Júlia Valentina da Silveira Lopes was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1862 and passed away in the same city in 1934. Throughout her life she wrote crônicas, plays, novels, poems and children’s literature. She also received several honours from national and international institutions. Almeida was raised in Campinas and lived in Portugal, where she married the poet and journalist Filinto de Almeida (1857–1945). Together they had three children. During her lifetime, she was an active intellectual figure and prominent literary voice. A number of critics have investigated why Almeida (or ‘D. Júlia’, as she was known during her lifetime) was not included in the literary canon after her death, even though her work was compared to that of renowned Brazilian authors such as Machado de Assis.¹

A commonly cited description of Almeida comes from the cronista Paulo Barreto (1881–1921), known by his pseudonym, João do Rio, who visited the family’s house and wrote that ‘Mrs. Júlia is sitting in the shade, talking about her books and her children at the same time. I believe she confuses them and thinks about her imagined characters as she kisses the sweet fruits of her life. Her voice is calm, sweet, and her gestures are maternal.’² In this description, published in O momento literário in 1905, João do Rio identifies a certain slippage or confusion in the way in which the writer talks about her children and her books. The interview captures Almeida’s internal debate about how to divide her time between her domestic responsibilities and her creative work while being a mother. This tension between labour and gender is one of the topics evident in Almeida’s 1901 adultery novel A falência [The Bankruptcy],³ where she establishes a connection between economics, literature and adultery. By drawing out these links between economics and adultery in A falência, this essay distils a critique of both financial capitalism and the policing of female sexuality.

In this chapter, I compare the 1856 French novel with Almeida’s A falência to identify how both novels manifest a crisis of credibility that extends from personal relationships to institutions, and how each novel presents different projects in its specific national context. I also demonstrate how Almeida self-consciously writes in reaction to an established genre of female adultery novels, exemplified by Madame Bovary, that feature female characters written by men. Not only does Almeida’s text dramatize the precarity induced by unconstrained capitalism – the same forces that lead Emma Bovary to commit suicide – but she also depicts an alternative economic system predicated on feminine solidarity. Almeida’s vision of a cooperative economic sphere populated by women challenges the abstract figure of ‘economic man’ central to modern economic theory, who is largely defined by his competitive instincts and unfettered self-interest.⁴ Moreover, the economic dimensions of Madame Bovary and A falência are entwined with a preoccupation with literature insofar as Emma’s habits of infidelity and consumption are attributed to the effects of the romance novels she reads whereas Camila evinces an aversion to adultery fiction which appears to be informed by a critical awareness of the limited perceptions of male writers to adequately capture female sexuality.

Emma and Camila both have affairs while married, challenging the norms of the institution of marriage and undermining their own credibility as they lie to deceive their husbands. Meanwhile, Emma’s and Teodoro’s bankruptcies demonstrate the role of fantasies in sustaining financial institutions. Emma’s purchases and Teodoro’s investments are inspired by the reading of catalogues and the comparison of external signs of wealth, respectively. Credit and stock market speculation emerge as mechanisms for Emma and Teodoro to actualize in their own lives the representations of wealth which they have encountered, but these same mechanisms introduce a fateful precarity into their lives.

To compare Emma’s and Camila’s affairs and Emma’s and Teodoro’s financial ruin and death is to articulate a link between fantasy, economics and adultery – an association hinted at by the etymology of the word ‘credit’. The word ‘credit’ is derived from the Latin verb credere, meaning ‘to believe’, which in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European word for ‘heart’.⁵ The word ‘credit’ names the instrument of Emma’s pursuit of wealth and also gestures towards the credulity of her husband, Charles, who fails to notice her affairs. Moreover, Teodoro’s decision to invest in the stock market is tied to his perception of the credibility of his acquaintance, Inocêncio, who has facilitated the acquisition of sudden wealth of other men through stock market speculation. ‘Credibility’ is also a key term for Camila’s love life, since she tells her lover that she knows that her husband, Teodoro, lies to her by having other lovers, while she herself doesn’t know that her lover is also lying to her. In both novels, misguided belief in the likelihood of future returns on investment, the indefinite deferment of debts, or the discourse of other characters in their romantic and economic relationships results in illusions that are eventually punctured by bankruptcy (whether moral or economic). The financial institutions that seduced Emma and Teodoro result in desperation – a dynamic repeated in the romantic affairs of Emma and Camila, who lie to their husbands only to be lied to in turn by their lovers.

