Lisbon Revisited

Urban Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Portuguese Fiction

Rhian Atkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351560016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Twentieth-century Portugal saw dramatic political and social change. The monarchy was abolished, and a republic installed (1910), soon giving way to a long-lasting dictatorship (1926); a transition to democracy (1974) led to membership of the European Union (1986). But what do we know of how people lived during these periods? And how did men, in particular, respond to the changes taking place in society? In this illuminating and broad-ranging study, Rhian Atkin uses as case studies the work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Luis de Sttau Monteiro (1926-93) and Jose Saramago (1922-2010) in order to examine the relationship between socio-political change and the construction and performance of masculinities in the urban environment of Lisbon over the course of the last century.

CHAPTER 1
❖
Masculine Subjectivities in the Modern City

Over the course of the twentieth century, the transformation of the political and social environment of Portugal contributed to shifts in the gender and class structure of the country. The changes witnessed in society become especially evident when we focus on the capital city, Lisbon. The industrialization of Lisbon took place later than that of Paris or London, and even today Lisbon remains a small city in comparison with other European capitals. One can easily traverse the entire city centre on foot, and there are natural restrictions on some forms of transport because of Lisbon’s hilly setting and old, winding streets. Tradition and modernization live side by side within the city centre, while much of the industrialization in the region is located on the city’s outskirts. Modernization, and, in some cases, the failure to modernize, marks the city with contradictions. Across Lisbon today, one can observe buildings in a state of crumbling deterioration alongside gentrified, renovated apartment blocks. Old, clanking trams share the streets with 4×4s, and traditional cheap restaurants share a block with hip wine bars. In Livro, Homem and História the gradual processes of modernization are reflected, and the effects on the individual of changes in the city and in society can be traced. Through the principal characters of these texts, namely Soares, the homem and Raimundo Silva, the problems of adapting to a changing world and an increasingly capitalist society are highlighted. While each text reflects the Lisbon in which it was produced, a comparative analysis of these texts reveals the industrial, social and gendered transformations of Lisbon throughout the twentieth century.

Gender and Modernity

Discussions and discourses of modernity reveal multiple and conflicting responses to the ways in which society has changed.¹ The paradoxes and contradictions of modernity and the simultaneous anxiety about and drive for change and renewal that are so central to life in the so-called modern and post-modern periods, affect all lived experience.² Although modernity has been seen to have broadly similar effects, however, significant modulations occur with time and in different geographical contexts, while the specific traits of modernity differ between individuals and social groups.³ New subjectivities continually emerge from the inconsistencies and crises of identity and authenticity brought by modernity. In European literature, some of the dominant responses to modernity are fragmentation, a heightened awareness and questioning of the relationship between time and space, and a new focus on the relationship of the individual to the social world. Modes of experiencing the world influence every individual’s relationship with that world, especially in the city, which is the principal seat of technological progress. Indeed, in twentieth-century Portugal, processes of technological change were largely focused on the urban environment.

Technology changes the way in which we experience the world and interact with others. The machine, in its various guises, has a direct impact on sensory perceptions, aesthetics, and the body. The artifice that comes with the development of technologies raises questions about authenticity of bodily and psychological experience, and may lead to a sense of crisis in the modern subject. New technologies and practices transform social behaviours and values. The modern subject, paradoxically, is often the one who interrogates and explicitly opposes the norms that come to prevail, dismissing change for change’s sake and seeking to maintain authenticity in a world that progresses and leaves behind those who refuse to be caught up in its current.⁴ For such individuals, there is often a sense of loss, or of potential loss, that arises from the experience of the modern world.⁵ The modern subject attempts to come to terms with the processes of structural and societal change, and the effects of these on individuals and groups. To take a critical approach to the experience of day-to-day life may lead to marginalization as the modern subject remains outside the masses, refusing to ‘move with the times’. Each of the periods discussed in this case study — the 1920s/30s, the 1950s and the 1980s — has been a turning point in terms of social, political and technological change, and in terms of the changes in understandings of gender and identity, in Portugal as elsewhere.⁶ For John MacInnes, the concept of masculinity is rooted in the modern, and came about as the gendered order of society changed in response to cultural and political shifts.⁷ Soares, the homem and Raimundo are, in my reading, modern critical subjects who reject being carried along unthinking with the march of progress. Their mental and emotional responses to the world around them allow us to interrogate the present in which they are each rooted and their gendered perspectives on their urban environment, its architecture and its inhabitants.

