[In the following essay, Haberly argues that the majority of nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist literature depicted black slaves as sexually immoral and prone to violence, stereotypes that reinforced the demand for emancipation based less on sympathy for the victims of slavery than the supposed dangers these slaves posed for their white slave-owners.]

The abolition of African slavery is clearly one of the fundamental events of nineteenth-century Brazilian history. Its peaceful accomplishment—in sharp contrast to the bloody struggle in the United States—has traditionally been presented as evidence of the social and political flexibility of the Empire and the nation's abhorrence of violent confrontation. The virtual absence of pro-slavery publications before 1888, moreover, has been cited as proof of Brazil's fundamental and unique racial tolerance.

Some historians have been unwilling to buy this portrait of idealism triumphant, and have pointed out the importance, in Brazil's progress toward abolition, of increased European immigration, urbanization, and basic economic and agricultural changes. These attempts to get at the motives behind the campaign, however, have not challenged the traditional description of its public image—tolerant, deeply humanitarian, and a continuation of similar struggles throughout the world.

A closer examination of the literature of Abolitionism, however, suggests that the character of the campaign was uniquely and peculiarly Brazilian, utilizing certain highly effective racial stereotypes that were simultaneously anti-slavery and anti-slave. This literature—both a reflection of the racial attitudes of white authors and readers and an important element in the formation or reinforcement of those attitudes—helped smooth the way for abolition; its nature and its strong and persistent influence after 1888, however, would seem to have been dangerously counter-productive.

The most obvious characteristic of Brazilian Abolitionist literature, perhaps, is its sparseness. Intellectuals in Europe and the United States turned out thousands of novels and poems assailing the slave trade and slavery itself, but the major works of the Brazilian movement would fit easily on a single bookshelf. The relative paucity of material, however, should not lead us to conclude that this literature was also of limited effect; a primitive publishing industry and a very small reading public simply could not support the kind of saturation campaign waged elsewhere.

Abolitionist literature also developed late in Brazil, where slavery had a very strong constituency among the elite until after the middle of the nineteenth century. The institution seemed vital to economic stability and progress in almost every province of the Empire. Londoners or Bostonians could bewail conditions far away in Jamaica or Louisiana, but this kind of regional differentiation appeared very late in Brazil. In addition, as long as the pro-slavery consensus endured, the relatively few Brazilians able to read and rich enough to buy books and periodicals were generally also those with the greatest investment in the slave system, and were understandably loath to patronize writers who directly attacked their interests.

The treatment of the slave trade in Brazil is a good example of this national self-censorship. European readers knew all about conditions on the floating coffins well before 1750, but the first known description of a slave-ship to appear in Brazil was published in 1844—a Portuguese translation of a Spanish translation of an English account.¹ This article apparently awakened little sympathy or interest, for no sequels are listed by Sayers. The slave trade was a common motif in eighteenth-century European literature, but the first Brazilian poem about a slaver (Castro Alves' “Tragédia no Mar: O Navio Negreiro”) was written in 1868—eighteen years after the trade had been abolished—and was not included in Alves' published works until 1880.²

If Abolitionist literature in Brazil was limited and late, it was also virtually without roots in the nation's literary past. In most of Europe, the long fight against the slave trade developed methods and themes that were later used against slavery itself; this preparatory stage never existed in Brazil, where the end of the traffic was largely due to British pressure.

But this was not the only lacuna in the tradition Brazilian Abolitionists inherited. Far and away the most striking feature of the literature of Brazil before 1850 is the almost total absence of Negro characters—good or bad, light-skinned or dark.³ The millions of slaves who lived and died in Brazil were quite literally invisible, at least in literature.⁴ Contemporary drawings and the accounts of travellers make it clear that slaves played vital roles in every area of upper-class life, yet there is scarcely a trace of this omnipresence in Brazilian poetry, drama, or fiction.

Perhaps a good many of the slaves actually were almost invisible, black birds-of-passage who toiled on plantations far from the intellectual centers of the coast. Perhaps we can also see the first stirrings of a sense of shame—about slavery itself and about the miscegenation it sometimes fostered—and a desire to keep Brazil's dark secret from the outside world. Above all, however, despite twentieth-century descriptions of affectionate master-slave relationships, this literary invisibility suggests that whites in Brazil simply did not see Negroes as human beings; the slave was a possession—half animal and half automaton, without personality, without emotions, without any conceivable interest as a subject for the exalted art of literature.

