As relações de maternidades/maternagens em Verão no aquário, de Lygia Fagundes Telles

Abstract

This study analyzes the dynamics and effects of mother-daughter relationships in Lygia Fagundes Telles’s novel Verão no aquário (1963), focusing on the conflict-ridden coexistence between Raíza and Patrícia and its repercussions on the formation of female subjectivity. Set in the urban bourgeois milieu of São Paulo in the early 1960s, the study examines how the domestic space, far from being a neutral setting, functions as a site for the production of affections, silences, and normative expectations, articulating motherhood, filiation, authority, and social judgment. In addition to the mother-daughter relationship, the study considers the roles of other female characters, such as Marfa, aunt Graciana, and Dionísia, as they embody distinct positions regarding work, care, and the hierarchies that permeate the home and daily life, challenging the notion of motherhood as a homogeneous and natural destiny. By identifying Dionísia’s motherhood as a key interpretive framework for the novel, this thesis shifts the reading of Verão no aquário to show that its mother-child tensions are also intersected by the hierarchies of race, class, and care that underpin the bourgeois household. The research draws on feminist literary criticism and decolonial thought to shift away from readings traditionally centered on the characters’ inner lives and psychology, observing how the novel is also structured around historically persistent power regimes. In this sense, it engages with the notion of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2005) and the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2020), articulating them with contributions from Brazilian and Latin American feminism that allow us to understand inequality among women and the social distribution of care (Gonzalez, 1984), as well as the materiality of reproductive labor (Federici, 2017). Additionally, the study draws on research on motherhood and parenthood (Badinter, 1985; O’Reilly, 2007) and reflections on women’s writing and feminist criticism in Brazil (Telles, 1997; Hollanda, 2019/2020), also considering the home as a symbolic operator in fiction written by women (Xavier, 2012). By linking these references to the corpus, the hypothesis guiding this study is that Verão no aquário problematizes, on a symbolic level, the normative patterns of motherhood, filiation, and women’s identity by exposing the contradictions, silences, and conflicts that run through the relationships between mother and daughter. From this perspective, the novel demonstrates that female identity is not reduced to the fulfillment of a socially imposed destiny, linked to the idealization of the good mother and the good daughter. Thus, we propose that the narrative functions as a form of symbolic contestation of the idealizations that condition women’s experiences.