Both novels dramatize a pattern of adultery and bankruptcy which exposes the constitutive role played by fantasies in the maintenance of social and economic institutions. Edward Said cites Don Quixote and Candide as works that satirize the ‘fallacy’ of assuming ‘that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books – texts – say’.6 Emma Bovary, whose visions of married life – inspired by the reading of romance novels – collide with an underwhelming reality, is a prime example of the effects of such a textual attitude. The failure of Charles Bovary to match the protagonists of these novels encourages her to seek love elsewhere.

But Emma’s economic behaviour also manifests a preference for simple narratives over nuanced ones. Through the mechanism of credit, Emma is able to construct an imaginary future that has little correspondence with economic realities. As Jens Beckert writes in Imagined Futures:

According to Beckert, economic action is rooted in stories told about the future. These narratives are fictional texts insofar as they make claims about futures that have not yet come to pass. If the fictional futures that underlie economic action are texts, it follows that it may be possible for those interpreting such futures to fall victim to Said’s textual attitude. Not only are Emma Bovary’s romantic exploits based on a failure to distinguish between literary narratives and reality, her economic life – enabled by credit – is likewise predicated on an unrealistic narrative of an infinitely deferrable future and a perpetual postponement of debt repayment.

Building on Emma’s example, I contrast two manifestations of the textual attitude in A falência: in Teodoro’s confusion of projected economic futures for financial realities and Camila’s reprimand of Dr Gervásio for uncritically accepting a model of female sexuality presented in popular novels. These examples demonstrate not only the role of narratives in economics, but also the economic dimensions of adultery.

Fictions of Financial Futures

Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s novel draws attention to how the introduction of the stock market initiates a process of dematerialization that separates labour from value. While Karl Marx asserted that commodities are not only material entities but also ‘mystical’ things ‘abounding in metaphysical subtleties’,⁸ the financialization of the economy (the transition occurring when financial services begin to dominate an economy, replacing manufacturing as a primary source of wealth production) introduces another layer of abstraction into economic exchange. The abstraction of labour that Marx claimed ‘stamps’ commodities as commodities is compounded by an additional level of abstraction during the process of financialization. The abstract values stamped on commodities become themselves commodified in a kind of self-reflexive mode of speculation – an economic hall of mirrors populated by, as Fredric Jameson writes, ‘spectres of value’. This stage of capitalist development, Jameson argues, is characterized by ‘the increasingly feverish search, not so much for new markets (these are also saturated) as for the new kind of profits available in financial transactions themselves’.⁹ As the title of Almeida’s novel indicates, these financial abstractions have very real material effects on the well-being of her characters, resulting in a material and moral bankruptcy and precipitating a state of economic and emotional precarity.

One material effect of the stock market depicted early in the novel is the massive wealth it generates for certain fortunate individuals – wealth that manifests as expensive commodities. Teodoro’s decision to invest in the stock market is in part inspired by the fact that his own house, ‘um palacete’ [a mansion], is no longer the grandest and most expensive in the neighbourhood. That distinction now belongs to Gama Torres, a younger coffee-seller who is described as a ‘modern business man’, since he has invested in the stock market with the support of the broker Inocêncio and been able to ‘build a large house’ with wealth acquired seemingly overnight.¹⁰ The difference in the size of Teodoro’s and Gama Torres’s houses seems to indicate the relative wealth-generating capacities of business based on, respectively, the buying and selling of commodities and financial speculation.¹¹ Before the rise of the stock market, coffee exports had not only produced vast fortunes in Brazil but had played a role in configuring the global luxuries market in the nineteenth century.

