Florbela Espanca, Diário. Modernist alternatives

Abstract

The hypothesis I propose in this study is that Florbela Espanca must be read today within a different hermeneutical context than that of her contemporaries. Her exacerbated sentimentalism has its origins in an insecure and multifaceted identity, much akin to first modernism, as clearly seen, for instance, in Sá-Carneiro. Therefore, “being a woman” is also a mask equivalent to those of other modernists, and her suicide merely the culmination of this situation. The reading of the posthumous Diário of her last year thus argues for the interpretation of “alternative modernists” that in Florbela Espanca, as in other authors, are also discernible.