It is appropriate to stress once again, in order to understand better the characters’ descriptions, that Azevedo was an artist, a professional sketcher. And, more than this, that before writing a novel, he would go to the places where his characters lived and spend time sketching them to capture the nuances of their personalities. He was so interested in the exactness of the descriptions of the different types that he used to dress as a common laborer and mingle with the general populace to draw his sketches. It is said that he nearly risked his life when, on one occasion, some of these individuals mistook him and his companion for policemen spying on petty criminals’ activities.
For many, what stands out in The Slum is the social struggle and the description of the economic and social trajectory of three different types of Portuguese immigrant who came in contact with Brazilian society: João Romão, who gets rich following his cohabitation with the ex-slave Bertoleza, and his exploitation of the slum; Jerônimo, an exemplary worker who nevertheless ends up penniless under the influence of the destructive forces of tropical society; and, finally, Miranda, symbolizing the rich immigrant, who even has a noble title, and remains above it all. Viewed from this perspective, the book is a narrative of social and economic problems, amplified by the particular circumstances of the proletarians gathered in the slum and exploited by those in power.
For others, however, what stands out in the book is its eroticism and praise of the mulatto, which are evident in the relationship between the mulatta seductress Rita Bahiana, and the quick-witted mulatto Firmo. Mulattos represent prototypes of the tropical man bursting with vitality and eroticism in contrast to the European immigrants who possess a more austere and hardworking view of life. Thus Rita Bahiana would also represent a spicier version of the moreninhas (quadroons) of Brazilian romanticism and a forerunner of Jorge Amado’s seductive character in Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1957). Along this line of thought, bold eroticism appears in many scenes, especially in the prostitute Léonie’s lesbian relationship with her goddaughter, the adolescent Pombinha.
Traditional criticism has also identified Realist and Naturalist traits in this book, tracing the ways in which the theories of Hippolyte Taine or the stylistic practices of Émile Zola and J. M. Eça de Queiroz are reproduced in it. These critics try to show how environment, race, and historical moment constitute the framework of the narration and the explanation for the characters’ attitudes. Their behavior is explained from the outside in, by means of biology and sociology rather than psychology. Without any doubt the author emphasizes the influence that food, drink, dancing, and the sun itself exert over the characters’ personalities. Indeed, the sun is an ever-present symbol affecting the sexual life and even the conflicts among the different groups in the slum.
The title Azevedo chose for this work is doubly significant. In the first place, cortiço was the name given to a group of poor dwellings more or less resembling what today is called a favela—a slum. With the emancipation of slaves in Brazil these slums became more common. Here could be found ex-slaves and all kinds of migrants from other parts of the country, gathered along with newly arrived European immigrants in search of better opportunities in the tropics. The lack of a clear policy as to how to take advantage of this freed manual labor gave rise to a problem that from then on grew progressively worse. To be sure, the slaves had been freed gradually over several decades through laws that in one instance granted freedom to the children of slaves born in Brazil and in another prohibited slavery for those older than sixty. But it was following the “Golden Law” signed by Princess Isabel in 1888 that this labor force, previously concentrated in the countryside, began to move to the cities in search of a livelihood.
The second meaning of the word cortiço, is “beehive.” It is as if the author had wanted to compare these miserable dwellings to a veritable human hive. He is employing a metaphor from the animal kingdom to explain an urban gathering. In this connection one of the strongest characters in the book, the lesbian prostitute Léonie, who ruled over her peers and men alike, is described as a “queen bee.”
It is significant that the novel tells the story of a community and not of an individual, an exemplary hero. The strategy of Realism and Naturalism was precisely to focus on human groups. The interest was centered on the social, not the individual. Romantic novelists who wrote in the immediately preceding period had privileged the description of the great hero or heroine, such as Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, Camille (La dame aux camélias) by Alexandre Dumas, or Atala by François Renéde Chateaubriand. But realist and Naturalist authors—emerging during the period when sociology was created by the positivist Auguste Comte, biology had advanced with G. J. Mendel, and anthropology itself was a new discipline—opted to explain the individual through the collective, and the psychological through the social, and the biological.
2. The Structure of the Novel
From the point of view of structure, the characters of this novel can be divided into two groups, which we will call simple and complex. The former is represented by João Romão’s slum, while the latter consists of Miranda’s family. Beside internal conflicts, these two groups maintain a tension between them and communicate through a controlled regimen of exchanges. This is exemplified by the alliance formed between joão Romão and Miranda. João Romão needs to get closer to the wealthy Miranda and obtain his daughter’s hand to complete his social rise. Miranda, in turn, needs to strengthen his fortune, so he agrees to marry his daughter off to João Romão. In the simple group the characters are reduced to the lowest common denominator by poverty. In a hive, metaphorically speaking, the great majority of bees are workers too. Therefore the author’s insistence on a series of animal and insect images to underscore the animalism of the characters in this group is not surprising.