Teodoro is torn throughout the novel during this transition between a traditional plantation-based economy and a financial one – a change that he interprets through a theological lens. He believes that God helps those who work for long periods, and he sees the devil’s hand in Gama Torres’s sudden enrichment. Although Teodoro initially resists the promises of quick riches by criticizing Gama Torres’s gambling, he eventually succumbs to the seductive possibility of tripling his wealth on the stock market over the course of a few days. Teodoro’s abandonment of his more conservative business practices exemplifies an economic trend witnessed by Almeida’s contemporaries. As Felisbello Freire explains in his História constitucional da República, this era was ‘a time of gambling never before seen. True adventures where the audacity of some sacrificed the naivety of others. Fortunes that existed disappeared. Some, who the day before had come as beggars for bread from the State, at the next moment presented themselves as millionaires.’¹² Freire’s remarks on the sudden acquisition and loss of fortunes speak to the economic uncertainty (and fascination) that the emergence of the stock market unleashed in the previously more economically stable lives of A falência’s bourgeois protagonists. In a moment of self-reflection, Teodoro laments, ‘He had worked so hard to finally achieve what others had acquired with a gesture!’¹³ Contrasting his own arduous and gradual enrichment with the sudden fortunes of the nouveau riche who, in a single day, obtain wealth similar to that which Teodoro took his entire life to acquire, he links the intensification of economic volatility with the decoupling of profits from productive labour.

14 The clarity of the language employed by Inocêncio allays Teodoro’s misgivings about the stock market. Inocêncio’s speech, complemented by handwritten notes and passages from foreign newspapers, produces a vision of future economic prosperity that paradoxically mobilizes clarity of terms and arguments to conceal the fundamental opacity and uncertainty of the future. Inocêncio produces a fantasy of foreknowledge about the future in his description of an economic system that Teodoro is only beginning to understand. Despite his initial aversion to the stock market, Teodoro is enticed by Inocêncio’s proposal. The narrator claims that Inocêncio ‘extended the proposal seductively’.¹⁵ There is thus a blurring of romantic and financial terms in describing Teodoro’s attraction to the possibility of profits.

Teodoro’s seduction by Inocêncio’s account of future profits from a financial system he knows little about is a manifestation of Said’s textual attitude. Said claims that one situation in which the textual attitude appears is when ‘a human being confronts at close quarters something relatively unknown and threatening and previously distant’. In cases such as this, ‘one has recourse not only to what in one’s previous experience the novelty resembles but also to what one has read about it’.¹⁶ Such a textual attitude is evident in Madame Bovary, where the romantic novels read by Emma create a simplified image of married life that fills the vacuum of her inexperience. For Teodoro, Inocêncio’s discourse and the textual sources that supplement it form a representation that renders the complexities of the stock market cognizable. The clear and readily understandable explanations furnished by Inocêncio preclude the necessity for any fine-grained analysis of the complex and volatile mechanisms underlying stock prices. The simplified fantasy becomes a substitute for a sprawling and uncertain reality.

Yet, even a rigorous analysis of the functioning of the stock market would reveal the central role played by fantasy. Anna Kornbluh in Realizing Capital summarizes the relationship between economics and fantasy very precisely: ‘something within all capital is fictitious’.¹⁷ In financial capital, this ‘something’ is the set of expectations about the future which determine value. Together, these expectations produce a fictional discourse that disavows its fictionality. It is crucial that no one treats the imaginary values as imaginary.

Accordingly, finance produces an effect akin to that of the textual attitude, as when Teodoro believes his economic fantasies will materialize in the near future. When Teodoro finds out that he has lost everything, he asks the family doctor (who is also Camila’s lover) to tell Camila and the children about their destitution. In the ensuing dialogue, Dr Gervásio criticizes Camila’s shock and incredulity about Teodoro’s bankruptcy and says, ‘You, women, don’t understand these things. You only know life on a superficial level, that is why you are surprised with normal facts. Today it is Teodoro’s bankruptcy, tomorrow will be someone else and then another. The list will be long.’¹⁸ Gervásio paints Teodoro as one casualty of the onward march of capital; and he claims that the conditions of Camila’s gender have prevented her from seeing and understanding the risks encapsulated in the financial market upon which her husband was betting. Curiously, Gervásio does not assign Teodoro’s failings to his gender, but instead describes them as part of a general economic dynamic. Likewise, whereas Camila’s surprise at her husband’s bankruptcy is deemed a product of the superficiality of the knowledge she has by virtue of her gender, Teodoro’s surprise at going bankrupt is not attributed to any particular masculine quality.

