REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FEMININE: ANTÔNIO VIEIRA AND THE ARCHETYPES DOCTRINE - PANDORA, EVE AND AVE MARIA

Abstract

Over the history of culture and religions, it is evident that the reference to the women have been retaken in many artistic expressions. The livingness, or should we say, survival of the feminine has conditioned itself to many types of representation – from the Greco-Roman origin to the Orthodox Catholicism or, in other words, from Pandora to Eva, and, in between times shaping the image of Virgin Mary. In this communication, we will propose the choose of a moment particularly interesting in the Luso-Brazilian literary historiography, by examining a sermon from Antonio Vieira, one of the most admired orators in the seventeenth century, fully directed to the women, in order to illustrate the representations of the feminine under Christianity. More specifically, we will analyze a sermon preached in 1651 for the religious women of Patriarca São Bernardo, from the Convento das Odivelas, in Portugal; its unity of sense, operated by the pragmatic logic, stablishes a critics over the habits of the nuns, who used to spent many hours in front of the mirror, considered by the preacher as a metonym of the ‘silent demon’, more daring than any other demon, even the persuasive serpent in Heaven. From this supposition, we can glimpse dislocations and recycles from the conceptual symbolism of hybris as unmeasured, as Vieira continually stablishes relations with the pagan world, demonstrating that the actions of the nouns are horrible, because they origin from two censurable trends: on one hand, these actions are an inheritance from Eva and, at the same time, are reprehensible, because they respond to an antiSocratic practice, full of exaggerations and non-moralizations. In this lecture, hybris symbols itself under vanitas – the vanities and futilities – reflected in the mirror as a disagreement between life in the cloister and the costumes of a nun, who exceeds the limits of behavior when she endeavors embellishment of body and forgets to embellish the soul.