The traditional invisibility of the slave was maintained in the tiny number of anti-slavery tracts that appeared before 1850. Slavery was considered, not the slave, and the theme of most of these arguments was the harmful impact of the institution on white Brazilians. An essay of 1838 blamed a long series of ills on African slavery: white laziness, technological backwardness, low labor productivity, and sluggish population growth.⁵ José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva also lamented slavery's pernicious effects on the life of white Brazil, but admitted his ignorance of the exact nature of the invisible and unwilling culprits: “If negroes are men like us, and do not constitute a separate race of irrational animals, … what a picture of sorrow and misery do they not exhibit to the feeling and Christian mind.”⁶

The literary invisibility of Brazil's slaves was considerably reduced after 1850; blacks and mulattoes were still far rarer in literature than in the national population, but the change from the previous period was dramatic. While this chronology has long been accepted, little attention has been paid to the reasons behind this shift in the content of Brazilian literature. The influence of Victor Hugo and other foreign writers did encourage social and political activism in literature, but the timing of the transformation strongly suggests that white Brazilians did not really see the dark faces around them until the end of the slave trade seriously endangered the continued existence of the institution and greatly increased the value of individual slaves, now more expensive and difficult to replace.

Brazilian Abolitionism largely rose out of this spasm of concern, which strongly influenced the content of its literature. The basic character of literary Abolitionism in Brazil was defined by two powerful forces: by the pull of the past—the influence of the nation's literary tradition, the nature of previous anti-slavery arguments, and, above all, the inborn prejudices all white Brazilians shared; and by the realities of the present—the need to reach an audience overwhelmingly hostile or apathetic, taking advantage of their new concern about their slaves.

Central to Abolitionist literature was a total and irrevocable confusion of two separate entities—the institution of slavery and the individual slave.⁷ Slavery, Abolitionists proclaimed, was evil; but evil, in the self-interest tradition of anti-slavery propaganda before 1850, simply meant harmful to white Brazilians. Foreign appeals to morality and humanitarianism, the traditional economic arguments, concern for Brazil's international reputation—all were too vague, too theoretical to move the vast majority of Brazilian readers. “Slavery is bad,” Francisco Pinheiro Guimarães declared, “not only for slaves but for their masters as well,”⁸ and most Abolitionist writers set out to prove this thesis—a doctrine that derived from their own beliefs and from the nature of their audience—by insisting that Negroes were evil and violent, and that slavery was bad because it forced whites into close contact with these dangerous creatures.

Anti-slavery writers in Brazil, after 1850, could not entirely avoid the influence of foreign models, of the humanitarian stereotypes—the Noble Slave, the Faithful Slave, the Pitiful Slave—long since familiar to European and North American readers. But these largely imported figures, by themselves, do not appear to have greatly altered Brazilian racial attitudes or the fundamental bias of the nation's Abolitionist movement.⁹ At least two Portuguese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared, and Mrs. Stowe's success must have been a great encouragement to Brazilian Abolitionists;¹⁰ most white readers in Brazil, however, probably saw the novel as an international best-seller that had very little connection with their own racial problems.¹¹

The Pitiful Slave, nonetheless, did achieve a certain importance in Brazil—but only when the character was closely tied to the specific concerns of the nation's elite. White Brazilians, after 1850, were especially preoccupied with female slaves; there were relatively few women in the senzalas, and their very low fertility was a major obstacle to the continuation of slavery.¹² The Pitiful Slave, in Brazil, was almost always a woman, and her usual fate—suicide after immense suffering—could be interpreted by Abolitionists as a great moral tragedy; pro-slavery Brazilians, on the other hand, must have been moved by the immoral waste of good breeding stock.

Despite the popularity of a Brazilianized Pitiful Slave, the most striking Abolitionist works were generally concerned with two home-grown figures found often in the scattered and sporadic references to Negroes in literature before 1850—the Immoral Slave and the Violent Slave. Both these stereotypes had some basis in the reality of Brazilian slavery; the scarcity of African women and the life-style of the plantation did lead to immorality, and there were a great many instances of fugitive or rebellious slaves.¹³ The very high proportion of immoral and violent Negro characters in Brazilian literature, both before and after 1850, nonetheless serves to illustrate the emotions and attitudes of white authors and readers.

Abolitionists found the Violent Slave and the Immoral Slave especially useful because, after 1850, simple mathematics made slave-owners particularly sensitive about their female slaves—almost all Immoral Slaves are women—and about the danger, to their lives and to their man-power resources, of slave rebels and fugitives. Above all, these stereotypes were effective because they trapped the audience that Abolitionism sought to reach in the net of its own prejudices; both had long been used to justify and defend slavery, and now were suddenly turned against the institution.

The Immoral Slave, in Brazilian literature, wiggled brazenly out of the poems of Gregório de Matos (1623-1696).¹⁴ His satirical descriptions of Bahian life are filled with over-sexed prêtas and mulatas, either prostitutes or simply very agreeable. The Immoral Slave who cheerfully bestowed her abundant favors on master, overseer, and any other able-bodied white male who happened along became far and away the most popular Negro character in literature prior to 1850. This wishful image of the perpetually willing female—implying both the greater desirability and superior sexual ability of white males—became both a national daydream and a justification for the system that encouraged this sort of miscegenation.

