Solitária, de Eliana Alves Cruz, e o espaço social em disputa

Abstract

In 2022, Brazilian writer Eliana Alves Cruz published Solitária, a novel that dialogues closely with the contemporary reality of confronting symbolic hierarchies by social groups historically burdened by a colonial and slave-owning past. Through the two protagonists Eunice and her daughter Mabel, the novel makes explicit and questions the apprehension of the common world that naturalizes social distinctions and the power relations that maintain such structures in society even today. This article aims to analyze Solitária with the support of the concepts of symbolic power and habitus, by Pierre Bourdieu. The construction of the characters—the mother, a maid; the daughter, a medical student—is the focus of the proposed analysis and points to a slow and gradual movement of destabilization of the forces that for centuries have determined a place of lesser or greater prestige for Brazilians according to their race.