As paixões de Deisi: mergulhando n' O lago encantado de Grongonzo, de Marilene Felinto, a partir da semiótica de linha francesa

Abstract

This article analyzes the construction of the female identity of Deisi, the protagonist of Marilene Felinto’s novel O Lago Encantado de Grongonzo (1987), based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the French School of Semiotics, with emphasis on the Semiotics of Passions developed by Algirdas Julien Greimas and Jacques Fontanille, as well as on the developments of Claude Zilberberg’s Tensive Semiotics. The study aims to investigate how the protagonist’s passionate states are discursively structured and how they contribute to the constitution of her subjectivity and female identity in confrontation with social, cultural, and gender norms. To achieve this objective, a bibliographical, qualitative, and interpretative approach was adopted, taking Felinto’s novel as its corpus and mobilizing concepts such as passionate trajectory, modalization, subject of state, value-object, tensivity, memory, and identity. The analysis is also grounded in the contributions of José Luiz Fiorin, Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros, Simone de Beauvoir, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, and Djamila Ribeiro, articulating semiotic studies with discussions on gender, subjectivity, and power relations. The findings reveal that Deisi is constituted as a passionate subject traversed by tensions between belonging and exclusion, memory and displacement, wanting-to-be and not-being-able-to-be. Her identity trajectory is organized through successive affective oscillations associated primarily with the symbolic opposition between Grongonzo and Brasília. While Grongonzo concentrates values related to memory, ancestry, and affective bonds, Brasília represents experiences of uprootedness, inadequacy, and identity fragmentation. The analysis demonstrates that memory functions as a structuring element of the protagonist’s passions, reactivating affective states that shape her relationship with herself, with others, and with the spaces she inhabits. The study concludes that passions transcend the sphere of individual experiences and operate as discursive mechanisms through which Marilene Felinto problematizes issues related to gender, belonging, and power relations. Thus, the Semiotics of Passions proves to be a productive theoretical framework for understanding identity construction processes in contemporary Brazilian literature, highlighting the centrality of affects in the constitution of the subject and in the elaboration of literary discourses of resistance.