Dôra, Doralina by Rachel de Queiroz

First published: 1975 (English translation, 1984)

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1930’s to the 1940’s

Locale: Brazil, including the Northeastern state of Ceará, towns and cities in the interior, and Rio de Janeiro

Principal Characters:

• Maria das Dores (Dôra or Doralina), the protagonist, an actress and eventually mistress of Soledade Ranch
• Senhora, the widowed mother of Maria das Dores
• Laurindo Quirino, the husband of Maria das Dores, a surveyor
• Asmodeu Lucas (the Captain), the lover of Maria das Dores, a riverboat captain and smuggler
• Raimundo Delmiro, an old man who lives on Maria das Dores’s land, formerly a bandit
• Brandini, an actor and the director of the Brandini Filho Company of Comedies and Musical Farces
• Dona Estrela, the wife of Brandini and the lead actress in his theater company

The Novel

The action of Dôra, Doralina is located in the consciousness of the protagonist Maria das Dores (nicknamed Dôra or Doralina) who broodingly remembers the pleasures and pains that she has experienced as a daughter, a wife, and an actress.

The novel’s first section revolves around Dôra’s bitter struggle with her mother, whom she always formally calls Senhora. A beautiful widow, Senhora tyrannically manages the family ranch, Soledade, while showing no love toward her daughter, and the depth of Dôra’s alienation is evidenced in many ways: through her deep sense of loss over the death of her beloved father, through her belief that she is her mother’s slave and that she has been dispossessed of her inherited share of the ranch, and through her desperate need to be loved.

This desire for love, however, seems to be realized when Laurindo Quirino, a handsome surveyor, enters Dôra’s life. Investing him with the aura of a film star, she sees Laurindo as a release from her emotionally stunted life on the ranch. Moreover, he becomes a way for Dôra to defeat her mother, especially since Senhora is also attracted to him. Thus, Dôra gloats: “I was twenty-two years old, she was forty-five—Laurindo married me.” This joy, though, soon sours as she realizes that he is a violent, morally hollow opportunist; the climax of this section occurs when Dôra discovers that he is having an affair with her mother. Dôra is shattered by this revelation, and her sense of imprisonment deepens—only lessening when her husband is killed in a mysterious hunting accident. Although Queiroz never completely explains this mystery, she implies that Laurindo is murdered by Raimundo Delmiro, a former bandit now living on the ranch and devoted to Dôra because she once saved his life.

No longer able to tolerate her mother, Dôra leaves the ranch and moves to the city. The second section of the novel describes how she increasingly escapes her haunted past. Whereas the claustrophobic first section is filled with images of death, imprisonment, and alienation, this part is a picaresque affirmation of the human spirit, especially after Dôra joins a ragtag theater group as a fledgling actress. For the first time, as the company travels back and forth across Brazil by ship, train, and truck, Dôra begins experiencing the larger world. Just as important, the company gives her the sense of family that she has always desired. Brandini, the vital Falstaffian director of the group, and Dona Estrela, his commonsensical wife, love and protect Dôra as she becomes more independent, as she tests her society’s mores by coming to the realization that “my body was mine, to keep or to give, as I wished. . . . This change made a tremendous difference to me. . . .” Eventually, three years after Laurindo’s death, this section reaches its fullest expression when Dôra meets the man who fulfills her dreams: Asmodeu Lucas, a handsome, volatile, “macho,” even demoniac river captain. The two grow more intimate as they travel down the São Francisco River, and finally they “marry”—neither worrying about obtaining any legal sanction for their union.

