Failed hostesses, precarious guests, and familiar parasites: sites of (in)hospitality in dulce Maria Cardoso’s Eliete

The traditional locus of hospitality is the welcome of an unknown, foreign guest. As Derrida (1999) famously argues, usually this sort of welcome does not only go along with a set of (violent) conditions, but also involves the appropriation of a space as one’s own. By saying welcome, the host asserts himself as the master and owner of a house or land over which he holds the right to decide who is admitted and who is not. But what happens to hospitality when we leave this locus? When we do not look at master and stranger, but instead on other members of the household that do inhabit but not own the house? Or guests that are well-known? And what about a home whose master seems to be absent? In the present paper I propose to explore these and similar questions in the context of Dulce Maria Cardoso’s novel Eliete: a vida normal (2018) [Eliete: A Normal Life, 2024]. Focusing on three specific sites of (in)hospitality, I argue that Cardoso’s text uses situations of welcome/intrusion to problematize processes of subjectification and social stratification in contemporary Portuguese society. Placing emphasis on ambiguous constellations in which a host-guest dichotomy is unsettled, I analyse how the novel articulates the complexity of the self-other relationship, accentuating not only precarious attempts of (female) identity formation, but also how the private, normal life of the protagonist is haunted by the memory of fascism/authoritarianism and empire.