A casa ou o túmulo: (des)encontros com as “mães literárias” em Patti Smith e Sylvia Plath

Vanessa Cezarin Bertacini; Erica Martinelli Munhoz

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2025.e103902

Authors

Vanessa Cezarin Bertacini State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8379-1108
Erica Martinelli Munhoz University of São Paulo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2825-964X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2025.e103902

Keywords:

Literary Mothers, Memory, Place, Sylvia Plath, Patti Smith

Abstract

The 1970s anglophone feminist literary criticism proposes the idea of matrilineage, in which the encounter of women writers with their literary mothers represents a source of nurturing which allows them to write. Subsequent generations, however, question this idealization of female relationships, revealing their ambivalent and less welcoming aspects. While Bachelard (2000) proposes the association between the figures of the mother and the house outlining their positive values, Massey (1994) affirms that the house can also be a place of conflict. In this article, we propose a reading of “Tempest Air Demons” (2015), by Patti Smith, and the poem “Wuthering Heights” ([1961] 2018), by Sylvia Plath, with the aim of verifying how these authors work with the figures of their literary mothers in a non-idealized manner through the representation of the places (Lawrence-Zuniga, 2017) of the grave and the house.

Author Biographies

Vanessa Cezarin Bertacini, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)

Vanessa Cezarin Bertacini é doutoranda em Teoria e História Literária no Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL) da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) e possui mestrado em Estudos Literários (2018) pela Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCLAr) da Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” (UNESP).

Erica Martinelli Munhoz, University of São Paulo

Erica Martinelli Munhoz é doutora em Teoria Literária (2023) pelo Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL) da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) e possui mestrado em Teoria Literária (2017) pelo mesmo instituto. Atualmente, é pesquisadora de pós-doutorado no departamento de Teoria Literária e Literatura Comparada da Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH) da Universidade de São Paulo (USP).

References

BACHELARD, Gaston. A poética do espaço. Tradução: Antonio de Pádua Danesi. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2000.

BACHELARD, Gaston. A terra e os devaneios do repouso. Tradução: Paulo Neves. 2. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.

BANCROFT, Colin. Fear and disillusionment: The EcoGothic in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. E-Rea, v. 21, n. 1, 2023. Disponível em: https://journals.openedition.org/erea/17048. Acesso em: 31 out. 2024.

BOOTH, Alison. Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

BRONTË, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

CLARK, Heather. Red comet: the short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

CORBETT, Sarah. “A Certain Minor Light”: Plath in Brontë Country. In: BRAIN, Tracy. Sylvia Plath in context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. p. 297-305.

ELLIS, Jonathan. “Mailed into space”: on Sylvia Plath’s letters. In: BAYLEY, Sally. BRAIN, Tracy (ed.). Representing Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. p. 13-31.

ERKKILA, Betsy. The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History and Discord. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

FAIAL, Edite. Dois poemas de Sylvia Plath: Finisterrre (Finisterra); Wuthering Heights. Revista Cerrados, Brasília, 1995, v. 5, n. 5, p. 190-197, 1996. Disponível em: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/cerrados/article/view/842/730. Acesso em: 15 maio 2025.

GILBERT, Sandra M.; GUBAR, Susan (ed.). The Madwoman in the Attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

HENDRIX, Harald (ed.). Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, 2008.

KAYE, Richard. Queer Brontë: parody, revision, identification, and the pleasures of (factitious) myth-making. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, n. 130, 2016. Disponível em: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/805700. Acesso em: 31 out. 2024.

LAWRENCE-ZUNIGA, Denise. “Space and Place.” In: Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Disponível em: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0170.xml. Acesso em: 31 out. 2024.

MADDRELL, Avril; SIDAWAY, James D.: Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning, and Remembrance. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

MASSEY, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

MATTHEWS, Samantha. Representations of the grave in nineteenth-century English poetry: A selected commentary. Ph.D. Thesis. Department of English. University College London, 1997. Disponível em: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10099937/. Acesso em: 31 out. 2024.

MATTHEWS, Samantha. Poetical Remains: Poets' Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

MOERS, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1976.

MUNHOZ, Erica Martinelli. Não há nada entre nós: uma (im)possível tradição poética de mulheres no imaginário de Adília Lopes, Ana Cristina Cesar e Patti Smith. Tese (Doutorado em Teoria Literária). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, 2023.

PLATH, Sylvia. A Walk to Withens. The Christian Science Monitor, Vol 51, Iss 162, 06 jun. 1959. Disponível em: https://archive.org/details/per_christian-science-monitor_1959-06-06_51_162/mode/2up. Acesso em: 31 out. 2024.

PLATH, Sylvia. In: PLATH, Aurelia (ed). Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. p. 268-70.

PLATH, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

PLATH, Sylvia. In: KUKIL, Karen (ed.). Os diários de Sylvia Plath: 1950 - 1962. Tradução: Celso Nogueira. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Azul, 2018.

PLATH, Sylvia. Wuthering Heights. In: PLATH, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. New York: Harper Perennial, 2018. p. 167-68.

PLATH, Sylvia. In: STEINBERG, Peter; KUKIL, Karen (ed.). The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Volume 2: 1956-1963. London: Faber & Faber, 2018. p. 34-38.

SHOWALTER, Elaine. A crítica feminista no território selvagem. Tradução: Deise Amaral. In: HOLLANDA, Heloisa Buarque de. Tendências e impasses: o feminismo como crítica da cultura. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1994. p. 23-57.

SMITH, Patti. “Tempest Air Demons”. In: M Train. 2 ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

SMITH, Patti. “Demônios aéreos da tempestade”. In: Linha M. Tradução: Claudio Carina. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016.

SMITH, Patti. Just Kids. New York, Harper Collins, 2010.

WILLIAMS, Linda. Happy families? Feminist reproduction and matrilineal thought. In: ARMSTRONG, Isobel (ed.). New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. London: Routledge, 2012. p. 48-64.

WOOLF, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Ed. David Bradshaw and Stuart N. Clarke. Chichester: Wiley, 2015.

WOOLF, Virginia. Um quarto só seu e três ensaios sobre as grandes escritoras inglesas: Jane Austen, Charlotte & Emily Bronte e George Eliot. Tradução: Julia Romeu. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2021.