Malaise, Well-Being And Ambivalences Regarding Carlos de Melo’s Formative-Emotional Process On Plantation Boy

Abstract

As part of our studies about the formation of the failure – and the affects that it is constituted – on José Lins do Rego’s first three novels, we aim to examine, in this paper, the development of the emotional complex of the narrator and protagonist Carlinhos de Melo on Plantation boy (1932), a narrative that comprehends eight years of his life, from four to twelve years old. To achieve this goal, our theorical basis concern the psychoanalysis in order to investigate the child’s sentimental structure, important works about the Bildungsroman, and we also make use of this author’s and novel’s critical essays. This paper is divided in three affective valences: the malaise, the well-being and the ambivalence. At the same time that the boy, in the intimated-related chapters, is forged by sadness, which becomes perennial, especially because his mother’s murder – committed by his father – he also, in the chronical of customs chapters, feels the establishment of a life drive that integrates him to almost every person on the plantation. The ambivalences, mainly the sexual ones, bring up the phobic objects, which repulses and attracts him simultaneously. If José Lins do Rego’s focus is indeed on crafting stories where disenchantment is emphasized, Menino do Engenho allows room for joy and doubt. Regarding Carlinhos’s suffering, which will be drastically expanded in Doidinho (1933) and Banguê (1934), we are witnessing its origins.