THE ART OF STEALING: EÇA DE QUEIRÓS AND KLEPTOMANIA

Abstract

This essay analyzes an important early short story by José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), “Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl”, first published in 1874. The female protagonist’s kleptomania plays a major role in the story, and is far more significant than has been previously noted by criticism. While her impulse to steal serves to challenge and undermine the social, economic, and patriarchal order it also functions as a meta-narrative technique. Through a focus on the materiality of the story, on the objects stolen, and on the symbolic and metonymic references, this essay connects a critique of economic and literary conventions with the story’s narrative structure. As Marie-Hélène Piwnik has noted, “Eccentricities of a Blonde- Haired Girl” resonates with an earlier short narrative by Balzac, just as the ambivalent first-person narrator seems to steal the romantic tale from the protagonist Macário. This instability of narrators and authors is part of Eça’s art of stealing and narrating, and Luísa’s kleptomania, as an extension of the author’s own, is thus a mark of autonomy, creativity, and critique, a revisionary shaking of established orders.