All the Silent Ladies: Attempted Female Catharsis in Fernando Meirelles’ City of God and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden

• In Event: Theorizing Violence in Latin American Cinema

Abstract

This paper examines the ways that Fernando Meirelles’ City of God (2002) and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden perpetuate notions of machismo through keeping women from experiencing catharsis after sexual abuse. While the violence towards Paulina in Death and the Maiden drives the plot and the violence towards women in City of God takes on a secondary (nearly nonexistent) role, in both cases the violent acts are only implied, denying the audience visual representations of this violence. I argue that despite the roles that the violent acts towards women take in the plots of the respective texts, both texts render the women voiceless, complicating the audience’s trust of the women. Thus, City of God and Death and the Maiden leave the women’s claims to violence unvalidated. By putting both works in conversation with Aristotelian theories of catharsis, Hélène Cixous’ theories presented in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and close readings, I demonstrate that City of God and Death and the Maiden diminish the effect of violence towards women to the audience by preventing the audience from purgation on behalf of the women, therefore invalidating the women’s humanity and suffering. In this way, I suggest that while both texts perpetuate machismo, City of God passively perpetuates it while Death and the Maiden makes the audience complicit in the perpetuation of machismo, as Dorfman transforms Paulina’s catharsis into a tool for massive audience purgation.

Author

• Julia I Martins, American University