Who She Is
Dona Maria da Glória Fernandes Santiago is Bentinho's mother, a widow since the age of thirty-one (chapter VII), devout, who raises her son alone at home, without school (chapter XI), to postpone as long as possible the separation she herself promised to God. The whole seminary plot, which occupies the first half of the novel, is born of a vow she made without consulting anyone (chapter XI), and her function in the book is to uphold this vow against her own wish to see it fulfilled.
Trajectory
In chapter III, overheard by Bentinho hidden behind the door, she reacts to the denunciation by José Dias by playing it down because of the two children's age, but decides right there to bring the seminary forward: É promessa, há de cumprir-se.
, It is a promise, it must be kept.
The origin of the promise is told in chapter XI: having lost her first child at birth, she swore to God to make the second a priest, if a boy, and never revealed the vow to her husband, only to relatives and hangers-on, as witnesses to herself.
At the "secret audience" of chapter XLI, concluding nothing about the courtship, despite José Dias's denunciation, she explains to her son, in a voice "veiled and choked," why she does not ask God for a dispensation: Nosso Senhor me acudiu, salvando a tua existência, não lhe hei de mentir nem faltar, Bentinho; são coisas que não se fazem sem pecado, e Deus que é grande e poderoso, não me deixaria assim [...]
, Our Lord came to my aid, saving your life, I must not lie to Him or fail Him, Bentinho; these are things that cannot be done without sin, and God, who is great and powerful, would not leave me like this [...]
She is the one who welcomes Capitu as an intimate while the two are still adolescents (chapter LXVI), and her serious illness, in her son's youth, is what brings him back from the seminary before the impasse is resolved (chapter LXVII). The narrator himself, decades later, tells, as something he discovered later, that she secretly nursed the hope that the courtship would make Bentinho "incompatible" with the seminary without her bearing direct blame for the breaking of the vow (chapter LXXX). When Escobar's solution reaches her, she hesitates and yields after Father Cabral, having consulted the bishop, says that the substitution is valid (chapter XCVII).
She finally approves the marriage, announced by José Dias to Bentinho now a bachelor of law, and she herself makes him the prophecy in a mother's wording (chapter C): "You will be happy, my son!" She dies after her son's separation, in the time of his trips to Europe, and is buried beneath an inscription that he himself chooses, without a name (chapter CXLII): Uma santa.
, A saint.
Themes Embodied
The themes that run through her are Religion and Loyalty and Betrayal.
Dona Glória is the only character in the book whose pledged word is fulfilled by a substitute (chapter XCVII), and not by Bentinho: she does not break the vow, but neither does she carry it out without outside help, letting José Dias (chapter XCV) and then Escobar (chapter XCVI) work out the way out that she herself perhaps desired and could not formulate. The book does not show her lying or manipulating, it shows a woman bound to her own word to God, unable to break the contract and perhaps relieved, without ever admitting it, when someone else does it for her.
It is worth noting that she is described by the narrator, in connection with the boy he was, as "candid as the first dawn, prior to the first sin" (chapter XLI), incapable of deducing from the hidden courtship anything beyond what is openly told to her; it is this same candor that keeps her from seeing what José Dias already saw, and that makes of her, unintentionally, the piece that holds out longest against the solution that all the other characters end up finding outside of her.
Divergent Readings
There are those who read Dona Glória as a victim of her own devotion, bound to an impulsive vow of mourning that not even her husband came to know (chapter XI), and there are those who note, as the narrator himself tells, saying that he discovered it later, a deeper ambivalence: she perhaps needed Bentinho's courtship of Capitu to be free of the promise without guilt (chapter LXXX), which would make her resistance to their romance less sincere than it seems on a first reading.
The narrator tells this hope as something that he only later "presumed to discover" (chapter LXXIX), and the reader is left with only his word, as he will be later regarding Capitu, with much more weight and much less reservation.
Relationships
- Bentinho: the son she consecrated to God before he was born (chapter XI), and whom she draws near and pushes away over the course of her life, always in terms of the promise.
- José Dias: a hanger-on of the house since before her widowhood, who feeds and reinforces, for years, the memory of the promise in her (chapter III, chapter XXI).
- Capitu: becomes her intimate while still an adolescent, sewing and visiting the house before her illness brings Bentinho back from the seminary (chapter LXVI, chapter LXVII).