The attribution of limited financial acumen to gendered differences in knowledge is also present in Madame Bovary. The narrator writes that Emma was ‘troubled no more about money matters than an archduchess’.19 Emma’s frivolous attitude towards money is compared to that of a female aristocrat who, like Camila, is insulated from economic anxiety and spends without care or concern. Moreover, Emma’s entrance into a system of debt obligation is undertaken without a clear understanding of the responsibilities it places on her. Just as Teodoro is seduced by Inocêncio’s proposed scheme to attain instant wealth, Emma is tempted by the luxuries displayed to her by the local merchant and creditor, Monsieur Lheureux. Emma appears gripped by a perpetual propagation of new desires that, once fulfilled, are only replaced by fresh iterations.

In this respect Emma is similar to Teodoro, who is constantly pursuing wealth and social recognition of his success. The economic behaviours of Emma and Teodoro are thus not only the result of a confusion between simplified explanations and complex realities but also enabled by the distinct temporalities produced through debt spending and financial speculation. In the temporal regime of finance, Elena Esposito explains, ‘the future is produced using expectations about the future, in a circularity where one loses sight of the difference between reality and illusion’.²⁰ In finance, value becomes tied to expectations, about future values, and money becomes a tool for adjudicating these different expectations rather than a metric of time spent in productive labour. These expectations are of course illusory, papered over a fundamental uncertainty about the future; this mixing of reality and illusion is a key element of what has been called the ‘stock market novel’.²¹

In Flaubert’s novel, owing to her relative lack of wealth, Emma’s desires produce a slightly different temporality than that found in the stock market novel. For Emma, the promise of credit – or the deferment of payment into a projected future – serves as a means of escaping present conditions. She borrows from the future to pay for the present, whereas Teodoro gambles away his present wealth for the sake of potential future gains. These distinct modes of expenditure represent gendered dimensions of economic activity. As a female bourgeois character, Emma is not free to pursue wealth through commerce, investment or labour. Given the relatively limited wealth of her husband, Emma turns to credit. Teodoro, on the other hand, is free to gamble away his family fortune.

From Fictional Futures to Fantasies of Adultery

The preoccupation with stock market speculation in A falêncua is coupled with a narrative arc involving female adultery. Camila is having an affair with Gervásio, the family physician. Just as her husband is seduced by the lure of multiplying his wealth through stock market speculation, Camila is seduced by the refined manners, extensive knowledge, and passion embodied by Gervásio. While Teodoro’s stock market misadventures lead to material ruin, Camila’s transgressive sexual behaviour threatens the abstract ideal of the family and the broader social order.

Studying this entanglement of sex, money and fantasy in the novel, it is possible to discern from Almeida’s work a critique of both capitalism and the gender norms governing turn-of-the-century Brazilian society. Reading Gervásio’s claim that ‘You, women, don’t understand these things’²² alongside the works of contemporary feminist economists, we can see how Gervásio’s exclusion of women from economic considerations is widely replicated in mainstream economic theories. The Swedish journalist Katrine Marçal, for example, has identified how the ‘primary characteristic’ of ‘economic man’ – the rational actor central to so many economic models – ‘is that he is not a woman’. She adds, ‘Economists sometimes joke that if a man marries his housekeeper, the GDP of the country declines.’²³ She describes how models of economic behaviour have tended to privilege those traits deemed masculine – competition, reason and individuality – at the expense of feminine traits such as caring and cooperation. Furthermore, economics as a discipline, she argues, has discounted the unpaid domestic female labour that makes complex economic activity possible.

The literary critic Bill Overton, meanwhile, has identified in The Novel of Female Adultery how the genre of the adultery novel has from the outset possessed a markedly gendered emphasis. ‘No classic novel,’ he writes, ‘let alone any fictional tradition, is based on male adultery. The widely used term “novel of adultery” is therefore a misnomer which masks a gender bias both in the novels themselves and in the critical discourses within which they have been interpreted. This is why I employ the term “novel of female adultery” instead.’²⁴ While women are excluded from economic theories, men are conspicuously absent from adultery novels. Overton’s term ‘novel of female adultery’ is an attempt to make visible a widespread but little noted asymmetry in the gender of those charged with adultery.

According to the narrator’s descriptions, Charles is a simple provincial bourgeois physician, who fails to live up to Emma’s image of a potential husband based on the heroic and glorious knight Ivanhoe. Emma’s lovers (first Rodolphe and then Leon) similarly fail to live up to the standards of her literary models. In A falência the comparison is more complex, since there is no outstanding difference between Francisco Teodoro and Dr Gervásio. While Emma’s lovers at least possess certain qualities that Charles lacks (such as good looks, aristocratic values, being a hunter, enjoying fashion, reading poetry, etc.), Camila’s lover is not particularly different from her husband. Moreover, it is not out of boredom that Camila engages in her affair but out of what she claims to be genuine love for Gervásio.

