The writing of yourself in Where my heart has been, by Maria Helena Cardoso

Abstract

Published in 1967, Por onde andou meu coração is the first book by Maria Helena Cardoso (1903-1994), in which the author recalls her past through her memory, from which her childhood, strength and work of the women of family, the customs of small towns, moving trips, experiences of love, friendship and death, in addition to some periods in the political history of Brazil and the world. This study intends to analyze the construction of the work as a self-writing, which occupies a hybrid space between Literature and autobiography, considering especially the female figures as emblematic characters composed from the narrator’s point of view. Based on fundamental concepts of the memorialistic genre, such as the autobiographical pact proposed by Lejeune (2008), and on Benjamin’s (2012) conception of the primordial narrator, some thematic and formal aspects responsible for the confluence between life and fiction, which make this book one of the great achievements of Brazilian memorialism.