COQUEIRO, Wilma dos SantosASSUMPÇÃO, Carolina Rocha de2026-05-182026-05-182026-05-182026-03-18https://repositorio.unespar.edu.br/handle/123456789/983This dissertation, situated within the concentration area Society and Development and linked to the research line “Human formation, sociocultural processes, and institutions,” in alignment with the advisor’s project entitled “Literature, Society and Women: expressions of women-authored writing,” has as its general objective to investigate the representation of female aging in Simone de Beauvoir’s novella The Woman Destroyed (2021 [1967]) and in Elvira Vigna’s novel Nada a dizer (2010). The aging process, when intersected with gender, requires differentiation and a careful examination of the specificities of women’s experiences at this stage of life, considering the social context that reinforces the negative burden attributed to old age. Throughout history, literature authored by women has been silenced and excluded, with its conditions of production, circulation, and consumption diminished by the hegemonic social order grounded in patriarchy. This exclusion of women from the world of writing has resulted in a scarcity of analyses on the experience of female aging (Batalini, 2022). In this sense, the works selected as the corpus of this study – although originating from different centuries and countries – describe the severe reality imposed on women, particularly in maturity, by illustrating the anguish experienced by the protagonists of the novella and the novel, respectively. Acknowledging the inseparable relationship between literary fiction and society, as articulated by Antonio Candido (2019), and the relevance of comparative and interdisciplinary approaches in literary studies, the research is conducted through bibliographic inquiry. Its theoretical framework establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue among Cultural Studies, feminist studies, Psychology, and Women’s History, with the aim of analyzing the points of convergence and divergence between the French writer Simone de Beauvoir and the Brazilian writer Elvira Vigna. From this perspective, the comparative analysis revealed that the works expose the contradictions and challenges inherent to female aging, highlighting affective ruptures, identity revisions, and experiences of loneliness shaped by gendered discourses. The results indicate that, in both narratives, writing functions as a tool for working through the crisis and the social demands placed upon women in maturity. It is concluded that women’s fiction broadens the understanding of the reality of elderly women and exposes structural aspects of female old age that remain invisible, thereby contributing to academic and social debates on aging from a gender perspective.Interdisciplinaridade, Estudos Culturais e Crítica feminista, Literatura de autoria feminina, Ficções francesa e brasileira comparadas, Envelhecimento feminino.DissertaçãoInterdisciplinar