Body, Femininity, and Desire: The Modern Poetry of Gilka Machado

Abstract

In the current Brazilian literary scene, there have been many debates about ecopoetry and its ethical and aesthetic consequences. However, this perspective of bringing together literature and ecology - subjectivation and nature - was a poetic approach widely used by women writers at the beginning of the 20th century, who sought to rework certain classic conventions linked to poetry, in particular Gilka Machado, the focus of our research. Thus, as Sadlier (2013) points out, the author sought to relate poetic creation and female authorship, looking for new ways of saying and presenting issues such as the body and desire from the perspective of a female lyrical self - the Muse that can now finally speak. In this way, we aim to investigate how Gilkian poetry makes use of symbolic devices to either subvert the figurations of the feminine available in Western culture or to build original images of female authorship connected to nature. As a result, we can perceive the use of non-human bein gs such as the spider, the surging bird, and the snake, as allegories of an artistic endeavor linked to a creative feminine subjectivity, consequently developing a singular poetic consciousness. These elements present in the author's work, in addition to the metalinguistic tendency of her poems, state the modernity of Gilka's poetry, which does not seek to break with the past, but to renew it.