Female perspectives of a male narrator: Gender question in the Cyro dos Anjos’ novel O Amanuense Belmiro

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the different female representations in the novel O Amanuense Belmiro, by Cyro dos Anjos. The narrator-character, besides focusing on the conflict of male and female genders, formulates four sets of female profiles in order to understand the changes in a phallocentric society. Among the four sets of female representations, one of them is built by a single figure: Jandira, who reverses the ventriloquism game that takes place in the male utterance in the Brazilian literature, whose main representative is Machado de Assis, in his novel Dom Casmurro. It was possible to conclude that in the novel O Amanuense Belmiro the confrontation between these sets of female representations, passing from conservative to mythical and challenging, denounces the tensions that underlie the narrative of the novel, whose style was seen, up to now, as slowed by moderation of literary chronicle and mitigated by the conformed spirit of the narrator-character.