Impostors and Alienated Women: Passion, Politics and Passive Resistance in Camilo's A Brasileira de Prazins

Abstract

This article re-examines Camilo Castelo Branco's novel A Brasileira de Prazins (1882) in light of the title's identification of the novel's heroine as the exclusive property of her husband, Feliciano de Prazins. It will be argued that not only the fact that others impose their wills on Marta but also the lack of realistic alternatives to her arranged marriage reflect the unsatisfactory political solution of compromise imposed on Portugal after the popular Maria da Fonte revolution of the 1840s. The total indifference to Marta's own needs displayed by those around her (and her own apparent reaction in retreating into compensatory wish-fulfilment) reflect the author's own sense of the futility of political idealism as an agent of meaningful change at a time when the Republican movement was beginning to gain some popular support in Portugal, which Camilo expresses in his own recollections and reflections on the rebellion which forms the historical basis for the novel.

Key words:

• Camilo Castelo Branco
• A Brasileira de Prazins
• Maria da Fonte rebellion
• late 19^th-century Portugal
• Sebastianism/Sebastianismo
• patriarchy
• female hysteria
• arranged marriage
• marital rape

Notes

1 Padre Casimiro José Vieira, Apontamentos para a História da Revolução do Minho em 1846 ou da Maria da Fonte, escriptos pelo Padre Casimiro, Finda a Guerra, em 1847 (Braga: Typographia Lusitana, 1883).

2 See, for example, David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), 121–23. Birmingham accounts for the Maria da Fonte revolt largely in terms of rural resistance to the imposition of bureaucratic land titles over traditionally more informal, collective practices of land usage (121), combined with a stoking up of resentment against a threat of British interference: ‘These national sentiments led the Maria da Fonte women to remember the exiled Prince Miguel and proclaim him as their national saviour. His reign of terror in Lisbon was ignored or forgotten and the ideal of a pure royalist patriot gained wide appeal, spreading the rebellion and frightening the government’ (123).

3 Helder Macedo, ‘A Brasileira de Prazins: fragmentação e unidade’, Colóquio: Letras, 125–26 (1992), 25–30.

4 All textual references to Camilo's work are based on the Obras completas de Camilo Castelo Branco, ed. Justino Mendes de Almeida, 18 vols (Oporto: Lello & Irmão, Editores, 1982–2002), Vols VIII (1988) and XVI (1993); references will be indicated in the form: volume number, then page number(s).

5 See Macedo, ‘A Brasileira de Prazins: fragmentação e unidade’, 27.

6 See Macedo, ‘A Brasileira de Prazins: fragmentação e unidade’, 27.

7 Macedo, ‘A Brasileira de Prazins: fragmentação e unidade’, 27.

8 Mário Martins offers a detailed commentary on the exorcism of Marta recounted in the text, asserting that it is closely based on the recommendations of the seventeenth-century Frei Cândido Brognolo, OFM, as translated into Portuguese by Frei José de Jesus Maria in 1725. See Mário Martins, ‘A Brasileira de Prazins de Camilo Castelo Branco e o estudo da possessão diabólica’, Boletim da Casa de Camilo, Série 3, No. 6 (1985), 7–16. This article is immediately followed, in the same issue, by a further study, by Manuel Simões, of the same novel, ‘Brognolo e Camilo’ (17–49), which consists of an annotated juxtaposition, on facing pages, of excerpts from Brognolo and the text of Chapters 19 and 20 of A Brasileira de Prazins.

9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), 104.

10 Alexandre Cabral, ‘(A) Brasileira de Prazins', in Dicionário de Camilo Castelo Branco (Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1988), 95–96 (p. 95).

11 One should note here Camilo's satire on the simplistic (and self-serving) application of ideas on heredity imported from France: ‘De má árvore ruim fruto era toda a sua filosofia, que se encontra diluída modernamente nas explorações fisiopsicológicas de Janet, de Maudsley e no Determinismo’ (VIII, 781). The novelist's use of a traditional proverb alongside references to prestigious foreign scholars effectively undermines the use being made of the latter's ideas, while subtly insinuating that those who applied the proverb did so merely because of its convenience for their own ends.

12 This view is also supported by Maria Saraiva de Jesús, who considers the novel as a whole in the light of its subtitle ‘Cenas do Minho’, indicating that Marta's story is echoed by numerous other ‘cenas burlescas, em que se caracteriza a tacanha mentalidade aldeã, mundo grotesco, irremediavalmente disforme’. See her ‘O jogo interdiscursivo entre Romantismo, Realismo e Naturalismo n’A Brasileira de Prazins’, in Actas do Congresso Internacional de Estudos Camilianos, ed. Aníbal Pinto de Castro et al. (Coimbra: Comissão Nacional das Comemorações Camilianas, 1994), 424–41 (p. 430).

13 For details of this proposed marriage and an explanation of the abandonment of this proposed compromise, see Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal, 113.

14 António Henrique R. de Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal, 3 vols (Lisboa: Palas Editores, 1981, etc.), III (2ª ed., 1981), 30.

15 As Alexandre Cabral points out, the Republican Party had been formed in 1876, and the tercentenary of the death of Camões in 1880 had been marked by commemorations which caused the government to fear renewed popular uprisings, roundly criticized at the time by the novelist. See Cabral's Subsídio para uma Interpretação da Novelística Camiliana (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1985), 146; as well as Cabral's ‘Tricentenário da Morte de Camões’, in his Dicionário de Camilo, 636–38. There appear to have been some objective grounds for Camilo's cynicism here. Livermore argues that the ideals and the early success of the Republican movement were based as much on an idealized rejection of the defects of constitutional Liberalism as they were on their own merits (see Harold V. Livermore, Portugal: A Short History [Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1973], 171). Birmingham reaches similar conclusions, adding that the initial strength of the movement lay in an intellectual elite and in secret cells within the military, more than in any coherent programme shared by the broad mass of Portuguese society (see Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal, 127 and 143–46).

16 Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal, III, 27. See also Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal, 124.

17 Tristram Hunt, quoting Friedrich Engels, in The Frock-Coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 180. The original source for Engels’ words is The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, trans. Richard Dixon et al., 50 vols (New York: International Publishers, 1978), X, 147–239 (p. 151).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.