Repetitions and ruptures

female performances over three generations in Maina Mendes by Maria Velho da Costa

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of the repetitions and ruptures in the performances of the female characters of three generations of a Portuguese family belonging to the bourgeoisie from the late 19th to the mid-20th century in Maria Velho da Costa’s first novel, published for the first time in 1969, Maina Mendes (1977). Based on the concept of performance (Butler, 2019), the aim is to understand the complex and gradual process of figuration (Reis, 2018) of the female characters who sometimes repeat behaviours that comply with the social norm for women, updating and reifying the notion of gender that prevails in that social context, and sometimes break with it by denying, in whole or in part, the adequacy of their behaviours to that social norm, thus causing destabilization.