This essay takes the publication of poems by an invented female author, Violante de Cysneiros, in the second issue of Orpheu as its point of departure toward a preliminary inquiry into the relationship between fictional characters of female avant-garde artists in some of the canonical works of Portuguese Modernism (such as, besides Orpheu, Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s A confissão de Lúcio and José de Almada Negreiros’s A Engomadeira) and the aesthetic and political legacy of Decadentism, suppressed for the most part by dominant historical perspectives on the Modernist era in Portugal. The case study that sustains this project focuses on the 1912 novel Nova Sapho by Visconde de Vila Moura, whose protagonist, a noblewoman from Minho named Maria Peregrina, a lesbian and poet of genius, anticipates such later Modernist female creations as Sá-Carneiro’s American in Paris and Almada’s unorthodox laundress. Nova Sapho also stands out due to its symbiotic intertwining of Northern nativist regionalism with a broadly cosmopolitan outlook, embodied in the experiences of Maria Peregrina’s travels and in her intertextual engagements. This symbiosis contradicts the polarization, drawn by Fernando Pessoa and broadly accepted in the scholarship on Portuguese Modernism, between the narrowly nationalist and regional perspective of the Northern writers associated with A Águia and the cosmopolitanism of the “Lisbon school” (i.e. Orpheu), permeated by a multiplicity of international modern aesthetic trends.
