The psychic degradation of the feminine in Aluísio Azevedo’s The Man

The aim of the research is to analyse the literary work showing the individual marked by the environment and the possible consequences that can influence their behaviour. In this dialogue between literature and science, the work analysed presents a case of the pathological temperament of a woman who is totally given over to an illness or to the fatality of not allowing herself to be tamed by the needs of nature. From a literary and psychoanalytical perspective, the work studies the catastrophic situations generated by the influence of the environment on the individual, generating the neurosis that characterises the protagonist in her journey between delirium, reverie and madness; denoting a typically naturalistic stance in valuing animal instincts. Literary and psychoanalytical bibliographical studies have shown that the female figure in the novel represents a physical organism entirely dominated by physiological and mental laws. Thus, naturalist literature manages to fulfil the particularities of scientism by showing the stages of psychic degradation to the extent that the human mind can be distorted by the environment.