Sexuality and misogyny in Fernando Pessoa: The Duke of Parma's contribution to the topic

This essay examines the intersection of sexuality, misogyny, and male intellectual superiority in Fernando Pessoa’s work, focusing on his unfinished tragedy The Duke of Parma. The Duke emerges as a psychologically troubled, ostensibly “chaste” figure who expresses revulsion toward the female body and sexuality. The study situates this play alongside other writings—Marcos Alves, Pessoa’s mediumistic texts, A Cadella, and passages from The Book of Disquiet and Epithalamium—to consider whether such views reflect authorial belief or function as dramatic constructs. It argues that the Duke’s rejection of women is grounded in a belief in male intellectual supremacy and in a “higher” homosocial bond beyond physical desire, while female sexuality is cast as impure and inferior. These ideas resonate with a recurrent motif in Pessoa’s work: abstinence as a condition of intellectual or artistic superiority.