Relatively few immoral male slaves appear, either before or after 1850, largely because it was so difficult to define immorality for Negro males. Sex with dark-skinned women was not considered immoral for whites, and it was hard, therefore, to criticize prêtos or mulatos for the same thing. More important, and in clear contrast to the situation in the United States, both abolitionists and pro-slavery writers carefully avoided the supreme taboo of Brazilian literature—sexual contact between Negro men and white women.¹⁵ Thus, when Gregório de Matos wished to emphasize male immorality among the Negroes of Bahia, he could only hint at homosexuality—the unspeakable excesses he claimed to have witnessed at a candomblé.¹⁶

A few writers, after 1850, kept on turning out paeans to the charms of lascivious prêtas or mulatas,¹⁷ but Negro women were increasingly described as dangerous. Bráulia, the mulatto villainess in Pinheiro Guimarães' História de uma Môça Rica, seduces, panders, and poisons as she attempts to destroy her mistress.¹⁸ Other Immoral Slaves, however, were allowed some excuse for their sins. Carlota, the beautiful and intelligent mulata in Castro Alves' play Gonzaga, almost single-handedly wipes out the Inconfidência Mineira. But the reasons behind her treachery say a great deal about the racial attitudes of Brazil's most famous Abolitionist poet: Carlota helps the play's chief villain because he has threatened to hand her over to the “mais repugnantes negros de minhas senzalas.”¹⁹ Her evil deeds are no salvation, however; she is raped by one of the villain's blacks and commits suicide rather than live with her shame.

The treatment of many female characters, moreover, suggests that some Abolitionists were working towards a new definition of immorality, an immorality of availability rather than of character. Simply because they were present to tempt white males, Negro women became dangerous creatures, unleashing violence and lust they could not control. While this concept of latent immorality somewhat lessened white guilt, it also served to increase white fear—even the most proper negra or mulata was a kind of time-bomb, destined someday to explode and destroy.²⁰

There is considerable evidence that slave women, in at least some cases, were used and abused by masters acting out their own strange and repressed desires; something very similar took place in Abolitionist literature. One finds a certain loving attention to the details of lashings, torture, and rape that strongly suggests the sublimation of the authors' hidden longings. This externalization of forbidden emotions is especially evident in the frequent use of incest—overt or implied—as a plot device. Incest, in Abolitionist literature, inevitably led to murder, suicide, or both, and this theme must have had considerable force for a number of white Brazilians, inevitably self-conscious about the tangled family relationships slavery often implied.²¹

The other major stereotype of Abolitionist literature in Brazil, the Violent Slave, had long been present in colonial accounts of rebellions and of quilombos like Palmares.²² The stereotype was not simply an expression of white disquiet, but also served a very real social purpose—to justify a set of rigid controls that sought to prevent or contain slave discontent. When an Abolitionist literature developed, the Violent Slave quickly became a powerful weapon—particularly since his actions were often presented as a response to the mistreatment of female slaves—in the campaign to convince slave-owners that abolition was the only way to neutralize the threat posed by their cruel and dangerous chattels.

This stereotype, however, brought Brazilian Abolitionism into direct conflict with the European models that had influenced its vocabulary and its literary style. The Noble Negro, in foreign literature, was very often a typical Romantic hero—the solitary rebel who fought for freedom and avenged evil. For white Brazilians after 1850—increasingly paranoid about the adult males who were left in the slave-quarters—this imported stereotype was not heroic, but terrifying.²³ And when images from abroad clashed with the Violent Slave, humanitarianism lost. Thus, in Luís Delfino's “A Filha d'Africa,” a Noble and Pitiful Slave-girl sits by the sea and longs for her African homeland; the mood shifts suddenly, however, and she dreams of a vast sea of black rage, pent up in Brazil's interior, waiting to forge chains into weapons and push white civilization into the Atlantic.²⁴

The fundamental antipathy of the majority of Abolitionist writers toward those they sought to free—and the distance between Romanticism and Abolitionism—comes through clearly in many of the poems and novels about slave rebellion. Castro Alves, in “Remorso,” described John Wilkes Booth—perhaps the arch-villain of world Abolitionism—as a frightening, black-robed figure, riding alone through the night.²⁵ Yet the same poet presented a supposedly sympathetic character, a Negro rebel, in exactly the same terms as Lincoln's assassin; “Bandido Negro,” with its threatening and insistent refrain, was also one of the most powerful single poems to come out of the anti-slavery movement in Brazil.

Trema a terra de susto aterrada …
Minha égua veloz, desgrenhada,
Negra, escura nas lapas voou.
Trema o céu … ó ruina! ó desgraça!
Porque o negro bandido é quem passa,
Porque o negro bandido bradou:
Cai, orvalho de sangue do escravo,
Cai, orvalho, na face do algoz.
Cresce, cresce, seara vermelha,
Cresce, cresce, vingança feroz …(26)

Mauro, Fagundes Varela's rebellious slave, was designed to awaken the same terror in the minds of white readers. After the rape and murder of his sister, Mauro avenges her honor by slaying the master; then, transformed into the spectral essence of violence and dark perversion, he hovers just outside the limits of the known:

