Os fios que tecem o imaginário

Uma leitura de "A cortina da babá Lugton" à luz da literatura fantástica

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze, in view of fantastic literature, the short story “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain” (1924), by the English writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Although Woolf was not the author of works that fundamentally belong to the fantastic literature, her concern with portraying the depth and imaginative capacity of the human mind, together with her characteristic modernist experimentalism, ended up creating, in our view, some narratives that can be read through the fantastic literary mode. Thus, “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain” stands out for bringing the theme of inanimate objects coming to life and the creation of imaginary worlds in such a way that it creates an ambiguity between reality and imagination that remains unresolved for this brief moment in the story. Thus, this story presents what Roas (2014), Ceserani (2006) and Furtado (1980) define as the fundamental element of all fantastic narratives, that is, producing the uncertainty of reality, so that the relationship between the real and the impossible remains inexplicable. Therefore, the accurate investigation of this short story is discussed in this article in order to demonstrate how Virginia Woolf's work dialogues with the tradition of fantastic literature while simultaneously giving it a unique form and subverting elements of it.