Madness and aging in the poetics of dereliction: notes on The obscene Madame D, by Hilda Hilst

Abstract

The Obscene Madame D, by Hilda Hilst, presents as a central character Hillé, a sixty-year-old widow who decides to live in the stairwell of her house, from where she talks to her dead husband and father, hears voices from inside the wall and startles the neighborhood with paper masks. The article, dedicated to this work by Hilst, addresses the intertwining between old age and madness in the definition of a space of exclusion from which the character experiences a singular relationship with language. It is not only the constant contact with the theme of death, but also the experimentation around the word from which derives a singular aesthetic, a poetics, the poetics of dereliction.