Desnudez Uivante, by Marmelo e Silva: a female hell in Portuguese Eden

Abstract

Madeira, the Portuguese island that second lieutenant José Marmelo e Silva knew when Portugal was supposedly neutral during part of II World War, hid behind the epithet Pearl of the Atlantic a particularly agonizing hell for women. This reality is fictionally transposed to Desnudez Uivante where some of the female characters are asylum-seeking orphans, poor children exposed to all kinds of misery, maids from the Eden-Hotel, prostitutes and even officers’ wives, in a disturbing denunciation carried out through the literary point of view of the autodiegetic narrator, lieutenant José Luís Jordão, the Author’s alter ego. A character not exempt from peccadillos, his keen social conscience exposes female lamentations rather than burying them. In this study, we analyze these private female hells that occurred in a so-called earthly Paradise.