As an exercise in analysis, let us take the magnificent chapter III, which relates with richness of detail what the beginning of a day in the life of the slum was like. Men, women, animals, and vegetables seem to belong to one species. It is a pack of males and females, “plunging its roots into life’s black and nourishing mire,” exhibiting the “animal joy of existence.” A “stream of ants” becomes a “veritable stampede” and one hears laughter, the sound of alternating voices without knowing where they are coming from, the quacking of ducks, crowing of roosters, cackling of hens mingled with human voices. Within this simple group, people are better known by their nicknames than their names, which shows the degree of their depersonalization through caricature. Thus Leandra appears with “haunches like a draft animal;” Nenen like an “eel”; Paula with “teeth sharp and pointy as a dog’s,” and Pombinha’s name itself (little dove) characterizes the adolescent virgin who will discover the pleasures of sex in the arms of the leonine Léonie. As for the rest, Romão and Bertoleza work like a “pair of yoked oxen” (Chapter I), and the generalized zoomorphization causes the characters to insult each other with names such as dog, cow, hen, and swine.
It is not surprising, then, that intercourse among the characters is governed by violence. Conflicts are resolved by aggression and death. There is no dialogue or negotiation, which are characteristics of more complex societies. One could say, borrowing the language of anthropology, that the characters of the simple group are closer to nature, while those of the complex group are closer to nurture. The passage from nature to nurture requires the adaptation to laws and rules that are no longer purely instinctive.
That is why, in the complex group, represented by Miranda’s mansion bordering on João Romão’s land, relationships are more subtle. The difference between the two groups of characters is immediately noticed in their proper names, which illustrate their higher social position. Miranda, the name of the wealthy Portuguese, derives from the Latin miranda, the gerundive of mirare, to admire, that which must be admired and, by extension, “evident.” Significantly, the mansion where Miranda lives has more than one floor—it rises above the horizontally sprawling slum. It is from the top of his small pala
ce, however, that Miranda witnesses the celebrations and fights in the favela and also watches with alarm João Romão’s gradual encroachment upon his possessions and family. Miranda’s wife, already confirming in her name the social superiority of this family, is named Estela (star) and is described as “a pretentious lady of aristocratic airs” (Chapter I). Their daughter, Zulmira, who stands out in the narration with her adolescent pallor as she looks down upon the world, has an equally significant name that means “the eminent one.” Miranda’s family is joined by young Henrique, who has come to finish his studies in the capital. Etymologically, his name comes from the stem rik: “powerful, rich, prince of the house.” In this group even old Botelho has a name that fits the context of the story, since it means “parasite,” “alga.” And the narrator himself takes pains to refer to him as a parasite, showing how he “vegetates in Miranda’s shadow,” serving as a mediator in Henrique and Estela’s sexual transactions and, later, in Romão and Zulmira’s marriage.
3. The Role of Women in the System
As is typical of Realist-Naturalist fiction, women appear primarily as females who mate with the male for biological and material motives. There are, however, a few nuances that must be highlighted. There are actually three kinds of women in The Slum: the woman-object, the woman subject-object, and the woman-subject.
a) Woman-object The woman-object is initially exemplified by Bertoleza, the feminine element which associates itself with the masculine (Romão) for the creation of the slum. Male and female work day and night, and the more time passes, the more the male moves away from the female, who was a fundamental element only at the beginning of his career: “As he climbed the social ladder, she seemed even more debased” (Chapter XIII). Zulmira is another example: She will also act as a stepping stone for Romão, in this case no longer within the simple group, but the complex one. The passage from one group to another requires the presence of a female who functions as a mediating element in the regimen of exchanges. This reaffirms certain rules of society, what José de Alencar—the greatest romantic novelist of Brazil—in describing the bourgeois types of the nineteenth century, called a “matrimonial market.” The ties between Romão and Bertoleza and Romão and Zulmira are totally circumstantial. The women are interchangeable elements, exchange currency in the trade he operates.
b) Woman subject-object The Estela-Miranda relationship puts both characters on an equal plane: Both benefit from it. This relationship strikes a balance in the regimen of sexual exchanges that: are the counterpart of the economic and social exchanges. The Rita-Jerônimo pair exemplifies this same regimen of exchanges. Here again we have a white Portuguese juxtaposed with a woman of another race. The narrator explicitly states that there is a ritual of racial attraction between them. Rita is the metonymy of the tropical nature, while Jerônimo is the symbol of what the author calls the “superior race”: “Ever since Jerônimo had fallen in love with her, fascinating her with his calm seriousness, like that of a strong, kindly animal, the mulatto’s blood cried out for purification by a male of nobler race, the European” (Chapter XV).