Ruge no espaço o trovão,
Do raio o fulvo clarão
Rasga o véu da escuridão
Com fúria descomunal,
E das frias sepulturas
Erguem-se as larvas impuras,
Cantando nênias escuras
Ao sopro do vendaval.
Por esta noite de horrores,
Da tempestade aos furores,
Quem se atreve sem temores
Pelos ermos se embrenhar?
Quem és tu, vulto descrido,
Tredo espetro foragido,
Que em teu corcel destemido
Cortas o plaino a voar?
Tens os olhos encovados,
De fundos visos cercados,
Sinistros sulcos deixados
Por atros vícios talvez;
A fronte escura e abatida,
Roxa a bôca comprimida,
A face magra tingida
Da morte na palidez.(27)

All of the anti-slave appeals of Brazilian anti-slavery literature were tied together by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo in As Vítimas Algozes (1869)—the most sordid, grotesque, and effective product of the movement. Slavery, Macedo declared in his preface to this collection of short novels, “first affected the slave of our homes and our plantations, the creature who was born a man but transformed, by captivity, into a plague, a wild beast”; the slave-beast then inevitably sought conscious or unconscious revenge. “If you consider these narratives carefully,” Macedo warned his readers, “you must abolish slavery, lest they repeat themselves endlessly. For these stories are wholly true, and were and are and shall be forever—so long as you own slaves. Read, and you shall see!”²⁸ And Brazilians read and believed these exaggerated tales—of the spoiled house-boy who massacres the master's family; of the witch-doctor who poisons the livestock, fires the cane, and convinces the cook to seduce the senhor and poison the senhora and her children; of the mulatto maid who teaches her innocent young charge unspeakable perversions and helps her own lover seduce the girl.

Abolitionist literature is generally classified as part of Brazilian Romanticism, a movement that was moribund by about 1880. Traditional literary Abolitionism began to taper off at the same time, and politicians, not writers, were the major figures in the final campaign for the “Golden Law.”

Romanticism collapsed upon itself for many reasons—the ennui of both authors and readers, the availability of newer foreign models, and the presence of young writers eager to assert themselves. Also important, however, was the increasingly overt conflict between European Romanticism and the thematics and ideology of Brazilian Abolitionism. The internal tension between foreign stereotypes and the male and female bogies of anti-slavery literature in Brazil was paralleled by a more basic schism: the Romantic cult of the individual—capable of some control over his actions and responsible for them—laid an unacceptably heavy burden of personal guilt upon the shoulders of those the Abolitionists were seeking to convert.

These problems, critical for traditional Abolitionism, were largely resolved in the most important movement in the post-Romantic Brazilian novel, Naturalism.²⁹ Historians of Brazilian culture have frequently been puzzled by the failure of Realism—a highly prestigious movement in Europe—and the triumph of its exaggerated and relatively minor offshoot, Naturalism. This break in the normal transatlantic flow of literary influences is understandable, however, if one realizes that Naturalism, in Brazil, was in large part a continuation and revitalization of Abolitionist literature, a response to the special needs of readers in the years directly before and after 1888.

Naturalism, as understood and practiced in Brazil, defined the novel as a branch of science, a kind of microscopic slide upon which the author placed certain organisms—some healthy, most diseased—and then observed and described their interaction with an objectivity devoid of moral judgements. The actions of Naturalism's animalistic characters, in pursuit of the basic goals of survival, sex, and wealth, were wholly determined by inescapable natural forces—heredity and environment.³⁰

As we have seen, some of Brazil's major Abolitionist writers were working independently toward something very close to Naturalism. In As Vítimas Algozes, for example, we find the definition of human beings as animals, the “systematization of evil” Sílvio Romero later criticized in the Naturalists,³¹ the deterministic use of environmental or hereditary explanations for violence and immorality, and the consequent dissolution of individual responsibility.

Naturalism, however, turned the ideology implicit in the stereotypes of the Immoral or Violent Slave into a coherent and unified system, and bestowed the blessing of European literature and science. The Naturalist novel, moreover, had certain advantages in the treatment of Negro immorality and violence. It eagerly sought out controversial and forbidden themes—including incest, sexual relations between Negro males and white females, and homosexuality—and treated them with a frankness that often bordered on the pornographic. In addition, the theory of human animalism, fully developed by Naturalism, made respectable the literary expression of the prejudice enshrined in such common colloquialisms as macaco, cabra, or bode.

Abolitionism, in Brazil, was always remarkably short-sighted, concentrating upon its objective and almost entirely ignoring the consequences of success. It preached the dangers of close contact between master and slave, yet was either unwilling or unable—even when final abolition became inevitable, with timing and compensation the only issues—to come to grips with the future of Brazilian society once the violent and immoral creatures it had taught its readers to fear were at last turned loose. Perhaps it was hoped that freedmen would either return to Africa or disappear, like the Indians, into the vast interior. The results of the rising tide of manumissions, capped by total abolition in 1888, made it very clear, however, that the traditional system of controls had broken down, and that large numbers of former slaves were inevitably drawn to the coastal cities where a majority of Brazilian readers now lived.

