As construções discursivas do trabalho livre e o escravo na peça Mãe de José de Alencar

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the discursive constructions of the free and enslaved work on José de Alencar’s play Mãe, published in 1860. The research was mainly exploratory when it came to its objectives and utilized the bibliographic method, searching on the texts of Marx, Engels, Freyre, Freitas, Fausto, Gorender, Costa, Ianni and other authors for the emergence of the salaried work and indications that led to comprehending how the transition from enslaved work to free work happened in Brazil in the XIX century. The analysis has as a corpus José de Alencar’s play Mãe, and it tries to raise how the author represents the work relations in the second half of the XIX century and the possible inferences of such representation. From Bakhtin and the Circle’s Dialogical Discourse Analysis (DDA), it is attempted to comprehend on the theatrical literary speech how it is represented the relations between master and slave and between the social classes that restructured themselves and the free workers. As a result, the research revealed how the author innovates by bringing as the main character a female slave, during the existence of slavery in the country, showing that she can be a free worker, in her lines, despite her condition of a slave on her skin and exposes on the work’s microcosm how it is constituted the free and enslaved work at the time. It also shows the astonishment before the need of higher-stratum-belonging women to work. Alencar attempted to build on his works an identity for the constituting country, and despite denouncing the badness of slavery on works such as Mãe e Demônio Familiar (1857), the invisibility of the slaves and their descendants remains in millions of black and mulatto Brazilians depleted from their rights. The research pointed out the importance of rediscovering works such as Mãe that do not allow us to forget that slavery happened and that 129 years since its official end, its effects are still felt, making it fitting that every Brazilian, making use of their own capacity, write a new history for work in this country: free and dignified work for every inhabitant in this land, independent of color of skin or social condition.