Another sea, another self: a reading about the metaphorical nature of "Paisagem com mulher e mar ao fundo"

Abstract

The work Paisagem com mulher e mar ao fundo, by Teolinda Gersão, was published eight years after the Carnation Revolution and brought as the background decades of dictatorship in Portugal. Given this context, the moment when it was necessary to resignify and review the recent past in order to understand it, we intend to analyze in which ways the language can be the place where a new view emerges over the past of cruelty and suffering. In this work, we will see how the metaphor and metonymy can promote the resignification of the language. Like the landscape, the view over the sea - symbol of the portuguese culture, memory and history -, next to their surrounding elements, will be revisited and reviewed, under that context. The characters' "shattered" bodies will be the metaphor of a destroyed portuguese social body and wrecked cultural identity. The studies of Roland Barthes, Renato Cordeiro Gomes, Ângela Beatriz Faria, Denilson Lopes, Eduardo Lourenço, among others, will be the groundings for this work.