The determinism of Naturalist theory served to justify and legitimize a new, less formalized set of social controls that sought to separate Negroes and whites in urbanized areas. Writers could still announce their opposition to slavery and their joy in its abolition, but Naturalism claimed to prove that the products of a wretched environment, the slave-quarters, and of generations of mistreated, malnourished, and misbegotten ancestors were both inferior and dangerous. Naturalism abolished white guilt, since all the crimes of the slave system were simply the result of uncontrollable natural forces, but it also advised those safely outside that environment and safely free of those genes to avoid the possible contagion of contact with those forever maimed by situation and genealogy.³²

Whites, at this time, were especially worried about mulattoes, a group with some chance of upward social mobility. As an upper-class character declared in an 1881 novel, “This mixed race is the most cunning in all of Brazil! Pity us whites if they get a little education and decide to pull something! That will be it for us!”³³ The danger of mulatto immorality was a time-honored theme, and characters like Pinheiro Guimarães' cruel and conniving mulata had a certain influence on urban attitudes well before 1880: “A certain wealthy and influential woman when asked why she permitted no mulatto women in her house replied: ‘Mulatas in my house? I'm not looking for bad luck. Not one has ever crossed my threshold since I saw the Moça Rica.’”³⁴ In Naturalist theory, however, mulattoes were particularly dangerous and depraved, since they received the weak and evil genes of both masters and slaves; their segregation, even their destruction, could be argued as a legitimate measure for white self-defense.

The first clearly Naturalistic novel in Brazil, Aluízio Azevedo's O Mulato—written in 1879 and published two years later—claimed to be an attack on slavery and on the petty bigotry of provincial society. Raimundo, the main character, seems the perfect young aristocrat—white, blue-eyed, highly-educated, and excessively noble. He returns to Maranhão, eager to collect his inheritance and seek information about his mysterious past, and awakens the smothered passions of his sexually unfulfilled white cousin, Ana Rosa. When Raimundo discovers that he is a mulatto, and that his mother, the slave mistress of a wealthy Portuguese immigrant, was tortured and driven mad by her master's wife, he feels unworthy of Ana Rosa. Driven by her lust, however, she seduces him, announces her pregnancy to her family, and demands marriage to Raimundo. Assorted villains conspire to kill Raimundo, and Ana Rosa is forced to marry a white man, a Portuguese clerk whom she loathes.

O Mulato was a great and scandalous success, largely because readers were shocked by the frank description of Ana Rosa's affair with Raimundo, but it was also very much in the Abolitionist tradition. Many critics have been confused and puzzled by a brief and idyllic epilogue to this tale of lust and death: we see Ana Rosa, five years after Raimundo's murder, totally contented and fulfilled as the wife of the clerk she once detested. In terms of Abolitionist and Naturalist stereotypes, however, this scene is entirely logical. Any Negro, regardless of status, education, character, or pigmentation, is inevitably a catalyst for immorality and violence. Raimundo's mother brought about immorality, cruelty, and her own insanity; Raimundo's uncontrollable effect upon Ana Rosa's libido causes her lust and his own death. A major lesson of O Mulato, for Brazilian readers, was that peace and happiness could best be achieved in the absence of Negroes.

In two later novels, Casa de Pensão (1884) and O Cortiço (1890), Azevedo reiterated his opposition to slavery, but could not suppress his prejudice.³⁵ Negro characters are consistently described as animals—and as certain specific animals: in O Cortiço, for example, Florinda has “the lustful eyes of an ape”; Leonor has the “agility of a monkey”; Firmo is “as agile as a billy-goat.”³⁶

Casa de Pensão provides a panoramic view of the Negro contagion in both rural and urban life. Amâncio comes to Rio from the Northeast, still young but already corrupted by childhood contact with sensuous and immoral slaves, infected by the milk of a syphilitic Negro wet-nurse. Amâncio cannot escape, even in the cosmopolitan capital: his boarding house is filled with lascivious blacks and mulattoes, his already abnormal preoccupation with sex intensifies, and he is destroyed. O Cortiço is even more pessimistic, for its hero, Jerônimo, is an honest, clean-living Portuguese immigrant, unsullied by the long history of environmental and hereditary perversity that marked Amâncio. But once in Rio, once in contact with violent Negroes like Firmo, with mulatas as destructively and uncontrollably seductive as Rita Baiana, even Jerônimo cannot escape contamination—and his marriage and his character are ruined.