In the early twentieth century, and ‘despite the political turmoil of the years of the First Republic, the fabric of Lisbon continued to change and a modern city began to emerge.’⁸ The social fabric of Lisbon was altered during the Republican years (1910–26) with the emergence of a feminist movement and women’s demands for emancipation and increased legal and political rights. These movements in turn gave rise to the ‘New Woman’, a figure described by Felski as ‘a resonant symbol of emancipation, whose modernity signalled not an endorsement of an existing present but rather a bold imagining of an alternative future’.⁹ In response to demands for ‘women’s suffrage’, the male-dominated First Republic explicitly excluded women from voting rights in the 1911 constitution.¹⁰ Yet the feminist movement in Portugal was forceful (it was one of the leading movements in Europe) and Lisbon hosted two Congressos Feministas in the 1920s.¹¹ Despite the Republican efforts to limit women’s power, Vicente notes that the majority of feminists (men and women alike) were in favour of the Republic.¹² The early Portuguese feminist movement was mainly concentrated within the urban elite,¹³ and so we can surmise that the questions raised about masculinities as a consequence were also principally related to the urban context.

During the inter-war period, an increasing number of women entered the workplace, and in professional, white-collar (rather than, or as well as, menial or manual) roles.¹⁴ It can be argued that the combination of social and political changes and the increased visibility of women in the public sphere contributed to a sense of threat to the position of men in Western society, and forced a revised understanding of masculinities and of the city.¹⁵ Specifically in Portugal, though, as the century wore on, further changes occurred in the gendered structure of society which largely allowed Portuguese men to ignore the ‘woman question’ for many more decades. With the onset of Salazar’s dictatorial regime from 1928, gender remained a political issue but the discourse shifted. The movement for female emancipation was all but annulled. Social gender boundaries in Portugal were cemented along pre-Republican lines under the conservative Estado Novo, despite the short-lived period of female emancipation during the First Republic. Salazar’s regime brought with it the compulsory subordination of women to male authority and the reification of the old adage, ‘do homem a praça, da mulher a casa’ [the man’s place is the square, the woman’s is the home] which had permeated Portuguese culture since at least the seventeenth century and was formally recovered in Salazarist ideology.¹⁶

After 1945, there was a shift in understandings of gender throughout European and American society. During the Second World War, and in many of the countries which had fought in the War, women had been obliged to take jobs in factories while men were on military service. After their return home, however, ‘social and cultural authorities sought to make marriage and the home more attractive to both women and men’.¹⁷ Returning servicemen were encouraged to return to their roles as breadwinners and heads of family, while women were pushed back from the workplace towards the home as the image of the domesticated — and domesticating — female became prominent in European and North American cinema and literature.¹⁸ Amâncio refers to this cultural phenomenon with the implicit suggestion that this was mirrored in Portugal, despite the fact that Portugal was not directly involved in armed conflict during the war.¹⁹ Perhaps the Estado Novo regime took advantage of a broader cultural shift to consolidate its ideological position in relation to gender. Certainly, this trend seems to be manifested in an example of popular film in Portugal: Perdigão Queiroga’s Fado, História d’uma Cantadeira [Fado, Story of a Songstress] (1948) shows in comedic and melodramatic form just what might happen to a woman who chooses a career and a public life over her role in the home: Ana Maria, the female protagonist played by the famous fado singer Amália Rodrigues, is punished for having chosen public life over the home when her ward, Luisinha, is paralysed by a runaway wine barrel and eventually dies.²⁰

By the late 1950s, the position of women in Portugal seemed to have changed little since Salazar came to power. In Sttau Monteiro’s novel, the main female character, Fernanda, apparently does not work and spends most of her time at home. She is a domesticating influence that the homem wants to reject because, as for the British ‘Angry Young Men’, ‘to achieve freedom, the hero [has] to escape from the restrictions of both conventional culture and of domestic life.’²¹ In Homem, the restrictions identified here by Brooks in ‘Angry’ literature are embodied by Fernanda. The crisis of authenticity or integrity that the homem experiences comes as he attempts to reconcile his personal desires with his social obligations.

The policies implemented by the Estado Novo in the 1933 constitution reaffirmed the separation of the sexes and enabled men to believe in their innate superiority, while much was done to perpetuate the myth that the woman’s only ‘natural’ role was within the family and at home.²² This gender ideology fulfils the social function of making alterable and fluid gender roles appear to be fixed, natural and stable. The regime prescribed a normative heterosexuality where both parties would subscribe wholly to the permanence of marriage, even when a marriage proved to be no longer viable. The man’s role was clearly identified under the ‘Código de Seabra’ that was in force during the Salazar regime. It stated that while the married woman should reside in her husband’s home, he could have free acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Masculine Subjectivities in the Modern City
• 2 Masculinities in the Streets
• 3 Masculinities and Consumer Society
• 4 Men at Home, Men at Work
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index