Agustina Bessa Luís et l’écriture de l’Histoire

Sammanfattning: When Agustina Bessa-Luís rewrites History she is guided by the will to show the absence of women in History. Our reading will show the reintroduction of women in Portuguese History through the “descontruction” of its discourse. It’s through questioning the historic objectivity, by the variety of points of view and by an intertextual work with written sources, which reveal that they are human constructions, that the novels become postmodern historiographics metafictions. They elaborate through parody and ambivalence en carnival History, giving a different picture of Portugal. Then the novelist contrasts the official History with a Herstory in order to document the feminine experience and identity in all their multiplicities. The question of memory and phases that are inseparable from woman conditions, reveals a process of identical construction, which gives a report of two ways of feminine inscription into History, one authorize, the other transgressive. Then the principle of masculine domination is questioned through the matter of virility as an impossible model to attain. The men become ambiguous figures, who represent the disorder and decay of society. Fleing but reconciled they reform the masculinity and sign the death of patriarchate. Finally, the last foundations that govern the relation the relation between men and women, and the question of obligatory heterosexuality and the couple, are examined. The writer shows the end of radical otherness between the Other and the One which provokes a resemblance between sexes and questions the notion of the couple. Thus, if the author has shown in her novels, that we can be a man and a woman in different ways, she also shows that in a couple the union is impossible.