FORMS OF TRAUMA IN DOM CASMURRO AND THE KREUTZER SONATA

Abstract

In Tolstoy's The Kreutzer sonata, the murderous husband reviews his crime in compulsive speech. In Dom Casmurro, a contemporary narrative to that, Bento Santiago tries to "tie the two ends of life" while reminiscing about the path that led to a social "murder" of the exiled wife. In this article I tried to focus on the revisiting of these traumatic experiences by their perpetuators in the light, especially, of Shoshana Felman, who analyzes real and literary judgments of distant and recent intimate feminicides; Roberto Schwarz's invitation to Machado’s readers to distrust; and Sigmund Freud, Lacan and Ricoeur's theories on trauma and memory. All this in the shadow, of course, of the understanding of the context of an incipient female emancipation in bourgeois society in the late nineteenth century whose judgment in favor of O. J. Simpson proves an unsatisfactorily slow evolution.

In Tolstoy's The Kreutzer sonata, the murderous husband reviews his crime in compulsive speech. In Dom Casmurro, a contemporary narrative to that, Bento Santiago tries to "tie the two ends of life" while reminiscing about the path that led to a social "murder" of the exiled wife. In this article I tried to focus on the revisiting of these traumatic experiences by their perpetuators in the light, especially, of Shoshana Felman, who analyzes real and literary judgments of distant and recent intimate feminicides; Roberto Schwarz's invitation to Machado’s readers to distrust; and Sigmund Freud, Lacan and Ricoeur's theories on trauma and memory. All this in the shadow, of course, of the understanding of the context of an incipient female emancipation in bourgeois society in the late nineteenth century whose judgment in favor of O. J. Simpson proves an unsatisfactorily slow evolution.