A maternidade mulata na peça Mãe de José de Alencar e suas possíveis implicações

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze some representations of slave maternity in José de Alencar’s drama Mãe published in 1860. The methodology used in this research was the bibliographic review, seeking the works of Brookshaw, Candido, Freyre and other authors’ evidence to help us understand the black motherhood and its consequences in the nineteenth century society. This work was based on the literary analysis of Alencar’s play to understand how this romantic writer, uses this drama to report one of the major problems in the second half of the 19th century: slavery and its consequences. One of the objectives of this study is to understand why mullato women do not appear as mothers in Brazilian Literature in the 19 th century, despite Gilberto Freyre's Casa Grande & Senzala and other authors reporting the opposite. The research revealed the innovation of Alencar’s drama when he chooses to present a slave mother as a protagonist to discuss slavery problems. But paradoxically the same author as a politician had defended slavery maintenance in his political papers because “he was a product of his times”.