D. Benedita

Robert Smithson, Eight Parts (Cayuga Salt Mine Project)
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By RODRIGO MENDES*

Commentary on the short story by Machado de Assis

“I missed something, but I didn’t know what it was, and I had desires that I didn’t know about.”
(Machado de Assis, “D. Benedita”).

Machado de Assis is the great Brazilian writer, among other reasons, for revealing, sometimes with far from obvious literary resources, the Brazilian social structures of his time, the 19th century, in fact of the Rio de Janeiro court, more specifically of the urban area of ​​the capital of Rio de Janeiro.

Much has been said about his work, directly or indirectly, thinking respectively of Roberto Schwarz, his main critic, and Antonio Candido, who positioned him as the final point in the formation of Brazilian literature. The objective of this text is to explore, from a dialectical materialist perspective, the short story “D. Benedita”, present in the book Single Papers (1882)[I] which marks the transition to the so-called mature phase of Machado's literary work, here in the short stories, and which is accompanied, in the previous year, by the publication of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, in prose.

In short, what we seek here is to make an interpretation of the relations of power and domination present in the story, taking into account the slave-owning and patriarchal society of the time and which still persists in the institutions and worldview of a large part of the Brazilian population in the 21st century.

To achieve this objective, the notes will be on the issue of class through the whims of the main character, who gives the story its name; the landlady can be fickle because she is bourgeois, she does not need to do manual labor, which was repugnant to part of the Rio elite who saw it as a degradation typical of slavery, and she can dedicate herself to the futile tasks of a landlady, guided by whim.

 The gender bias is shown through the narrator's machismo, who holds the power of speech and constantly lashes out at and mocks the character. The choice of scenes to be narrated and the way he tells them demonstrate the disposition of an implied narrator, who does not behave as a third person and interferes in the initially neutral narrative. The narrator's ironic acidity has a critical bias, exposing the character to ridicule; ambivalently, I think there is machismo in his hierarchical position over D. Benedita, since he behaves as a first person who holds the floor, shaping the reader's view of the character.

Procedure similar to that seen in posthumous memories regarding the exposure of the execrable figure of the slave-owning bourgeois, but with the peculiarity of a third-person veil and in a relationship between man and woman, hierarchical by definition on Brazilian soil, presuming the gender of the narrator.

The story, one of the longest in the book, is about slave owner D. Benedita, a woman in her forties, with two children, and a husband who is a judge and works in Pará. Her life oscillates between taking care of her slaves in the house, the life of a landlady managing a family – her son's studies, piano lessons for her daughter Eulália, who is of marriageable age –, dinners for distinguished guests, and fleeting friendships.

Since time is not a problem, she goes on an odyssey to buy a fashionable novel, reads it and stops; starts two more and does not finish it. She decides to travel to meet her husband, does not travel, and becomes bored with the fashions that last more than fifteen days. A typical daily routine of the class to which she belongs.

To understand the historical basis of this apparently banal plot, let us shed light on the relations of domination that exist in the story, thinking about the issues of class and gender, as pointed out, and the starting point is Roberto Schwarz's argument in “A poesia venenoda de Dom Casmurro”, in the narrator's power of domination due to the social position he occupies.[ii].

Next we will analyze the story, pointing out that it is an implied narrator; that the narrator is fickle and this is conditioned by her class position; and how the narrator is malicious and mocking when criticizing the character.

The implied narrator

Machado de Assis articulates the narrative voice in an ironic way from the title. The subtitle of the story, “A Portrait,” refers the reader to the visual arts, in which a human figure is portrayed, generally with a wealth of detail, in a more or less realistic approach. In fact, the author builds a character, but whose description is full of twists and turns that could be labeled as anti-realist, opposing what the epithet implies, at least in its intention.

The implicated nature, therefore, which inspires distrust, appears right from the first sentences: “The most difficult thing in the world, after the office of governing, would be to say the exact age of Dona Benedita. Some gave her forty years, others forty-five, some thirty-six. A fund broker said she was twenty-nine; but this opinion, tainted with hidden intentions, lacked that stamp of sincerity that we all like to find in human concepts. I do not even mention it, except to say, from the outset, that Dona Benedita was always a model of good manners. The broker’s cunning did nothing more than outrage her, albeit momentarily; I say momentarily.” (p. 134).

Telling someone’s age and governing are not equivalent terms, and this combination of disparate elements informs the tone in which the story will be constructed. There is also the verb in the past tense “would”, increasing the feeling of uncertainty in the reader, who in fact has nothing to hold on to and depends on the narrator to continue the narrative. The status of the narration is also questionable; is it first or third person?

