No certainty of a home – household and speech in Lídia Jorge.

Abstract

The house is our corner of the world, our first universe, as written by Bachelard (1993, p. 24). “It keeps man going through the storms of the sky and the storms of life. It is body and soul. It is the first world of the human being” (Bachelard, 1993, p. 26). In literature, the various meanings of home have been explored at different levels, establishing deep relationships with both its interior and exterior. The metaphors of home as a physical place and as a place where the family structure is housed are present in Portuguese literature, which problematises the Salazarist period and thus reflects on the country's patriarchal heritage. No wonder, as Jorge Fernandes da Silveira pointed out, “[the] house is the setting for key issues, even today, for the relationship of the Portuguese with their own history, with themselves” (1999, p. 15). For that, we propose a dialogue exercise with Mônica Figueiredo's “A segunda morada: Vale da paixão, by Lídia Jorge”, which is part of the book No corpo, na casa e na cidade: as moradas da ficção. We seek to compare Lídia Jorge's novel, A manta do soldado, with a short story by the same writer, “Marido”, both published for the first time in 1998. We also try compreenhend something that is we understand as a model for the Portuguese house built under Salazarist values, an idea that is so well presented in the fado "Uma casa portuguesa", known in the voice of Amália Rodrigues.