In contrast to Emma, Camila seems relatively content with the material conditions of her bourgeois life: her mansion, jewellery and dresses seem enough for her. Whereas Emma shares Teodoro’s passion for money but lacks his wealth, Emma shares Camila’s transgressive sexuality. There are key differences between Camila and Emma as characters, however, which are exhibited most starkly in their different attitudes towards novels. According to Elizabeth Amann in Importing Madame Bovary – The Politics of Adultery, Emma is a ‘Quixote in skirts’ and, like Quixote, she mistakes tales of romance and chivalry for actual romantic life.²⁶ Camila, on the contrary, refuses to read a romantic story of adultery offered to her by Gervásio. In this comparison, I suggest, it may be possible to detect a critique mounted by Almeida against the tradition of adultery novels written by men which portray women as female Quixotes. Camila’s resistance to the typical representations of women in adultery novels is simultaneously a resistance to the link between literature and adultery established in Madame Bovary. Not only is adultery presented as a uniquely feminine crime in the genre of the adultery novel, but it is also associated with a particularly feminine mode of reading which is at once uncritical and escapist.

In Madame Bovary, Emma is educated in a convent to become a good wife and mother. Challenging the limits of such an education, Emma also participates in the clandestine trade in romantic novels that circulate in the convent. She obtains these illicit books from an old lady who ‘always carried [some novels] in the pockets of her apron’.²⁷ In another example of the relationship between economics and fantasy in Flaubert’s novel, the old woman who gives Emma the novels that will inspire her illusory visions of romance is herself a victim of bankruptcy – prefiguring the relationship between books and bankruptcy which will characterize Emma’s future. The narrator explains that she was ‘[p]atronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution’.28 Little is known about her family’s history beyond the fact that she is still respected by the clergy for her ‘ancient’ values; in the convent, however, the old lady is the source of love stories that will spur Emma’s disappointment with married life and motivate her sexual and consumerist habits:

Emma’s participation at the age of 15 in this clandestine book trade, according to the narrator, has made her ‘hands dirty with books from old lending libraries’.³⁰ Enumerating the novels that Emma reads, the critic Margaret Cohen brings attention to an overlooked point concerning Flaubert’s gender bias: ‘Flaubert does not name the most read novels in private lending libraries during the first decades of the Restoration. Before Walter Scott, and indeed, even contemporary with him, these novels were sentimental novels by women writers’ (my emphasis).³¹ How to understand, then, this absence of the names of female authors in Madame Bovary? Many of the novels that Emma reads in secret were probably written by women, but these women’s names are not listed by Flaubert. Flaubert’s decision to discuss Walter Scott while omitting the names of the female authors that Emma would almost certainly have also read echoes a general tendency towards the erasure of female authors from literary history, which also plagued authors in real life, including Almeida. As Rita Schmidt writes, Almeida ‘participated in the inauguration of the Academia Brasileira de Letras [Brazilian Academy of Letters], for which she was nominated. But since she was a woman, her nomination was, nevertheless, refused.’³²

Whereas Flaubert depicts a recursive dynamic wherein Emma imbibes the fantasies of romantic novels only to attempt to realize those fantasies in her own life, Almeida has Camila evince a much more critical attitude towards literature. For, in Almeida’s novel, the issue of gender and authorship is explicitly raised. In the first scene where the two lovers are by themselves, Dr Gervásio gives Camila a book. When Camila asks about its content, Gervásio says that it is about ‘a love similar to ours’,³³ which indicates that it is a novel about adultery. Camila then rejects the book, explaining that she wouldn’t read such a novel, since

Almeida presents Camila as being aware of the male perspective of writers of the nineteenth century, who will judge any transgressive action more harshly if the perpetrator is female. Camila even interprets these penalties in economic terms, claiming she pays a ‘high price’ for her happiness.³⁵

