BEHIND THE RUÃO CATHEDRAL: contributions of an analytical reading of Mário de Andrade's short story for historians of education

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the field of History of Brazilian Education through an analytical reading of the work "Behind Ruão’s Cathedral", by Mário de Andrade, written between 1923 and 1944, a time when the modernist revealed greater concern with problems of social order, education being an important issue for the debate. In this way, when we consider literary works as cultural artifacts, it is possible that they can be used by historians to extract verisimilitude and understand, via representation, the possibilities of how domestic education was provided by foreign governesses. We used, for the elaboration of this research, the methodology related to the notion of historiographical operation, through which we could verify that the tale reveals possible understandings of the challenges of the teaching profession in the homes, as well as the demands of part of the São Paulo elite for a sophisticated education at the time.

Keywords:
Domestic education; Modernist literature; Non-school educational