A reading of the femme fatale motif in poetry of Cruz e Sousa, under the perspective of the grotesque and the sublime

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the composition of the femme fatale motif in Broquéis (1893), in accordance with the categories of grotesque and of sublime, searching to emphasize the relations between this motif and the development of a plastic and suggestive poetry, formally innovative in the face of discursive tradition of Brazilian poetry and thematically singular. This motif differs the Cruz e Sousa´s poetry of the tradition of woman´s erotic representation in Brazilian lyric which was developed between the poles of the diaphanous muse of romanticism and the woman reduced to materiality by realistic poetry of the 1870s and 1880. The femme fatale in Broquéis articulates the grotesque deformation and the attraction of the mysterious experience of the sublime, may be considerate as a prism for the interpretation of typical tensions of Cruz e Sousa´s oeuvre. The Anguish of a consciousness divided between the material reality - which manifests itself in delusional and grotesque images -, and the expectative by a distant ideal - which manifests itself in dubious shape of the sublime -, marks all his oeuvre. The way that Cruz e Sousa composes the femme fatale enables the verification of her place in the tradition of symbolist poetry, that involves the influence of baudelairian lyric and aesthetic guidelines that are in the romanticism origin, that culminating in a contradictory and unsettling beauty typical of the poetry of modernity. The Cruz e Sousa´s femme fatale has implications not only on particularities of Cruz Sousa´s project, but on the historicity of his aesthetic choices too. Thus, these two perspectives are important to the investigation here proposed. Key-words: Brazilian Symbolism; Poetic Motifs, Brazilian Poetry, Grotesque, Sublime.