Logos and eros: writing about female desire in Ida e volta duma caixa de cigarros

Abstract

This article examines how Maria Archer’s novella Ida e volta duma caixa de cigarros (1938) intertwines logos (discourse) and eros (desire/alterity) to inscribe a female voice that confronts Salazarist morality and the Estado Novo censorship apparatus. Drawing on a contextual and comparative reading, the author reconstructs Archer’s biographical and editorial trajectory — including censorship and exile in Brazil — and shows that the character Marietta, independent and autonomous, unsettles the “angel in the house” model by exercising desire without male tutelage. The cigarette case, treated as a memory-object, functions as a mnemonic operator and a device of self-knowledge, leading to the choice of “Love” beyond particular men. The theoretical framework combines Byung-Chul Han (The Agony of Eros), Hélène Cixous (The Laugh of the Medusa), and Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch) to argue that eroticism, understood as a relation to alterity, is incompatible with narcissism and pornography, and that women’s writing operates as an act of political and symbolic resistance. The study repositions Archer within Portuguese Neorealism, foregrounds the narrative’s political character, and contends that recovering this work expands the critical corpus on female authorship, desire, and the body in twentieth-century Portugal — a theme that remains urgent today. It concludes that the interlacing of logos and eros potentiates an ethics of creation and freedom, making the text an act of intervention against historical erasures.