Through the character of Camila, Almeida is implicitly critiquing what Edward Said calls the ‘second situation of the textual attitude’.³⁶ Whereas, as we saw with Teodoro, the first situation occurs when humans substitute knowledge gained through texts for actual experience (believing in Inocêncio’s discourse about stocks as if it accurately describes their future value), the second situation occurs when certain descriptions gain traction and are reproduced in a discourse. Said gives the example of lions: ‘If one reads a book claiming that lions are fierce and then encounters a fierce lion (I simplify, of course), the chances are that one will be encouraged to read more books by that same author, and believe them.’³⁷ The author of these descriptions is granted the status of expert and his or her account of the nature of lions is reproduced by successive writers. The lion’s fierceness predominates in subsequent representations, subsuming other qualities and emerging as its own object of study. Just as the lion in Said’s example is reduced to a single quality that is simultaneously dominant yet unquestioned, fictional representations of women, Camila claims, are characterized by their misdeeds – which in the context seems to imply a tendency towards adultery. Not only is adultery the crime that Camila is guilty of, but, as we have seen, the novel of female adultery is a recognizable genre of fin-de-siècle fiction that generally presented adultery as a gendered crime that only women were capable of committing and for which they were solely to blame.

Drawing on Said, we might argue that a transgressive sexuality thus becomes the defining quality in female characters written by men, forming a genealogy of such representations that is self-reinforcing: the more such representations appear, the more accurate such representations appear to be. Indeed, the accuracy of a particular representation is judged by its conformity with previous representations. We can thus appreciate how even a genre of fiction such as realism, with its supposedly close correlation between the fictional world and reality, may yet be populated by representations of women that focus extensively on their transgressive sexuality. Following Said, we could say that the fictional worlds and the representations contained therein affect real attitudes so that reality begins to conform to fictional worlds rather than the other way around. Such a dynamic is, after all, the key claim in Said’s Orientalism – a book about the West’s ‘textual attitude toward the Orient’, in which fictional representations affect real perceptions of whole regions and peoples.

Unsurprisingly, as the critic João Roberto Faria explains, nearly all the most well-known descriptions of Brazilian female characters in the nineteenth century were written by male writers.³⁸ Against this backdrop of canonical depictions of women created mostly by men, it is possible to read Camila’s critique of male writers as an example of how Almeida was also challenging conventional descriptions of women. The novel that Gervásio offers Camila appears to belong to a different genre than those read by Emma. Indeed, Gervásio presents Camila a ‘novel of female adultery’ – offering her precisely the same genre of novel as that in which they are appearing as characters. The double standard evinced by such literature – wherein female sexuality is a phenomenon that requires policing but male sexuality is unproblematized – appears to Camila to be yet another manifestation of the gender inequality that partially motivated her affair in the first place. Regarding her husband’s affairs, Camila says,

The focus of adultery novels on transgressive female sexuality is the fictional counterpart of the normative social order that requires Camila to passively accept her husband’s infidelity. Almeida thus appears to self-reflexively place her novel in opposition to those novels of female adultery written by men. In a sense, Camila’s dialogue amounts to a critique of the textual attitude, insofar as she refuses to accept that fictional representations of female conduct adequately or fairly capture reality.

Conclusion: Reading as Resistance (against the Textual Attitude)

In the end it is Nina, the niece of Camila, who helps with domestic chores, who saves the family after Teodoro’s suicide. While the family was still wealthy, Teodoro gave Nina a birthday gift: a small house under her own name. After the bankruptcy and Teodoro’s suicide, Nina invites Camila, her daughters and the domestic servant, Noca, to move into her house. Although Teodoro has lost the family fortune by gambling on the stock market, Nina is able to keep the small property because it is under her name. The contrast between what is lost and what remains indicates that, in A falência, there is an emphasis on the value of land and physical assets over the abstract value of stocks. In Realizing Capital, Kornbluh traces the history of the term ‘realize’, concluding that it comes from ‘real estate’, which was a conversion of ‘money into land’.⁴⁰ Almeida’s novel appears to criticize the abstract value of financial capital by depicting the relative stability and use value of real estate. The durability of the house’s value as a place of shelter stands in stark contrast to the wild fluctuations of stock market values. The latter introduce precarity into the futures they conjure up through the production of fantasies of foreknowledge whereas the former (the land) adds certainty to the future by remaining useful over time.

