As criades de Júlia

Sonia Roncador studies the figure of the maid in the work of Júlia Lopes de Almeida, one of the most influential woman writers of the Brazilian belle époque. In both her fiction and essay writing, Almeida addresses the renegotiation of the old master/slave dynamic, transposed along the lines of housewife/domestic servant relations following the abolition of slavery. Through the discussion of two of Almeida's works in particular, the "how-to manual" Livro das noivas and the novel A intrusa, this study underlines Almeida's problematic view of the maid, seen, on the one hand, as an enemy to the consolidation of the national bourgeois project of modernization, hygienization, and civilization, and, on the other, as a worthy recipient of education and domestication as part of an idealized domestic sphere

Galician and Iberian cultural studies · Medieval Iberian Studies · Psychology · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies