Uma sinhá-moça em Recife

memória de viagem em Oiteiro, de Madalena Antunes

Abstract

Oiteiro – memórias de uma sinhá-moça, from 1958, narrates the childhood and youth of Madalena Antunes, heiress of the sugar aristocracy of Ceará-Mirim/RN. Written years later, when the author was already old, the book recalls her time spent between the rural and urban areas of the city; an experience that changes when the landowner's daughter is sent to Colégio São José, in Recife, where she remains interned from the age of eleven to sixteen. From the perspective of an elderly narrator, the memoir provides the reader with a travel account that is a true return to the past. In this sense, the objective of this work is to analyze, based on the linguistic and literary resources used in the text, how the writer constructs the narrative of her trip with memory as the driving force. To this end, the research, of a qualitative nature, based on an interdisciplinary approach, dialogued especially with the valuable contributions of Junqueira (2011), Cunha (2012), Schemes (2015) and Bosi (1994, 2003). The discussion based on the critical-interpretative reading of Oiteiro highlighted memory as the main articulator of Madalena's account, whose narrative, combined with sensitivity and nostalgia, presents itself as a rich example of the travel report genre, as it reveals the relationships of otherness constructed through the perception of the traveling self, reflecting on what it must have been like to be a young lady in the Brazilian context of the 19th century.