A loucura como forma de pensar a realidade feminina: a obra de Maura Lopes Cançado

Abstract

This research analyzes the writing of the Brazilian author Maura Lopes Cançado. She was born in São Gonçado do Abaeté, a city of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on January 27th, 1929. Her book, Hospício é Deus, was written between 1959 and 1960. The author was in a psychiatric hospital in Engenho de Dentro, a neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, during the book's writing. From this context, and taking into account the existential problem of madness, our work focuses on the self writing and the experience of madness expressed in the diary Hospício é Deus, published as a book in 1965. We are particularly interested in the representation of madness in the diary to investigate how the alteration of the mental state can be presented in writing, how it relates to the concepts of memory, diary, autobiography, and fiction about the self, how it is constructed as a rupture between public and private spaces, and how it plays an essential role in the narrative in the construction and affirmation of identity. Thus, after exploring the proposed themes, we seek to analyze the author's diary as ethnographic writing, basing on post-modern anthropology studies in the 20th century.