MARIANA ALCOFORADO, THE PORTUGUESE NUN: (RE)FIGURATION OF THE CHARACTER AND TRANSFICCIONALITY

Abstract

Published in Paris (1669), Lettres Portugaises is a collection of love letters written by a Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, to a French army officer, the Chevalier de Chamilly. Part of its interest and editorial success was due to the mystery involving the text’s authorship and its ability to weave desire into the textual fabric, thus highlighting contradictions, obsessions and dilemmas of love. Since then, the cultural myth created around this female figure aroused the attention of many, making it the subject of several interpretations, bordering reality and fiction and also encouraging a number of creative appropriations in television, cinema or theatre. It is important to reflect on the (re)figuration of the prototype of this ground shattering woman. At a certain stage, the main focus was the ideological ballast of the transgression of moral conventions and social rules, especially by openly asserting her sexuality and revolting against the enclosure. This aspect of resisting the ruling power is used by Maricla Boggio in her play La monaca portoghese (1980). The 1979 medium-length film, Mariana Alcoforado, directed by Eduardo Geada, deserves our special attention on what concerns transposing the literary text to the audiovisual means, for the relevance it has to our topic and because it is part of a wider project of television products which had Portuguese literature works and characters as a starting point. We will give attention also to Eugène Green’s film La religieuse portugaise (2009). Once more, there is a seductive dialogue with that cultural myth, as it portrays the stay in Lisbon of Julie de Hauranne, French actress connected to Portugal because of her mother, to shoot of a film based on Mariana Alcoforado’s story. However, after becoming friends with a nun, the actress decides to set off and discover herself. Lastly, B. François-Boucher’s full-length film Les lettres de la religieuse portugaise is analysed as a “comédie dramatique historique” with multiple encounters between past and present, but exploring also the intricacies of love and sentimentality from a female point of view, in a similar fashion to Ingmar Bergman’s aesthetics.