Mimeses da relação triádica entre identidade,cultura e poder em três contos de Edna O’brien

Abstract

This work analyzes the short stories “A Scandalous Woman”, “The Creature” and “Honeymoon” from the collection A Scandalous Woman, by the Irish writer Edna O’Brien. The central aspect of this study is to verify how the representation of the construction of identity and the constitution of the protagonists take place. Those representations were analyzed through different narrative aspects, in order to understand their perception and location, under the configuration of the mimesis of the relationship triad between identity, culture and power. In the first short story, the focus is on verifying how the protagonist's identity construction is represented, from the point of view of the witness narrator, whose problem involves justifying the background that the State's and Catholic Church's power fields impose on identities. In the second short story, we concentrated on the study of the space of the house as a shelter for the protagonist's constitution through daydreaming, under the conjuncture of verifying how their actions take place in the cultural environment. Finally, in the third short story, the narrated time brings as a resistance the configuration of a reality systematized by a power structured by the ideal of an Irish Nationalist State, configured by the Constitution of 1937, as a boundary that justifies the short story's protagonist's choices. Thus, in line with the analysis proposal of each text, it is visible how is the representation of the construction of the protagonists' identity, problematized in the environment of culture and power, from the narrative elements, such as point of view, space and time. As theoretical assumptions, texts about the identity and the historical trajectory of Irish feminist movements will be presented, imbricated to O'Brien's literary production, which give support to understand the developments of the central theme of this work.