Escapada, de Evelyn Scott: o discurso autobiográfico de uma modernista perdida no Brasil

Abstract

Evelyn Scott (1898-1963) was a Southern American modernist of an upper-class background who eloped to Brazil with a renown medical doctor twice her senior, married, and father of four. But in the idealized land Evelyn Scott faced a difficult childbirth, illness, poverty, and isolation in a country whose culture and language were completely unknow to her. All that within a world about to declare World War One.  This work aims at analising emotion in autobiographical discourse drawing from Escapada, the powerful autobiography written in loco. The theoretical concepts are supported by the anthropology of emotions, gender studies, and cognitive linguistics. The method is interpretative, and the corpus is the autobiography mentioned above. In facing such extreme experience, how is emotion expressed? How does gender affect both her experience and her discourse about the experience? Results indicate that Evelyn Scott strongly rejected being viewed as a victim and refused to compromise her worldview because she was a woman and was ill. She also resented both her homeland as well as the country she had dreamed as refuge.