Whereas Camila had the offer of shelter and support from her niece, Emma receives no such assistance despite appealing to her lovers for financial relief. Indeed, it is through their failure to provide monetary or emotional support that Emma realizes that her lovers were not serious about their partnership with her. What follows is a crucial event in the French novel, when Emma appears to grasp the scale of her own illusions: ‘You made me believe you,’ she says to her lover, Rodolphe; ‘for two years you held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream!’⁴¹ Emma’s reaction when she realizes that her lovers have lied to her about the extent and nature of their love is similar to Camila’s reaction when she finds out that her own lover is married: ‘He was married! He had lied to her! So many years of lies, so many years of lies!’⁴² Despite these similar moments of disillusionment, the two novels differ in the female characters’ eventual destinies.

As much as Camila is depicted as critical of the hypocritical male discourse against female adultery, she fails to see that she was deluded in assuming her lover Dr Gervásio to be a bachelor. In having Camila carry out an affair with a man who she believes is single but is actually married, Almeida once more departs from the convention of adultery novels. As Overton points out in presenting his theory on the novel of wifely adultery, ‘[e]ach [novel] is based on a plot in which, with minor variations, a married woman from the middle or upper classes is seduced by an unmarried man of the same class and comes to grief. They are further alike in that each is told in an impersonal narrative voice, and each was written by a man.’⁴³ Overton compares adultery novels by Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Theodor Fontane, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Eça de Queirós, Leopoldo García-Alas and Benito Pérez Galdós, identifying the features they have in common. Almeida upsets this particular narrative expectation, since Camila has an affair with a married man. Although Camila is distraught when she discovers that she cannot marry Gervásio, this departure from the conventions of the genre allows Almeida to explore a different outcome than the simple repetition of heteronormative marriage.

Besides being seduced by a single man, another convention that Almeida avoids at her novel’s conclusion is the suicide of the adulteress. Discussing Emma’s suicide, Bernard Paris writes that ‘Literature is full of protagonists who are granted romantic deaths, who feel that they have actualized their idealized images and then die before they are subject to continued failure, despair, and self-hate.’⁴⁴ Almeida’s novel, once more, strays from a narrative tradition that recurs in multiple popular examples: from Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina to Luisa in O primo Basílio (1878).⁴⁵ In A falência, it is Teodoro, and not Camila, who commits suicide.

Almeida’s avoidance of these two common endings to adultery novels is a narrative strategy to develop a feminine social space in which women prove to be resilient in the face of financial crisis and emotional devastation. In A falência, after the dissolution of all the couples – both the married and the adulterous ones – the narrative proceeds to focus on the bonds between the female characters who find themselves left outside the bonds of romantic love or global finance. Upon realizing that her relationship with Dr Gervásio has no future, Camila directs her attention to the creation of a new future embodied by her daughters (unlike Emma, who is left penniless).⁴⁶ She invests in this future not through speculative financial transactions, but by giving her daughters through education the tools to become independent. The novel ends with her declaring her intention to teach her daughters how to read and write.⁴⁷

After depicting the dissolution of social and financial models predicated on the policing of female sexuality and the financialization of the economy, Almeida’s novel focuses on the female characters’ transition from traditional models (the faithful wife, the naive daughters) to a new paradigm of woman based on female literacy and care labour. Although in constant dialogue with the tradition of wifely adultery novels, the novel presents an alternative model of female pedagogy predicated not on the relationship between male author and female reader, but on that between mother and daughter. By teaching her daughters how to read, Almeida seems to suggest, a different kind of literacy than that practised by Emma – reading novels isolated from the world in a convent – is possible. Indeed, literacy may function to critique what Said called the ‘textual attitude’. Considering the critical attitude towards literature expressed by Camila in response to the book offered to her by Dr Gervásio, it seems entirely possible that such critical skills may also be transmitted to her daughters along with the skills to read and write.

In departing from narrative conventions established by Flaubert in Madame Bovary and widely replicated afterwards, Almeida rewrites the novel of female adultery by suggesting that perhaps women have more credibility in discussing female sexuality than do male writers and deserve credit for the caring labour they overwhelmingly perform. Despite the collapse of the financialized economic system portrayed in the novel, and the discrediting of an institution of marriage based on lies shared by husbands, wives and lovers, A falência provides an image of a family in which female education prevails and labour rooted in care is valued as truly transformational.

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