Precedents of a brazilian gothic novel: the short story "Maria Vitória" and the Threshold manuscript

Abstract

Among many Brazilian narratives that flirt, in numerous aspects, with the poetics of evil, Fronteira is particularly noteworthy. Cornélio Penna’s first novel establishes a two-way dialogue with the Gothic literary tradition, at once impelled by it and nurturing it, and presents a vast array of points of observation: the lacunar plot structure; the stream-of- consciousness narration; the autodiegetic, paranoid and unreliable narrator, owner of a morbid sensibility; the semantic field linked to darkness, death, the phantasmagoric, and the lugubrious; the locus horribilis that manifests itself on several levels; and the ghostly past returning to haunt the present in frequent allusions to previous crimes and transgressions, conditioning the protagonists’ existences. In this paper, we explore the creative process of Fronteira from two previous texts by Penna: the manuscript of the work and the short story “Maria Vitória”, published in 1923. We intend to demonstrate that, through procedures of suppression of information about characters and specific events, the author managed to produce suspense and mystery effects that intensified the gothic nature of his work.