Madeleine is sleeping: o desabrochar da sexualidade e sensibilidade feminina em uma linha tênue entre o sonho e o real

Abstract

This bibliographical research, inserted in the English-language Literature field, has as its objective to explore the feminine emotional and sexual development through the character Madeleine in the novel Madeleine Is Sleeping (2004), by American author Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, and to analyze the almost absolute metaphorical union of dream and reality that is employed throughout the novel to portray the teenage years. For these procedures a variety of theoretical texts will be brought as references, among them Hutcheon (1991) for the analysis involving the postmodernist elements that are present in the novel’s form and content, Jung’s works (1959) to describe the concept of the dream as a crucial mechanism in one’s individuation process, and Bachelard’s Phenomenological criticism (1988), to discuss the literary creation process of fantastic literature and the relations between the unconscious’ impulses and the construction of the imaginative text.