Reminiscences of Fin-de-Siècle Gender Conflict in 20th-Century Brazilian Literature

Abstract Book of the 12th International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities and Education

Year: 2026

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Reminiscences of Fin-de-Siècle Gender Conflict in 20th-Century Brazilian Literature

Matheus Silva

ABSTRACT:

This paper aims to investigate the permanence and development of gender conflict in 20th-century Brazilian literature, considering the transcultural reconfiguration of recurring themes from fin-de-siècle European narratives. A recurring motif in the works of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde and Frank Wedekind, the so-called “war of the sexes” reflects both the perception of moral decadence and the crisis of masculinity, frequently associated with the construction of the femme fatale and with male anxiety in face of destabilized traditional gender roles. In order to analyze how these themes are reconstructed in the Brazilian context, this paper examines two modernist novels associated with a later stage of the mid-century movement known as “Brazilian Social Regionalism of the 1930s”: Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958) and Lucio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House (1959). Often classified as regionalist, both novels articulate gender conflicts in contexts marked by traditional social structures, apart from the ideals of modernization that characterize major Brazilian urban centers in the period. This research brings these novels into dialogue with fin-de-siècle European works, as well as with theoretical texts on sexuality and power relations by Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Robert Muchembled and Gerald Izenberg. Finally, it examines the critical reception of these novels, denoting how their authors engage their fiction as means to problematize the social debates of their time.

Keywords: 20th Century; Brazilian Literature; Gender Conflict; Literary Critics; Social Studies