Estudo da personagem e reverberações da estética decadentista na obra “Dentro da noite”, de João do Rio

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to study the composition of the characters in the narratives of Dentro da Noite, a book of short stories by the writer João do Rio (1881-1921), considering the social, cultural, and aesthetic interrelationships, understanding them also as symptoms of the author's worldviews. To this end, we discuss issues related to the structural modernization that the city of Rio de Janeiro went through in the first two decades of the 20th century, based on the European model, especially the French one, and what implications this process had for the writers and the way they conceived literature. João do Rio, attentive to this process, was sensitive to the preferences of the readers, his direct consumers, and was willing to seek forms of expression aligned to the moment he was living. Observing the publishing success of popular books, especially the "sensation novels" and the "books for men", the writer from Rio de Janeiro seeks to insert elements characteristic of these productions, such as crime, fear and erotic themes in the mental elaboration of his characters and in the development of the plots of the narratives in Dentro da noite. By articulating such elements with decadentist aesthetics, João do Rio, besides making his book commercially attractive to more readers, also achieves a manner of expression that allows him to apprehend the duality of Carioca society in the early 1900s, under the prism of a tropical Belle Époque lived between the charm and the threat of the modernization of the metropolis.