Lazer e sociabilidade da elite pelotense: os diários de Clarice Tavares Xavier

Abstract

Personal journals were constituted as standard modes of “writing about the self” concerning women. Since women acquired the right to be alphabetised, many of them utilised writing as a tool to place themselves in the world and to build their selfimage. In this dissertation, we will conduct a historical investigation about spaces of leisure and sociability through the personal journals of Clarice Tavares Xavier. By accessing the personal archives of Clarice Tavares Xavier, we were able to utilise, as our main source, her journals, dated from 1954 to 1956. Clarice Tavares Xavier was a young woman who stemmed from a tradition southern family and, through her look onto the world, described her daily life and the different impressions that she had concerning places she circulated in Pelotas. Together with photographs and oral testimonies, we tried to understand how young elite women circulated in social spaces which Clarice described in her narratives. Our research sought to analise the leisure and sociabilities within private spaces, educational institutions, recreational associations and public urban spaces under the perspective of a female look. We conclude, then, that the self-image created in the personal journals of Clarice Tavares Xavier can be understood (and compared to) in relation to the social context and leisure spaces that were occupied and enjoyed by the elite of Pelotas. The social condition and the structural rules of behaviour that were reserved to wealthy women caused, therefore, a considerable impact on a mode of writing that pretended itself private and particular. We believe that the personal image inscribed in journals is a satisfactory historiographical path through which we can understand, in this case, not only leisure spaces of the elite, but also how a dialectical relation is formed between personal expression and external structures – structures common to a specific gender and a specific class.