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

outras de violência”. 4 For twenty years she stubbornly refused to surrender to
such a fate, taking chastity vows, cutting her hair and living secluded in her
own home, finally taking religious vows at the age of fifty, after her father had
passed away.
Convents, therefore, gathered a heterogeneous and lively group of
women, joined according to their social class, to whom seclusion assumed a
wide range of significances. At the time, these institutions encompassed a set
of very specific circumstances that ended up fostering and promoting literary
creation. They offered more general access to book culture than did secular life;
they encouraged a set of writing practices: some examples are the life accounts
demanded by confessors to certain mystical or “problematic” nuns, recreational or
moral-function pieces of writing for the amusement of the nuns, or the practice
of poetry competitions in the various conventual festivities open to mundane
society. On the other hand, despite the constraints of a rigorous discipline, aiming
at muffling any manifestations of individuality, life in the cloister allowed for a
certain level of privacy and independence, that place of imagination and memory
that is indispensable to any act of creation (that Virginia Woolf would later call
a room of one’s own). 5
What was the profile of such nun-writers? In terms of social background,
some of the women were members of the aristocracy, such as Sister
Maria do Céu, others were members of the nobility or rural bourgeoisie, such
as Sister Isabel do Menino Jesus and Margarida de Castelo Branco or Mariana
da Purificação.
The women displayed a remarkable culture for their time, shaped
according to the standards of a period in which knowledge of rhetoric, languages,
ancient philosophy and religion was a privileged one. They sometimes received
education at home, benefiting from the private classes given to their brothers
and almost always against the will of their families. Education was frequently
obtained through self-instruction, at home or at the convent through a “close
relation with the holy books”.
The literary activity of these nuns did not, obviously, have a professional
character; nor was it an instrument for economic survival. According to the
authors, they wrote in order to fight against nostalgia arising from idleness. 6
4
[“having a high number of admirers, her parents did not give up persuading her to get married, often resorting to
industries, some other times to violence”]. Barbosa Machado, Biblioteca Lusitana, (Lisboa: Luiz Ameno, 1759), 273.
5
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Books, 2002).
6
“Divertir a melancolia e suavizar o ânimo” says Sister Madalena da Glória, (Reino da Babilónia, Lisboa, 1742), 13.
125