ABOUT FOGO MORTO: SOCIAL CHANGES AND CRISIS OF THE TRADITIONAL MASCULINITY STANDARDS IN BRAZILIAN NORTHEASTERN IN THE BEGINNINGS OF THE XXTH CENTURY

Abstract

This paper analyzes the crisis in the traditional male standards in the norteast of Brazil in early 20th century. Based on the metaphorical title Fogo morto, a novel by José Lins do Rego, this text focuses on the relation, found in the writer's literary discourse, between the decline of sugar economy along with the mill bangüê society and the crisis in a certain male standard related to some men's behavior that had prevailed during the so called patriarchal society. Indeed, not only did the mill have its fire extinguished but also all those men who had deep identity crisis for not being able to keep up with the individual male pattern boasted by the mill patriarchs, their grandparents. A continuous urgency for an urban-industrial society and new burgeois standards of sociability as well as a nuclear family undermined those men's identities who frightfully faced the emergency for the feminization of a society, or an unmanned pattern of customs. As a result, lost mill men!

Key words: Social change, male crisis, northeast, literary discourse, José Lins do Rego.