Fantastic literature written by women in Brazil: “Mãe Natureza”, by Natércia Campos de Saboya

Resumo

Through the paths of the fantastic, this article aims to analyze the short story "Mãe Natureza", by Natércia Campos de Saboya, in Iluminuras (1988). Circumscribed in a literary niche in the northeast of Brazil, the writer from Ceará is subject to a context of erasure and oblivion on the horizon of contemporary criticism, even though she stands out in prose, especially in fantastic literature, with narratives full of unusual manifestations that provoke a transgression of reality. Based on theoretical conditions that confirm the aesthetic effectiveness of the fantastic in her short stories, it was possible to investigate how this analytical category is represented in the author's fiction, which is intrinsically linked to cultural traditions, popular knowledge, the legends and myths of the Northeast and the stories borne out of the value of orality and generational transmission. In the story under investigation, the daily working life of the characters, the grandfather and the boy, is transformed by the telling of stories from the forest, which conjure up folkloric and legendary mysteries typical of nature and the world of superstition. With the patterns of day-to-day life and the human types that come from simple customs, there is a fictional journey that leads to magic based on a habitual world governed by the belief in secret beings and events.