Emma, Luiza i inne, czyli bovaryzm w Portugalii i Brazylii

The author makes use of the traditional methodology of literary history, with references to the critics of the myth and phantoms and the history of ideas. Alleging the ideas of the theorists and writers of the West (George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Vladimir Nabokov, Frederic Brown) and prominent Polish scholars (Maria Janion, among the others) analyses the notion of le bovarysme within the realm of tragic „romantic dream taken out from romantic oeuvres” (MJ). The moral collapse of Emma Bovary and Luiza Mendonça as the heroines of Gustave Flaubert and Eça de Queiroz (in the novel Cousin Bazilio, 1878) would have a relation with the exhaustion of the pattern of the romantic poetics of dreaming (la revêrie) and with undertaking by the Portuguese and Brazilian writers of the tasks outlined before the realistic literature „of a thesis” – what is summoned up is the thesis of the susceptibility of a woman to adultery. The Lusopohone metamorphoses and continuations of Emma Bovary stay within a close relations with the literary creation of Eça de Queiroz (in the novel in question and in the tale In the Windmill) as well as of Machado de Assis – the precursor of the Brazilian realism and of numerous writers of the Portuguese and Spanish language in Europe and Latin America.