have to be joined to literature in order to build a Brazilian nation, Franklin Távola orchestrate, in the inaugural romance of the “Literature of the North”, a double intention: the rescue of the national traditions through the history of the Cabeleira outlaw and the defense of the thesis stating that the education is the only means to save the sertanejo (inlander) – and the Brazilian people – from the barbarity and to raise Brazil to the civilizational plataform of European countries. The use of these ideals and certainties as literary material enabled the great variety of aspects present in the romance that emerge from a history registered both by historical chronicle and by the popular ballads about the terrible Cabeleira, nickname José Gomes, one of the first cangaceiros (bandits) from Pernambuco.