O corpo e o processo de envelhecimento: imposições e estereótipos no conto: "a chave", de Lygia Fagundes Telles.

Abstract

Literature has built a long tradition of female and feminist authorship and criticism, consolidating itself as a mechanism to combat to the social constraints and repressions suffered by women. With that in mind, nowadays the subject of the body intertwined with female aging has become the subject of debate based on the emancipatory search for categorical models that flee from reducing women to delimited roles exalting the physical appearance. This being said, the present research aims at analyzing the representation of aging and the impacts it causes on gender relations in the short story “A Chave” (2018), by Lygia Fagundes Telles; associating specifically the debate of the body and aging, based on the feminist movement, to the literary scope; present the author Lygia Fagundes Telles, her narrative trends with a focus on old age and aspects of contemporary Brazilian literature; as well as identifying, during the analysis of the story, both the differences between female and male aging and elements that show the imposition of eternal female youth, comparing the duality of the female characters portrayed from the idea of young woman and aged woman. For such na enterprise, it presents, according to Gil (2002), an exploratory-descriptive research methodology, having as a theoretical approach the critical analysis through the socio-historical prism, based on the assertions that, in the short story, aging impacts on gender relations and the way the male protagonist deals with his old age interferes with the way this issue is seen within the female universe. Thus, it has as a theoretical foundation the postulates of Borges (2012), Beauvoir (2018) and Lima (2008), among others. Therefore, this research sought analyze some impositions faced by women who fight against their own biological process, demonstrating that the aging body has been monitored by the insertion of the beauty standard, triggered by consumer and media industries, which postulate an ideal model body, which is associated with the archetype of youth and its characteristics, trying to demystifying, consequently, stereotypes that associate the ideal of conditioned beauty with youth.