We will see that most of the narrative has a detached aspect, therefore, it would be a third-person narrator, but there in the middle of the paragraph there is a conjugated first-person plural, and this subtle oscillation accompanies the plot until the end. At the end, besides the narrator's detours, there is the first ironic mention of the main character's character. We will see later that the character is unable to live a horizon of expectation, restricting himself to the most immediate field of experience, mechanically, reifiedly.

In the very next paragraph, the narrator adopts a realistic facet and describes: “D. Benedita turned forty-two on Sunday, September 1869, 134. It is six o'clock in the afternoon; the family table is lined with relatives and friends, twenty or twenty-five people in number.” (p. XNUMX).

The exact date, including the time the family is gathered, until at the end of the sentence a calculated imprecision interrupts the realistic flow and in a way sabotages the more naive reader. What do you mean by “twenty or twenty-five people”? The omniscient narrator knows the year and time of situations, but not how many guests are present?

This may seem banal, but it indicates the unreliable disposition of this narrator, hence the term “implied narrator,” which generates consequences for the understanding of the form. Machado de Assis, in addition to being skilled at constructing a narrator to manipulate the narrative, purposefully inserts words that refer to the daily life of slave owners in Rio, but always in a subtle way. (It is 1869, slavery is still in force, although weakened by the Eusebio de Queiroz Law of 1850, which abolished the transatlantic slave trade – the story takes place years before the Free Womb and Sexagenarian Laws.)

In the scene where there is a dinner at Dona Benedita’s house and the Canon, her friend, is going to cut the meat, the narrator opportunely says: “Dona Benedita followed this national custom in modest homes of entrusting the turkey to one of the guests, instead of having it carved up away from the table by servile hands (…)” (p. 135). This mannerism is used throughout the story to discreetly reveal the social structure of that house, within urban Rio de Janeiro society in the second half of the XNUMXth century.

Narrative imprecision is one of the hallmarks of Machado's work in its second phase, giving the sensation of walking a tightrope, as the reader has no choice but to trust the proposed fictional pact. The narrator of “D. Benedita”, when portraying a home scene of the character in a realistic manner, with clearly determined markings of time and space, goes on to describe D. Benedita's physiognomy:

“While she arranges the frills and lace of her white robe, a cambric robe that the judge had given her in 1862, on her birthday, September 19, I invite the reader to observe her features. You will see that I am not giving her Venus; I am not giving her Medusa either. Unlike Medusa, one can notice the simple straightening of her hair, tied at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are ordinary, but they have a good-natured expression. Her mouth is one of those that, even without smiling, are smiling, and it has this other peculiarity, which is a mouth without remorse or longing: I could speak without desires, but I only say what I want, and I only want to talk about longing and remorse. All that head, which neither excites nor repels, sits on a body that is rather tall than short, and neither thin nor fat, but plump in proportion to its height. Why talk about her hands? admire them immediately, as they grasp the pen and paper, with their tapered and wandering fingers, two of them adorned with five or six rings.” (p. 139).

The fluidity of the prose and the creation of images that Machado de Assis produces are impressive, even with the programmed imprecision of the narrative. The description of place and date is there – and note, from 7 years before the present time of the narrative – and then the characterization that does not characterize, “Venus” or “Medusa”, with the marking of the first person of the speech “I do not give it to you”, making explicit the narrator’s arbitrariness, which is intensified later: “I only say what I want”. How so? What kind of voice is this that begins the paragraph as the omniscient and neutral third person and then, arbitrarily, says that it will only say what it wants?

The reader is left to infer what is not said, but it is left without materiality, since the narrator purposely omitted and demonstrated his proposition of being partial. Next, also arbitrarily, the narrator ignores the character of D. Benedita's son: “Mother, daughter and son had lunch. Let's leave the son, who doesn't matter to us, a twelve-year-old brat who looks like he's eight, he's so moldy” (p. 142).

Vanity and class structure

We glimpse the class structure of that society through the subtleties of Machado de Assis' literary construction. The excerpt below is illustrative of a series of issues that denote the social asymmetries in slave-owning Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the 19th century:

“The suitcase was closed at two in the afternoon, Dona Benedita had woken up at nine, and, not living far away (she lived in Campo da Aclamação), a slave would take the letter to the post office in plenty of time. What’s more, it was raining; Dona Benedita pulled back the curtain on the window and found the glass wet; it was a stubborn drizzle, the sky was all covered in a dark brown color, dotted with thick black clouds. In the distance, she saw the cloth covering the basket that a black woman was carrying on her head float and fly: she concluded that it was windy. A magnificent day to not go out, and therefore write a letter, two letters, all the letters of a wife to an absent husband” (p. 139).

The context of the scene is that D. Benedita wants to write a letter to her husband telling him about the dinner the night before, where she became friends with D. Maria dos Anjos. The highlighted passage densely carries the slave-owning and unequal atmosphere of that time, especially with regard to work. It is juxtaposed with the possibility of idleness on the part of the owner, who wakes up late and decides what to do, and goes to write a letter, while the slave goes out in the rain to go to the post office.

