writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Interestingly, she found in movie female characters – e.g., Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich –
the personification of fortress. That’s why this kind of woman became the inspiration for her own
women’s literary images.
The French novel by Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary turned to be a decisive moment in her, so
to speak, rendez vous with literature. Its heroine was the model of Ema, the hero of Agustina’s
novel Vale Abraão (1991). But from her mother’s point of view, this fascination with literary texts
also meant her daughter’s loss of contact with reality.
She acquired too in adolescence valuable knowledge of Russian literature. Dostoyevsky soon
became an inspiring writer for Agustina, especially in the novel Antes do Degelo. She asserts in O
Livro that her novelistic ability was born after the reading of Russian literary masters.
Writing instilled in Agustina’s personality the feelings of loneliness and suffering, which prevailed
throughout her youth.
In Coimbra, where she lived after the wedding, this passion for writing never stop growing. She
made the following confession in her autobiography:
I didn’t want quick and easy success, opinions, and favors. I just wanted to write into
people’s heart and drink their blood, always evolving, creating situations, and making
the characters jump out of my books’ pages. 9
Reading has been a constant activity in Agustina’s life. In Caderno de Significados, 10 she speaks
of the ideal conditions for reading: “seclusion, suitable idle and a taste for privacy”.
Biography and autobiography are deep related in Agustina’s thought. In O Livro, she tells that
when she lived in Esposende (a small town in the North of Portugal), she had a strong wish to write
the life of Saint Anthony. At the same time, she felt she had to visit Italy and make “a kind of
pilgrimage to the places where he lived.” 11
In the same text, she evokes her friendship with the painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and
her husband, Arpad Szenes. In Longos Dias Têm Cem Anos, Agustina makes Vieira da Silva’s
biography.
Agustina’s O Livro is a revival of her family story, the juvenile and adolescence favorite places, the
first literary essays, the early friendships (with painters and writers), and the inspiring travels to
France, Greece, and Brazil. Therefore, we might say following Gusdorf that this autobiography
[…] is not simple repetition of the past as it was, for recollection brings us not the past
itself but only the presence in spirit of a world forever gone. Recapitulation of a life lived
claims to be valuable for the one who lived it, and yet it reveals no more than a ghostly
image of that life, already far distant, and doubtless incomplete, distorted furthermore by
the fact that the man who remembers his past has not been for a long time the same
being, the child or adolescent, who lived that past. 12
By the end of Agustina’s autobiography, we recognize that childhood and youth were for her the
time of a fulfilled dream – being a writer – but also of unaccomplished wishes – especially the strong
desire to become a painter.
In fact, her selection of memories matches to the notion of autobiography offered by Northrop
Frye: 13
Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to
select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that goes to build up an
integrated pattern. This pattern may be something larger than himself with whom he has
come to identify himself or simply the coherence of his character and attitudes.
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