Their relationship is the heart of the novel’s final section. When the pressures of World War II force the theater group to disperse, Dôra and the Captain begin to live together in teeming Rio de Janeiro. Queiroz initially depicts the idyllic nature of their everyday life, which, as Dôra stresses, “centered around just the two of us. But it wasn’t a prison; it was more like a hedge protecting a garden, which made it fun.” In contrast to her marriage with Laurindo, she gives herself to the Captain not out of duty, but out of love. Thus, she feels free, even though the demands of their relationship cause her to abandon her theater career, to accept his occasionally violent behavior, to acquiesce to his jealousy, and to close her eyes to the dangers of his new profession: smuggling. In short, she makes him a god whom she wants to possess totally, and as she says: “That could have been a mistake, I don’t know. In the end love is like that: We get a man or a woman just like all others, and endow that creature with everything our heart wishes.”

Their Edenic existence, however, is very precarious. This becomes increasingly apparent as one shadow after another begins haunting Dôra. Besides the Captain’s violence, which always threatens to destroy him, memories of Dôra’s past begin to stalk her again. Her mother dies, leaving the responsibilities of the ranch to her, and Delmiro is gruesomely killed, thus bringing the death of Laurindo to the forefront of her consciousness. Finally, the novel climaxes with the Captain’s death from typhoid—a disaster that makes Dôra, for the rest of her life, see the world as “one vast nothing.” Unable to cope with her grief in Rio, she returns to the more familiar solitude of the ranch and becomes the new Senhora. Now the novel has come full circle as Dôra, again in prison, tries to endure by rebuilding the deteriorating homestead.

The Characters

Maria das Dores is a complex protagonist because her passionate nature expresses itself in so many ways. During her life at Soledade, it rests behind her bitter, competitive relationship with Senhora, her persistent yearning for maternal love, her refusal to forgive the unworthy Laurindo, her single-minded desire to protect Delmiro, and her idyllic vision of the lost father who tenderly called her Dôralina. Later, it leads to her becoming an actress, to her challenging the morality of her culture by living with the Captain, to her celebrating their tender moments together, and to her feeling jealous toward anyone who receives affection from him. At its most dangerous, her passionate nature luxuriates in the Captain’s occasionally very violent, bullying behavior: Being with him gives her the freedom to act irresponsibly, to feel “delight in the taste of power, provoking everybody who was afraid to respond.” When she behaves like this, Dôra realizes that she is indeed the strong-willed Senhora’s daughter. Finally, this will to power helps Dôra survive the Captain’s death, for it leads her back to the ranch, which is now her possession: “A king dead is a king deposed. The Sinhá Dona had died and I had arrived. . . .”

While Dôra is the novel’s most dynamic creation, Queiroz also successfully draws Senhora, Laurindo, the Captain, and Brandini—all these characters being colored by the protagonist’s passionate attitude toward them. Senhora initially seems to be a monstrous maternal figure as she controls her ranch, her daughter, and herself with an iron hand. She is, as Dôra stresses, the “man of the house,” who renounces the tender side of her nature in order to step over all obstacles threatening her authority. Thus, Dôra’s alienation is well justified. Yet Queiroz tries to be fair to Senhora, as well. She indicates that this woman, like Dôra, has been the victim of a terrifying, often senseless world. In fact, as Dôra faces the Captain’s death, Queiroz makes her increasingly reflect on the woman whom she has so long hated. She has the same look of outrage, the same faith in the land, the same desire for solitude; and these similarities cause the reader to entertain the possibility that Senhora’s behavior was an outgrowth of the death of her husband—whom she loved as Dôra loves the Captain.

Just as Queiroz reveals the complexities of Dôra and Senhora by comparing and contrasting them, so she dramatically examines the ambivalent ideal of the “macho” man by playing Dôra’s lovers, Laurindo and the Captain, off each other. The men, on one level, seem quite similar. Both are physically attractive, and this draws the romantic Dôra to them. Both see themselves as “the beloved man, the dear master” whom women are born to serve. Also, both have an irresponsible violent streak linked to their need to assert their masculinity. Yet Dôra comes to detest Laurindo, even before she discovers his relationship with her mother, while her love for the Captain grows increasingly stronger. These different responses stem from her attraction to the Captain’s passionate interest in life, so unlike Laurindo’s shallow, hard impersonality; from her realization that the Captain—despite his moments of insensitivity—has intuitively understood her deepest needs; and from her sense that he, in contrast to Laurindo, has never been “one of those who hides love or is ashamed to love.” Therefore, she continues to endure his more diabolical actions (he has been appropriately named Asmodeu, after the devil in the Book of Tobias) long after they cease to be exciting to her.

