A path of suffocation, in the short story Maria, by Conceição Evaristo, under the perspective of the concept of cronotopo, by Bakhtin

Abstract

Conceição Evaristo, in the short story Maria, published in the piece Olhos D’Água, in 2014, reports the problems of the society from the point of view of a black, poor woman, dedicated to her children. We aim at analysing the narrative of suffocation of the character, pointing out how the author builds discursively the life story of Maria, through the dimensions of space and time, that reveals authentic traits of authenticity of the reality of the contemporary women. To understand how the elements of space and time value the discourse of the story, we will bring as foundation the concept of cronotopo developed by Bakhtin (2014), besides the feminist literary critics, to base the correlations developed in the research. We justify the present study by the need to problematize and demonstrate how social critics, specifically the one related to the black, poor woman, may be discursively built in relation to the space-time element. We conclude the discursive traits internal to the text, in the concept of cronotopo by Bakhtin, reflect the external dimension of the narrative, since the path of suffocation of the woman is objectively told in the space of lockdown of an urban bus, in the short period of time of a robbery.