Echoes of the Past

...religious and moral prejudices and taboos...

...She comes to epitomize Portugal itself, a land falsely and forcibly wedded to God and cast out from other nations...

...As for the Chevalier himself, the "Three Marias" have dealt chivalrously with him...

...Women have never enjoyed anything even remotely approaching civic equality in Portugal...

...It brings to mind that classic of 17th-century sentimental literature, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun...

...the community of the secluded...

...The mind invents lies as it writes...

...They contain-but of course-an imaginary "Sixth Letter," two fictional responses from the Chevalier to Mariana, an exchange between Mariana and her family, and other epistolary oddments-some of them appallingly maudlin...

...True, the theme is womanhood, Portuguese womanhood in particular, and the temptation for the authors to indulge in politics must have been almost irresistible...

...Non-feminist Maria Fatima "makes little effort to escape herself" and is "starving" or "drowning fully clothed...

...It is, however, ambition without full responsibility, for all the texts are unsigned...

...New Portuguese Letters, as the volume was originally titled, was suppressed by the Lisbon government upon publication in the spring of 1972...

...Picking up where Mariana left off, the entire "correspondence" continues the bitter task of "expostulating the desertion" of the second sex...

...She was merely using him, he claims, to wreak vengeance on the mother who abandoned her...

...As if by divine intervention, the junior officers' movement seized the Portuguese capital a week later and the case was dropped...

...the couple...

...Reviewed by Dan Hofstadter Free-lance translator, critic Here is a three-part invention all in treble clef...

...In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that a number of Women's Liberation groups have emerged (until very recently the new revolutionary government shunned them as a "bourgeois excrescence") or that two of the Marias-Maria Teresa and Maria Isabel-are feminists...

...Terror-stricken by his own tenderness," he accuses her of not being a "serious woman," of never having given herself to him outright...

...It descants so airily over the most mundane tortures that one is surprised at how muddy it gets after the first hundred-odd pages...

...Fortunately, though, the book is amorphous enough for a reader to simply skip the bad sections, passages the "Three Marias" would probably have excised themselves had they not been suffering from a pronounced case of scissors-phobia...

...The lament, "If only I had not been born a woman...

...This anonymity, intended to reinforce the solidarity of the collaborators, also conveys a certain coyness, especially since the reader readily spots the stylistic quirks of each Maria as well as the code names the others know her by...

...It is neither of these, and to see it thus is to misread it...

...That's what tends to happen, I suppose, when writers have censors breathing down their necks...

...These included "passion, feminine seclusion and sisterhood...

...The New Portuguese Letters function as a sequel to this Fifth Letter...

...In 1667, after nine years of monastic life, she fell passionately in love with a visiting French officer, the Chevalier de Chamilly, who abandoned her when their affair became a public scandal...

...hatred, separation, war...

...all three, too, were educated by nuns, and it is the symbol of the nun that acquires the greatest thematic weight as their trialectic evolves...

...here becomes one with the cry, "If only I had been born in some other part of the world...

...Ambitious...

...Soon the voices begin to imitate and embroider one another, and at times sing in sharp antiphony: "To resolve," warns one of them, "is neither to deal blows nor to receive them...

...The five tortured missives she wrote him following his departure form a sort of baroque trompe l'oeil: What at first appears as a romantic plaint is quickly perceived to be a caricature of chivalry...

...In her Fifth Letter, for instance, she declares, "I discovered that it was not so much you as my own passion to which I was attached...

...ingenuous love and sophisticated loveletters...

...10.00...

...You bet...

...All three women are mothers and professional writers...

...And so I feel that writing to you (to each one of you, to myself) is always a lesser good...

...Though today they actually comprise 26 per cent of the country's labor force, the unskilled female's average income is only about two-thirds that of her male counterpart...

...The attempt to combine these idioms of poetry with the baroque tone of the 17th century and the rhetoric of elevated letters, while still admitting a very modern lyric strain, inevitably loses much in Helen R. Lane's obviously superb translation...

...the act of writing...

...Their trial, which began in July 1973, was prolonged for many months in a blatant attempt to ruin them financially...

...The metaphors for desertion and dalliance are central here: knight and nun, saddle and cell, capture and captivation...

...Then, on April 18, 1974, the very day they were due for sentencing, the court mysteriously adjourned...

...Because of the Marias' persecution, their book has been hailed as a revolutionary tract and a missile in the war for female liberation...

...the pursuit of joy and pleasure...

...But their purity of diction, when loyally sustained, allows them to escape the lure of the confessional and to belie the Chevalier's accusation (it is they who put the words in his mouth) that their letters are merely "filth and suffering discarded for the filth and suffering of others to feed on...

...She is seen as the archetype not only of the shunned and psychically spayed woman, but of the ministering Sister and the solitary exaltee...

...the constants of our national history...

...a 1926 statute forbids them to work outside the home without their husbands' consent...

...they have made him as self-serving yet as cutting a psychologist as the nun herself...

...through your wretched behavior...

...It is, rather, a literary work, an assemblage of letters, poems, essays, and sketches...

...and it demands, for better or worse, to be read as literature...

...The Portuguese have a legendary fascination with their tongue, and one can sense, even if one doesn't know the language, where that infatuation way-lays the authors and where they manage to turn it toward serious ends...

...Reading them, one often catches an echo from another sentimental classic, Sonnets from the Portuguese: "I love thee with the passion put to use/In my old griefs...

...Yet the Letters were conceived not as a petition, but as an offering and a communion-what the third contributor, Maria Fatima (Velho da Costa), has called a "trialectic...

...The three friends met twice weekly for half a year to exchange short manuscripts on various selected "motifs" of common concern...

...it was remarkable how I suffered...

...guilt...

...The author of that work, Mariana Alcoforado, was forced into a convent at the age of 15 because her parents could not provide her with a dowry...

...even after you had become despicable...

...Maria Isabel is, by a pun, the "towering coral isle," the "stone," and the "mast...

...Indeed, at their best these writings help undo the hurts caused by the equation of women's suffering with filth: the nunnery-filth of bloodstains, shorn hair and small messes...

...man and woman as strangers to each other...

...Maria Teresa, is the "bitter sorrel," the "rose-one," the "one with the voice of glass" who "exhausts already exhausted words...

...a national and personal sense of isolation and abandonment...

...The New Portuguese Letters are most telling, I think, when they hint-and they never do more than hint-at the ways men and women find to transmute vengeance and nostalgia into love, and vice versa...

...In the meantime the plight of the women had become, willy-nilly, an international cause celebre...

...The authors were hauled into a courtroom and charged with "abuse of the freedom of the press...