Júlio Ribeiro's A Carne—the most openly and intentionally pornographic novel to come out of Brazilian Naturalism—is yet another warning against white contact with Negroes by another self-proclaimed Abolitionist.³⁷ His heroine, Lenita—raised in the utterly immoral environment of the coffee plantations in the interior of São Paulo, with “black, dirty, misshapen, hideous, repugnant”³⁸ slaves rutting mechanically and mindlessly all around her—somehow remains pure until attracted by a bronze statue of a naked gladiator. “Bronze,” in the Brazilian literary tradition, was often a code-adjective for Negro, and Lenita's sudden awareness of the dark forms of the statue, which brings on raving and ultimately self-destructive nymphomania, makes her feel as lustful “as a negra, a female field-hand, as a she-goat, as any animal. …”³⁹

The ultimate Negro immorality, in terms of the values of Brazilian society, was the theme of Adolfo Caminha's remarkable Bom-Crioulo (1895), perhaps the only Naturalist novel that modern readers still find both powerful and disturbing.⁴⁰ Caminha presents two very different worlds, a ship of the Brazilian fleet and the city of Rio de Janeiro. The ship is a kind of phantom slaver, adrift on the most perverse currents out of Brazil's past, a world of sadism and perverted sexuality. In this isolation ward for the physically and mentally maimed, Negroes and whites are thrown together, and Amaro, the Bom-Crioulo—an immensely strong and strangely gentle seaman, doomed to homosexuality by a plantation childhood and his degenerate heredity—comes to desire and possess Aleixo, the weakly pretty white cabin-boy. Once on land, in the more normal world of the city, Amaro's power cannot hold, and he loses Aleixo to the equally passionate embraces of Carolina, a middle-aged Portuguese whore. But immorality leads, as always, to violence, and Amaro—maddened by jealousy—murders the one person he has ever loved.

Even the most scandalous anomalies eventually became repetitious, and Naturalism was clearly on the wane, in most of Brazil, by 1895. Boredom, however, was not the only reason for its decline. The Naturalists, like their Abolitionist predecessors, worked to accomplish specific goals—the end of slavery and the justification of new forms of racial control. In pursuit of these ends, the two allied movements described—in vivid and highly alarmist terms—the physical and moral peril of white contact with Negroes. The only logical defense, however, against this contagion—the social asepsis of total separation of the races—was never a viable possibility in Brazil.

Trapped between emotion and reality, readers tried to escape into the pleasantries of a literature that defined itself simply as “the smile on society's face,”⁴¹ but the implications of the Abolitionist-Naturalist argument could not be so easily dismissed. Few Brazilians could claim either environmental or hereditary immunity to the Negro contagion, and this basic sense of contamination was reflected again and again in the deterministic self-doubt—even self-hatred—of such pessimists as Graça Aranha, Euclides da Cunha, Paulo Prado, or Oliveira Viana.⁴²

The persistent force of the Abolitionist tradition can be seen, well into the twentieth century, in the literature of the Northeast. While its influence on this literature deserves far more discussion than is possible here, a few important examples can be noted. Gilberto Freyre tried hard to break with the tradition, insisting—for the first time in decades—that a distinction be made between slavery and the slave, between the effects, on Brazilian life, of the African-as-slave and the African-as-immigrant.⁴³ Freyre proclaimed the immense value of the African contribution to the formation of a totally original society—based on the plantation, no longer a cesspool but rather a highly efficient and humane melting-pot—uniquely adapted to the tropics and to future world leadership.

This argument must have been a welcome antidote, for many readers, to despair and self-loathing, but even Freyre could not wholly overcome the pull of the past. His obsession with African sexuality ignored his own ground-rules, confusing character and situation as completely as the arguments of most Abolitionists, with but a single difference: the Immoral Slave-Girl, long a symbol of danger and destruction, once more became a precious national institution.

The major novelists of the Northeast have often been described as Freyre's disciples, but few of them made any attempt to challenge the inherited themes and stereotypes of the Abolitionist-Naturalist tradition. The Northeastern branch of Naturalism survived until after 1910, and its influence is unmistakable in early examples of the so-called “New Novel.”⁴⁴ When José Américo de Almeida and Rachel de Queiroz set out to publicize the cruel effects of the region's periodic droughts, they added yet another scourge to thirst and starvation.⁴⁵ The sêcas drive healthy, free, and largely white sertanejos to seek refuge in the physically dangerous and morally corrosive world of the plantation, placing them in contact with Negroes.⁴⁶ The flagelados finally return to their homes, maimed by that contact, but safe until the next drought repeats the tragic cycle.

This Neo-Naturalism is complemented, in other novels, by a kind of Neo-Abolitionism. The threat of uncontrollable Negro violence is used, once again, to convince readers of the need for basic social reforms; individual white guilt, however, is dissipated by Marxist theories of the inevitability of class conflict—the modern equivalent of the environmental and hereditary determinism of Abolitionism and Naturalism.⁴⁷

José Lins do Rêgo idolized Freyre, and claimed the novels of his own “Ciclo da Cana-de-Açúcar” were a fictional restatement of the Master's theories. Lins do Rêgo, however, is the finest example of the inescapable power of the past, a self-destructive power very different from Freyre's optimistic vision. Lins defined himself as a “doomed child, a plantation child”—a distant relative of Azevedo's Amâncio and Ribeiro's Lenita.⁴⁸ The hero of his autobiographical Menino de Engenho is powerless to escape his doom, destroyed by a long heredity of violence and immorality and by contact with plantation Negroes, who lead him into bestiality, onanism, promiscuity, and syphilis—and all before his fourteenth birthday.

