Live, feel, forget: apostasy in the trajectory of Rachel de Queiroz

Abstract

This article presents some thoughts about the multiple identities and versions of herself that permeate the narratives of the writer Rachel de Queiroz. The focus is on the nets of sociabilities, the affections and the feelings that passed and emerged through the process of her split up with the Communist Party. There fore,specific categories of intellectual history’s field (like the concept of microclimate) and the studies focused on the memory (like the notion of forgetting) are important. The research allows nuancing and perceiving the tensions and the silences that pervade both the puerile and youthful identity and the more intellectualized identity circumscribed to the author’s maturity. It is clear that Rachel de Queiroz’ rupture with the lefts does not have a definitive mark. It was a gradual and a diffuse process occurred between 1935 and 1940, sometimes marked by approximations, sometimes by distances and composed by an intricate affective network. Thus the historical, politic and literary plots of Rachel de Queiroz compose a complex scenario of her identities, in which the feelings, affections, desires, fears, pains, among others elements of the writer’s sensitivity, are intertwined.