Brazilian social estratification as literary aesthetics: the violence and the impossibility in “Quarto de despejo”, by Carolina Maria de Jesus

Abstract

This article treats the symbolic violence that ravages the dailyl life of Carolina Maria de Jesus, black woman and self-taught who lived in the Caninde´s shanty town and wrote about the routine of the oppressed between the years 1955 and 1960. There is a racial and gender issue that permeates all the diary “Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada” (1960), in order to highlight the impossibilities overcome, or not, by Carolina, a writer and paper collector. Supported by literary theories and questions about class struggle, racism and realism, the objective of this article is to think about the impossibilities of oppressed groups and how symbolic violence, the impulse of social cruelty, is able to silence the black body and dictate a predestination marked by misery, as well as how this structure od cruelty is represented in literaty work. The methodology of this article of is bibliographic review, having as framework, theorists like Candido (1999), Pellegrini (2005), Ribeiro (2019) and Ribeiro (2014), among other supports that help us to highlight the different scenarios that silence Carolina’s literary and social performance at the expense of hunger, poverty and misery that define the writer of a slum diary and the people of the concrete reality she intended to represent.