The personal voice is political

Narration and female subjectivity in Maria Judite de Carvalho’s Os Armários Vazios

Journal of Romance Studies (2019), 19, (3), 487–509.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2019.30
Language: English
Pages: 23

Abstract

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s 1966 novella Os Armários Vazios [‘The Empty Closets’] explores the experiences of several women who are united by the man who divides them: Ernesto Laje. This study will analyse how the first-person narrator of the novel, Manuela Lewis, both reveals and obscures the restrictions faced by three generations of women as they attempt to navigate their ambitions and give voice to their emotions, with their individual, subjective experiences being subordinated to the deceptive authority of a narrator who alternates between participation in the events described and distance from them. Despite Ernesto Laje’s apparent centrality to the plot, we interpret Carvalho’s text as a polyphony of stories (some told, some left untold but hinted at), all bound together by the isolation of their (female) protagonists, combining to produce a complex array of intertwining perspectives which belie the apparently straightforward nature of the narrative presented.

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