In fact, this is the second direct mention of slavery, and this time without euphemisms, and it is striking how naturally the narrator lists elements in the scene, and the slave is one of them. The highlighted passage is an impressive synthesis by Machado de Assis, who in a few words expresses the class antagonism of Rio de Janeiro society, the owner inside the house, sheltered from the rain, and the slave probably working in the street, in the rain. And a cruel free indirect speech, “a magnificent day not to go out”, ends the passage as a mockery of the owner who enjoys her social position.

The character’s ephemeral temperament is narrated in several passages, many of them with irony on the narrator’s part. Once, there are rumors that her husband is cheating on her. Shocked and angry, she decides to travel, but dismisses the idea “in three days” (p. 138). In the scene where this is told, it is a memory brought about by the blunder made by Leandrinho, the son of the “recent friend” (p. 138), when making a toast to the commander. Incidentally, let us note the precise adjective chosen by the narrator, indicating with disdain how fickle the character is.

The way she treats her friends is the same as how she treats her whims and tasks, also reifying her personal relationships; this is the recent friend, as there was another one last year and there will be a new one next year. This behavior of the character is not surprising, given that the society in which she lives treats a group of people, human beings, as merchandise, literally; racism is formed and perpetuated in Brazil in conjunction with the commodity form of slavery. The choice of words is fundamental to shaping the image we have of D. Benedita.

On another occasion, the narrator reports that one of the owner’s slippers was eaten by a cockroach, generating “another rage in Dona Benedita, because the slipper was very elegant, and had been given to her by a friend from last year. An angel, a real angel!” (p. 141). “Friend from last year” is an excellent, laughable and eloquent expression, as there is once again a combination of disparate elements, equating a friend with some product, indicating the process of objectification operated by the slave owner.

And once again the narrator is incisive and cynical when, in free indirect speech, he reproduces a phrase that is repeated throughout the entire story – always with a different referent –, whose exacerbation “a true angel” is diametrically opposed to the possibility of friendship that the character is willing to establish; from this mismatch arises irony as a criticism of the character's reifying personality.

The narrator visibly acts against the character, lashing out at her and mocking her way of life, in a critical sense, and reveals the gender component in a chain of class and race oppressions. The nature of the implication is directly related to two factors: the social criticism of the degrading figure of the slave-owning bourgeoisie and the machismo embedded in Brazilian social formation.

On one occasion, the narrative voice frames a scene in which D. Benedita is sewing, and we pay attention to the way in which it suggests a movement that is not objectively present in the scene, but which it introduces into the reader's head through a naturalized comment, assuming that the reader will agree with it, and which obviously has a critical bias, of mockery towards the character.

I notice that she has now torn the frill on her left cuff, but that is because, being also impatient, she could no longer “live with this devil” [her husband]. That was her expression, followed immediately by a “God forgive me!” that completely extracted the venom. I am not saying that she stamped her foot, but one can guess, as it is a natural gesture of some irritated ladies. (p. 140).

There is no embarrassment in saying that although such an action did not occur, it did occur. The mixture of affirmation and denial prevents the reader from continuing the sentence actively, or rather, objectively, in such a way that it sabotages the reading by directing the reader towards what he really wants to affirm, and which is latent in the discourse and then bursts forth in the sentence: for him, the act boils down to a natural issue – and here this term refers precisely to nature, as something innate – of the nature of “some angry ladies”. The manipulation of the discourse, or the narrator’s implication, has as its final point the sexist criticism of a certain type of female behavior that he despises.

As we have seen, in summary, Machado de Assis, in the form of the modern short story, constructs a narrator with an implied disposition, whose effectiveness is shown in leading the reader along the narrative paths of his own interpretation, making him an “accomplice” of his words. The narrator is not ashamed to expose his fictional position in a position of power in the social hierarchy of the short story, since he is a man and holds the monopoly of speech.

By criticizing the bourgeois slave owner, he demonstrates her social inequality in relation to her enslaved subordinates, and also the machismo of her position in relation to the narrated matter, so that we have in the form an excellent literary portrait of the social and gender asymmetries of the second half of the 19th century, in the Rio de Janeiro court.

*Rodrigo Mendes is a master's student in Literature, Society and History of Literature at UFRGS.

Notes


[I] All quotes from ASSIS, Machado de. loose papers. New York: Penguin Classics, 2011.

[ii] It is not within the scope of this work, but in the future I intend to scrutinize the story in more detail in light of Schwarz's essay, with due mediation. See SCHWARZ, Roberto. “The Poisoned Poetry of Dom Casmurro”. In: two girls. New York: Routledge, 1997.

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