Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

TRAVELLING THROUGH WORDS: REINVENTING A HERITAGE
OF THE IMAGINARY AND OF THE AFFECTIONS
Anabela Galhardo Couto (Open University of Lisbon - IADE)
Following a feminist line of critical and historical recovery of past literary
works, this article proposes a travel to the silenced world of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Portuguese feminine conventual writing. Departing from
the basic question: where is one’s place? the aim is to illuminate such literary
production, emphasising the shape of the identities and their close connection
to the travel metaphors. I will give special attention to “Life Accounts”
[Relações de Vida] – autobiographic narratives written by many nuns in seventeenth-century
Portugal. Sister Maria do Céu, Mother Mariana da Purificação,
Sister Isabel do Menino Jesus, Mother Maria Josefa, and Antónia Margarida
de Castelo Branco are the selected writers. I will especially focus on the narration
of the loving self. The aim is to show that this type of writing was one of
freedom, of opening to the other, of joy. The perspective of the analysis tries to
establish a dialogue between the personal history of the author and the subjects
revealed/fictionalised by the “Life Accounts” in a space-time journey that aims
at reconstructing memories and fictionalising a kind of feminine heritage of
the affections and of the imaginary.
From relativism to a sense of belonging: the reinvention of a past
In my personal history the reality of travel came together with the need to
establish roots, the logic of the gratuitous, the fragmentary, the discontinuous,
with the nostalgia of the absolute.
From the itinerant existence which, partially, characterised my childhood,
I may have retained the habit of living in-between, of attending
different circles, different fields, different beliefs, as someone who walks
or travels around. The first consequences of this “nomadic” existence are a
sense of relativism, being open to the perspective of the other, a concern with
cohabitation, and a fondness for hybridism and crossing borders. And also,
conversely, a tendency for scepticism, for gratuitousness, for meaningless.
The impossibility of being devoted to a cause, the impossibility of believing.
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