The female representation under the guidance of the sublime language in Espectros and its effects on Cecilia Meireles's mature oeuvres

Abstract

The research aims to investigate the feminine role under the sublime language orientation in the first book by Cecília Meireles, Espectros (1919) and in her following poetry work considered as a representation from her mature poet phase, such as Viagem (1939), Vaga Música (1942), Mar Absoluto e Outros Poemas (1945) and Retrato Natural (1949). Touched by the symbolist and decadent influences, and by consequence the romantic tradition that permeate these aesthetics orientations, Espectros shows poems orbiting around the full developed mythical female roles surrounded by an atmosphere of exoticism, mystery and fatality. Lined from the sublime conventions which allow us infer a recurrent motif here called the "sublime feminine", giving form to the femme fatales, and the phantasmagoric women that manage and nourish the feminine images with shapes that suggest a connection between the femininity and the mystery, death and supernatural ideas. Although the strict link to the symbolist conventions have been soften over Cecília Meireles more accomplished poetry to open space to the daily experience and covered with a pungent humanity, the sublime nature and its attached tradition still being felt in this production, regardless the resigned and particular view. It is what is seen by the sublime feminine motif that, in works like "Viagem", "Vaga Música" and "Retrato Natural", stop covering the exotic and mythical figures, but defile with an appeal to the mystery and supernatural, common experiences such as abandonment, exploration, grieve and frustrated love, configuring female images full of humanity, maintaining the bonds with the sublime imagery already seemed in Espectros. From Espectros to Cecília Meireles later work, the feminine sublime figures, at first exotic women carriers of fate and death under the detachment of the romantic orientation's exoticism appear as objects of contemplation, become subjects, poem protagonist, witnessing the adaptation process of the sublime diction to the common experience that foregrounds the human contradictions and afflictions. The reiteration of the sublime feminine motif study, from Espectros to Cecilia Meireles later work, we propound, offers a contribution not only to the exploitation of singularities that integrate the mature work to the inaugural, must say, rarely envisaged by the critics, but also show the particular way that Cecília Meireles appropriates the romantic-symbolist tradition, first reference to her poetry, as a form to like her individual aesthetic identity and, over this process, questioning and resigning this tradition postulates, so is the sublime language, our object of consideration.