Escapada, de Evelyn Scott

Escrita autobiográfica, resistência e sobrevivência no exílio brasileiro

Resumo

Evelyn Scott (1893-1963) was an upper-class American writer who, still a minor, eloped with an older married scholar, father of four, to live a sort of self-imposed exile in Brazil between 1914 and1919. But the idealized tropical refuge proved to be the challenge where Evelyn Scott would struggle to survive illness, poverty, and isolation in a country whose culture and language were completely unknow to her. One of the forms of expressions for the exiled writer is achieved through life-writings, such as autobiographies. This paper aims at analyzing Evelyn Scott’s Escapade from the starting point of the following questions: Coming from an elite Southern background, how does the act of describing the daily life of poverty in Brazil might have helped Evelyn Scott to face the difficulties of the new reality and at the same time provide the foundations for the successful writer that she would become in returning to her country of birth? Which specific difficulties might have been defining for the form and content of Escapade?