Lins do Rêgo's almost ritualistic adherence to the traditional Abolitionist-Naturalist stereotypes is even more overt in his attempt to describe the parallel development and destruction of a Negro playmate, the moleque Ricardo.⁴⁹ Ricardo, as Lins do Rêgo presents him, seems a stronger character, a part of the violence and immorality of the plantation rather than its victim. He goes to Recife, adapts to new surroundings, works to advance himself—and the author steps in to confirm Ricardo's ultimate immorality and to complete his ruin. Ricardo, like the Bom Crioulo, becomes a homosexual; he attempts to escape, returning to the plantation of his childhood, but his heritage destroys him in the final, violent explosion of a diseased soul.

These stereotypes of Negro immorality and violence, appearing almost a century after Brazilian Abolitionists first found them useful and effective, strongly suggest that the loudly-trumpeted racial tolerance of Brazil is a cosmetic myth, designed to buy time until immigration, miscegenation, and the laissez faire genocide of sharply higher rates of poverty, malnutrition, disease, and infant mortality provide a final solution to the danger of white contact with Negroes. If Brazil is ever to achieve the racial justice it has so often claimed, a basic first step is clearly the abolition of Abolitionism, the realization that these omnipresent themes and stereotypes are not reflections of an enduring reality, but the exaggerated and self-serving tools of a propaganda campaign whose limited goals were accomplished more than eighty years ago.

Notes

1. Published in the Minerva Brasiliense (Rio), III, no. 1 (Nov. 15, 1844), 6. Apud Raymond S. Sayers, The Negro in Brazilian Literature (New York, 1956), pp. 71-72.

2. Antônio de Castro Alves, Obras Completas, ed. Afrânio Peixoto, 2nd. ed., II (São Paulo, 1942), 121-132.

3. Sociolinguistic differences greatly complicate the use of English racial categories to describe Brazilian phenomena. “Negro,” in this essay, refers to both blacks (prêtos or negros) and mulattoes. The more specific terms are used where a distinction between these groups is necessary.

4. The most reliable figure for total slave imports into Brazil is 3,646,800 (Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census [Madison, Wisconsin, 1969], p. 269).

5. Francisco de Sales Tôrres Homem, “Considerações econômicas sôbre a Escravatura,” Niteroy, Revista Brasiliense (Paris), I (1836), 81-82.

6. Memoir Addressed to the General, Constituent and Legislative Assembly of the Empire of Brazil on Slavery, trans. William Walton (London, 1826), p. 32.

7. Machado de Assis, himself a mulato, was the only nineteenth-century writer to make a clear distinction between the slave and slavery. His major Abolitionist stories, however, were written after the end of the campaign, which he consistently refused to join—“O Caso de Vara” (1891) and “Pai Contra Mãe” (1905).

8. From a letter by Pinheiro Guimarães, cited in Pinheiro Guimarães Filho, Pinheiro Guimarães na Esfera do Pensamento Brasileiro (Rio, 1937), p. 189 (Sayers, p. 151).

9. Bernardo Guimarães' A Escrava Isaura is the best-known example of foreign, humanitarian influence in Brazilian abolitionism. But Guimarães' novel is not really about slavery at all; it is, rather, the chronicle of the struggles of a soap-opera heroine against various obstacles—one of which, in this case, happens to be her enslavement—in the course of True Love.

10. The translations of A Cabana do Pai Tomás were published in Paris and Lisbon in 1853 and 1856, respectively (Apud Sayers, p. 166).

11. The sporadic attempts to idealize Negro characters, moreover, were not well received by many Brazilians who nonetheless considered themselves abolitionists. Júlio Ribeiro, for example, damned what he called the “ridiculous negrophilia” of some authors. (Cited by Manuel Bandeira, “Discurso de Recepção” on taking Ribeiro's chair in the Academia Brasileira de Letras, Revista da Academia Brasileira de Letras, Vol. LX [July-Dec., 1940], 279.)

12. For the condition of slave women in Brazil, see Emília Viotti da Costa, Escravidão nas Áreas Cafeeiras (São Paulo, 1964), pp. 503-505.

13. Despite some wild-eyed Marxist dogmatism, the most complete discussion of slave unrest in Brazil is Clovis Moura's Rebeliões da Senzala (São Paulo, 1959).

14. Obras Completas, 2 vols. (São Paulo, 1945).

15. A very restrained treatment of this kind of miscegenation, O Escravocrata, a melodrama by Artur Azevedo and Urbano Duarte de Oliveira, was written in 1882, but the censors would not allow it to be presented. It was finally published in 1884, with a preface that justifies it as a warning to white Brazilians (Sayers, pp. 156-158).

16. Gregório de Matos, Obras Completas, II, 79-88.

17. See, for example, Trajano Galvão de Carvalho's “A Crioula,” in his Sertanejas (Rio, 1898), p. 20.

18. This play, published in Rio in 1861, is described by Sayers, pp. 151-153.

19. Castro Alves, Obras Completas, II, 274.

20. Examples of this concept, in practice, are such works as Fagundes Varela's “Mauro o Escravo,” Castro Alves' “A Cachoeira de Paulo Afonso,” and José de Alencar's Mãe, to list only the most notable.

