O Fio de Ariadne: desilusão e sensibilidade política em Os Maias, de Eça de Queiroz

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to examine Eça de Queirozs (1845-1900) literary narrative. It intends to analyze, through the work Os Maias, the process of (aesthetic and political) sensitization product and producer of a way of understanding and providing meaning to the Portuguese reality. The novel was published in 1888, after eight years of preparation, materializing the authors commitment to elaborate a work set apart. Considering the novelist own words, a publication bearing all he had in the bag. According to this expectation, but also because of the combined editorial history and creative procedures, the publication under discussion appears as the meta-synthesis of queirozian narrative: underlying the committed intellectual work and critique. This narrative weaves the completion of a negative evaluation of the modernization process the Lusitanian society had endured since the consolidation of the liberal order. According to queirozian logic, those transformations would have deepened the Portuguese secular problems instead of settling them. The elaboration of this assessment concurs with a path of disillusionment regarding the possibility of building an exit to Portugal, in association with the authors own literary ambitions: after the issue of the highlighted novel, said ambitions gradually declined. The path of decay embodied in Maia family in fiction can be comprehended as an allegory of the destiny that would be reserved to Portuguese society. We defend that this path of decay is related to civil commitments (among which literary work itself) devoted to the upbringing of a society able to construct new horizons. Though, this disillusionment points to a subjacent expectation with regard to the monarchical political force, which, in thesis, escaped from the reigning degeneration.