The Gothic, the Romantic, and the Melodramatic in Aluisio Azevedo

Hypertextuality in A mortalha de Alzira

Abstract

Aluisio Azevedo, the precursor of Naturalism in Brazil, retrieves a certain idea of Romanticism, Gothic, and melodrama when he publishes A mortalha de Alzira (Alzira’s Shroud) (1893). The novel derives from Théophile Gautier’s short story, “La morte amoureuse” (1836), but displays fractures with the original text. Although, in the work, Azevedo moves away from the naturalistic notion of literary representation as an “imitation of reality”, he inserts characters that carry with them the rational and scientific explanation for the series of strange events that occur in the narrative.  Thus, through the relational reading of the texts (the hypertext with its hypotext, in allusion to Gérard Genette) and the uses of the mobilized concepts (melodrama, Romanticism, fantastic, Gothic), the aim is to examine the presence of naturalistic traits in the narrative that resists the gothic-romantic imagination. Therefore, the objective is to understand “the tension between the deep desires and the consonance with the environment” of the work and its author (Candido, 2006).