Perspectives on the Women Literary Travelers: City and Gender in Mrs. Dalloway and Quarenta Dias

Introduction

In recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in the possible connections between city history and literature, and between city representations and literature. Given that the city ​​encompasses collective memory and the formation of identities, this chapter is interested in establishing a discussion about urban literary narratives, gender, and memory. As stated by Dalcastagnè (2003), city space, today more than ever, is constitutive of characters, whether or not they’re nomadic.

The reflection that instigates the authors of the chapter is towards the potential of using literature as a source for urban history, considering the city as its character-genre. This will be undertaken through the presentation of two literary works written by women (a classic and a contemporary) that touch the theme, although temporally and spatially distinct: Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf and “Quarenta dias”, by Maria Valéria Rezende.

The novel, Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (2021 [1925]), was described by Alan Pauls (2017, para. 1) as “a perfect example of modernist fiction”. The story takes place on a single summer day in London (England), in 1923. Narrated through the characters' streams of consciousness, the novel invites us to wander through the city streets and the memories and thoughts awakened by observations of urban daily life. The idea of ​​investigating the author's view of the city in this novel comes from the search for a perspective of “travel” and “traveler” from female characters during their brief journeys through the narrated territory.

The novel Quarenta Dias, by Maria Valéria Rezende (2014) is structured in a diary format written by the character Alice, who is the protagonist and narrator. The story begins with Alice, who is a retired teacher, moving the northwest to the south of Brazil, leaving her hometown, João Pessoa to the “strange” Porto Alegre, at her daughter’s request. The diary registers, however, only start when she returns home after wandering for forty days in the streets of Porto Alegre searching for information about a missing fellow townsman. Throughout the text, the main interlocution of the character is with a Barbie doll, which is present on the cover of the diary.

Maria Valéria Rezende, born in 1942, is a contemporary brazilian writer, considered an “author of the in between, the people in transit, which allows her work to exceed frontiers” (Piaceski, 2019, p. 252). Aside from being a writer, Maria Valéria is also a nun and has dedicated many years of her life, since the 60’s, to popular education and to social works that allowed her to travel the world. According to Piaceski (2019, p. 251), Maria Valéria “is a writer without frontiers also in her approach, since she writes for adults and children, poetry as much as prose, addressing themes such as fear, loyalty, social relations, gender violence, illiteracy, slavery and forced labour, money shortage and hungers, between many others”.

The literary piece “Quarenta Dias”, not yet translated to other languages, was created by Rezende in a mix of fiction and personal experiences from her past and from the 15 days that she lived in Porto Alegre, in 2011, as an invitation of a literary project in which Brazilian novelists would spend a specific amount of time in a different state than the one they lived in, in order to create novels aimed at rediscovering Brazil. The author, then a resident of João Pessoa in the state of Paraíba, travelled to Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, the same steps taken by her character, Alice. Other resemblances between author and character’s life include the writing process of “Quarenta Dias” and the character’s diary in the novel. Maria Valéria compares it: