The Elegy of <em>Dom Casmurro</em>

Abstract

Machado de Assis perfects the hybrid quality of his works, which benefit from a combination of his deep knowledge of European literature and his experience of the political, social and gender transformation sweeping through Brazil with the end of slavery (1888), the proclamation of the republic (1889) and the Belle Époque.Machado de Assis's position between these two worlds is one facet of the originality and modernity of his works and above all of Dom Casmurro. In Dom Casmurro, he reveals his fascination for a theme that is very dear to European literature jealousy -most notably represented in Shakespeare's Othello, which Bento the narrator refers to directly in chapters 62 "A Touch of Iago" ("Uma ponta de Iago"), 72 "Uma reforma dramática" ("A Dramatic Reform") and 135 "Otelo" ("Othello").According to Caldwell, Dom Casmurro can be considered one of the best modern reincarnations of Othello. 2 The story is told through the eyes of Bento Santiago, the supposedly betrayed husband. Bento does not become a priest as his mother wanted because he wants to marry, and he ends up marrying his enchanting childhood sweetheart and neighbor, Capitu. Capitu is therefore a sort of social climbing Desdemona of suburban Rio de Janeiro, whereas Othello's incarnation in nineteenthcentury Brazil is as a decadent superstitious Catholic paterfamilias. The aged narrator represents the decadent land and slave owning elite in the passage from the monarchy to 2 the republic; he has lost most of his wealth and has to make his living as a lawyer and from the remaining family assets.Bento is writing a memoir for the purpose of justifying his jealousy towards his deceased wife. The evidence of the betrayal that he gathers is very flimsy and could easily be interpreted as paranoia. In fact, we can summarize a substantial part of the history of Dom Casmurro's criticism as "the fiction of the tribunal", 3 which has essentially focused on the relationship between the narrator and his heroine, Capitu, and more recently, as we shall see later, on the triangularor even quadrangularstory of friendship, love and homosocial affection between Capitu, Bento, Escobar and Sancha.This article will also explore this triangular relationship, by proposing a reading of Bento's accounts of his life with his wife Capitu as an elegy, or perhaps a double elegy.The self-reflexive narrator interweaves the bitter and sad lament for the death of his heroine with that of his best friend Escobar. The relationship between the narrator and Capitu is the main purpose and the one which occupies the most space in the narrative, but it is not the only one. Capitu, who is the most complex character of the novelalongside the narrator himselfis in the foreground of the narrative, but in the middle distance he lets us glimpse the relationship between him and a male hero, his best friend Escobar, shedding light on the changes in the social, sexual and gender relations of the end of the nineteenth century in Brazil. As Chalhoub and Schwarz both state, Machado de Assis's novel portr...