21. Major examples, again, of the incest theme are Alencar's drama and the poems of Castro Alves and Varela.

22. The best history of Palmares is that of Edison Carneiro (São Paulo, 1947), but the primary source up through the nineteenth century was the História da América Portuguêsa of Sebastião da Rocha Pita (Lisbon, 1730).

23. Gonçalves Dias (1823-1864), the great Indianist poet, idealized rebellious Indians in the best Romantic fashion, but could not, given his readership, apply this to Negro rebels. His one Noble Negro is carefully isolated in the unreal world of medieval Portugal (the “Sextilhas de Frei Antão,” Poesia Completa e Prosa Escolhida [Rio, 1959], pp. 298-323). Elsewhere, Gonçalves insisted that Africans were both passive and inferior; see “Tabira,” ibid., pp. 239-241 and his O Brasil e a Oceânia (Rio, n.d.), p. 353.

24. Poemas (Rio, 1928), pp. 15-35.

25. Obras Completas, II, 79-81.

26. Ibid., 71-75.

27. Luís Nicolau Fagundes Varela, Obras Completas (Rio, 1943), I, 41-42.

28. Macedo, As Vítimas Algozes, 2nd ed. (Rio, n.d.), I, xiv-xv.

29. Verse, in Brazil, did not make the same kind of sharp break with the Romantic past as did the novel, and the transition into the long, forgetful day-dream of Parnassianism was gradual. The chief examples of Abolitionism in early Parnassian poetry, before 1888, are discussed apud Sayers, pp. 122-128.

30. A good description of the European background and Brazilian interpretation of Naturalism is that of Dorothy Scott Loos, The Naturalistic Novel in Brazil (New York, 1963).

31. Apud Lúcia Miguel-Pereira, Prosa de Ficção de 1870 a 1920, Vol XII of the História da Literatura Brasileira, ed. Álvaro Lins (Rio, 1950), p. 129.

32. It is at this time that we find the first references to open discrimination in such public accommodations as restaurants and barbershops; the hemisphere's greatest Negro poet, João da Cruz e Sousa, suffered both insults and abuse in Rio. See, for example, Fernando Jorge, “Aspectos inéditos de Cruz e Sousa,” Revista Brasiliense, No. 11 (May-June, 1957), p. 130.

33. Aluízio Azevedo, O Mulato, 12th ed. (Rio, 1945), p. 273.

34. Lafayette Silva, História do Teatro Brasileiro (Rio, 1938), p. 188 (apud Sayers, p. 153, trans. by Sayers).

35. Casa de Pensão, 9th ed. (Rio, 1942); O Cortiço, 8th ed. (Rio, 1939).

36. Cited by Loos, The Naturalistic Novel in Brazil, p. 48.

37. Published in São Paulo in 1888. Ribeiro insisted that “if it is just that the slave be free of his master, it is necessary, absolutely necessary, that the free classes be rid of the slave.” Quoted by Manuel Bandeira, “Discurso de Recepção,” 279-280.

38. Ribeiro, A Carne, 20th ed. (Rio, 1946), p. 106.

39. A Carne, p. 25.

40. Bom-Crioulo, 3rd ed., ed. Adriano da Gama Kury (Rio, 1956).

41. Afrânio Peixoto, cited by Brito Broca, A Vida Literária no Brazil—1900, 2nd ed. (Rio, 1960), p. 3.

42. José Pereira da Graça Aranha, Canaã (Rio, 1902); Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (Rio, 1902); Paulo Prado, Retrato do Brasil (São Paulo, 1928); Francisco José Oliveira Viana, Populações Meridionais do Brasil (São Paulo, 1920) and Evolução do Povo Brasileiro (São Paulo, 1924).

43. Casa Grande e Senzala (Rio, 1933) is still the best statement of Freyre's valorização of the plantation Northeast.

44. The last stages of Naturalism are discussed by Dorothy Loos, The Naturalistic Novel in Brazil, pp. 119-141.

45. José Américo de Almeida, A Bagaceira (Paraíba, 1928); Rachel de Queiroz, O Quinze (1930), 2nd ed. (São Paulo, 1931).

46. José Américo, in fact, even reverted to the traditional Negro-animal comparisons, describing the “moleques da bagaceira” as “uma patuscada de gorilas vadios.” A Bagaceira, rev. ed. (Rio, 1936), p. 31.

47. This approach comes through most clearly in the early novels of Jorge Amado (Cacau, Suor, and Jubiabá), but can be found, in Capitães de Areia, as late as 1937.

48. Menino de Engenho, 10th ed. (Rio, 1966), p. 123.

49. Ricardo is the main character in two novels of the Sugar-Cane Cycle, Moleque Ricardo (Rio, 1935), and Usina (Rio, 1936).