Finally, there is Brandini, the comic soul of the novel’s second section. He is an impudent, spontaneous, crafty, thoroughly romantic, and always curious life force, whose unfettered imagination is usually filled with grandiose future schemes as his theater company stays one step ahead of his creditors. As Dôra notes, everyone seems to bask in his vitality. Certainly he helps her experience life more fully, for he becomes her surrogate father when she joins his company. Striking a perfect balance in this role, he not only protects her, but he also encourages her to become an actress. Brandini thus gives Dôra the opportunity to express the artistic side of her personality, which has been so oppressed during her life with Senhora. Considering his love of life, it is not surprising that Brandini, of all the characters, has the greatest fear of death—a fear evident in his plaintive response to the news that Senhora has died: “That’s the way it is. People die!”

Critical Context

Critics have associated Queiroz with a group of writers (including José Lins do Rego, Jorge Amado, and Graciliano Ramos) who were bred in the remote Northeastern areas of Brazil and who burst onto the Brazilian literary scene in the 1930’s to create what has been called “the novel of the Northeast.” As Fred P. Ellison explains, this genre of the Brazilian novel is “characterized by its interest in man in his regional environment, by its implicit (and sometimes explicit) note of social protest, and by its endeavor to discover psychological truths in man, no matter what his walk of life. . . .” Dôra, Doralina can be seen as a late and interesting addition to this genre. The novel begins and ends with graphic descriptions of Dôra’s life in the Northeast as she is both repulsed by and drawn to her family’s ranch. Moreover, through Dôra’s struggle to find individual freedom, Queiroz once again explores a social issue that is in all of her novels: the degrading secondary status of most women in this region.

Yet Dôra, Doralina, which has rightly been called Queiroz’s most ambitious and accomplished novel, goes far beyond being merely a regional work. It contains her broadest vision of Brazilian society, as Dôra travels to many cities when she is with Brandini’s company before settling in Rio de Janeiro with the Captain. In addition, it continues Queiroz’s movement from the sociological emphases of her earliest works toward the psychological realism of As três Marias (1939; The Three Marias, 1963). Thus, with unflinching honesty, Queiroz reveals the subtleties of Dôra’s character and in the process—with more depth than ever before—develops some of the prevailing themes within her fiction: the ambivalent nature of memories, the human need for nurturing maternal love, the difficulties and beauties of male-female relationships, and the individual’s painful existence in a universe where the “good things in life occur less often, the evil ten times more.”

Bibliography

Courteau, Joanna. “Dôra, Doralina: The Sexual Configuration of Discourse.” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 20 (May, 1991): 3-9. A discussion of the narrative style of the novel, Queiroz’s treatment of the character, Dôra Maria das Dores, and a psychoanalytic examination of the book.

Courteau, Joanna. “The Problematic Heroines in the Novels of Rachel de Queiroz.” Luso Brazilian Review 22 (Winter, 1985): 123-144. An excellent analysis of the women characters and the female problematic in Queiroz’s novels.

Ellison, Fred P. “Rachel de Queiroz.” In Brazil’s New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. A good starting point for study of Queiroz’s early work, particularly in the context of the 1930’s Brazilian social novel.

Ellison, Fred P. “Rachel de Queiroz.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Queiroz’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.

Wasserman, Renata R. “A Woman’s Place: Rachel de Queiroz’s Dôra, Doralina.” Brasileira: A Journal of Brazilian Literature 2 (1989): 46-58. A discussion of the role of women in Brazilian society as reflected in Dôra, Doralina.