c) Woman-subject In the same way as Romão manages to succeed by asserting himself as an individual within the existing societal standards, women like Léonie, Pombinha, and Senhorinha move away from the constant dependence on the male and begin to wield power by means of sex. Like Romão, they go beyond their original group and realize themselves within the complex group, outside the slum’s walls. Léonie, as prototype of the slum woman who has gone on to elite prostitution, has free passage from one group to the other. She can parade with her lovers in the street and at the theatre with the same ease with which she returns to the slum to see her goddaughter Pombinha. Her social ascent grants her this free passage. Léonie’s paradigm is repeated in Pombinha, who is seduced by Léonie, putting aside her angelic demeanor to take on the attributes of the “snake,” an image the author employs to underscore the power of instinct and sexual menace. This determinism is repeated in onomastic terms; whereby the little dove (pombinha) will be devoured by the lioness through the homosexual initiation: “The serpent had triumphed at last; Pombinha, drawn by her own inclinations, had freely walked into its mouth” (Chapter XXII). Finally, after this initiation, Pombinha took flight. Symptomatically, this pattern is repeated with Jerônimo’s daughter and Piedade, lured by Pombinha: “The chain continued and would continue forever; São Romão was fashioning another prostitute in that forsaken girl, who was growing into womanhood beside an unhappy drunken mother” (Chapter XXII).
It can be affirmed that in spite of these differentiations there is a constant to be noted as far as the role of women goes: Azevedo’s Naturalist aesthetics stress the supremacy of the feminine over the masculine, of the female over the male in a pattern which can be summed up in this way: Sovereignty is to slavery as the feminine is to the masculine. That is, the feminine rules where the masculine submits. Men, Pombinha came to recognize, exist to “to serve women” and women are “queens” in an empire, ruling over the men, their “slaves” (Chapter XII). As also happens in a hive.
4. Biological and Sociological Paradigms
The evolutionist theories that gained some popularity in the nineteenth century along with studies of biological reproduction left a mark on the literature of that time. Mendel, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, as much as Marx and Comte, contributed to shape a new vision of life and society. In The Slum this manifests itself in several ways. The process of growth and expansion of João Romão’s properties follows the process of cell division by meiosis. Out of the initial “cell” formed by Romão-Bertoleza other elements gradually arise. An organism begins with a cell, which splits in two, which in their turn also split, and so forth successively. They replicate and adapt to the organism. In this novel we first encounter the poor tavern, which turns into a grocery store (venda), which becomes a small market, which expands into an eatery, which grows further and becomes a bazaar, then a large warehouse, an inn, a two-story house and, finally, metamorphoses into Avenida São Romão. Thus, from the initial “cell” we arrive at four hundred houses. The notion of evolution and progress fixes itself between the venda and the avenida, the grocery store and the avenue. In the same manner, the original slum itself goes through a process of meiosis and splits in two, with the slum that has undergone a few improvements, now called São Romão, on one side, and the Cat Head, which houses the poorest people, on the other. One follows the ascending line in evolution, the other sinks into decadence, repeating Romão’s ascending movements and Jerônimo’s descending ones.
Nevertheless, both slums maintain characteristics of tribal societies. In the conflict that ignites between them, the Cat Head is totemically represented by a cat and São’s Romão by a fish. They distinguish themselves by the color of their flags: “A yellow flag was hoisted in the middle of the courtyard at Cat Head; the silver jennies responded by hoisting a red banner. The two colors fluttered in the breeze like twin calls to arms” (Chapter XIII). Both slums, although different, function as closed societies, that is, they have their own laws and rules, as happens in ghettos. They don’t obey society’s general laws, and rebel against any external, exogenous, invading element. Thus in the midst of the struggle between Firmo and Jerônimo, when the news that the police are going to intervene spreads, the narrator describes the scene: “João Romão dashed across the courtyard, looking like a general determined to beat back a surprise attack, shouting: ‘Don’t let those cops in! Don’t let them in! Keep them out!’ ‘Keep them out!’ the chorus echoed. . . . A common determination stirred them to solidarity, as though they would be dishonored for all eternity if the police set foot in São Romão” (Chapter X).
* * *
Clearly these notes do not exhaust this novel’s readings. They only point to ways of approaching a book that has aroused the continued interest of scholars and the general reading public alike. Aluísio Azevedo accomplished a double feat: he brought Brazilian fiction up-to-date by writing a maste
rpiece, while recording in it not only the aesthetic issues of his time, but also the structural transformations Brazilian society was undergoing as it took leave of the nineteenth century to enter the twentieth.
—Affonso Romano de Sant ’Anna
Translated by Adria Frizzi
A Chronology of Aluísio Azevedo’s Life
1857 Born in São Luís, Maranhão, in the north of Brazil, the natural son of consul David Gonçalves and Emilia Amália Pinto de Magalhães.
1870 Works as a warehouse salesclerk, then leaves his job to enroll in the Liceu Maranhense.
1871 Takes painting lessons from the Italian Domingos Tribuzzi.
1876 Goes to Rio de Janeiro to attend the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and begins contributing sketches and caricatures to newspapers.
1878 His father dies. Aluísio returns to Maranhão to attend to family business.
1879 Writes his first novel, Uma lágrima de mulher (A woman’s tear), in the romantic style.
1880 Edits the anti-clerical paper O Pensador and founds with some friends the daily Pacotilha.
1881 Publishes O mulato (The Mulatto), which causes a scandal in the society of São Luís and earns the author national renown.
1882 Publishes the novel Condessa Vesper (Countess Vesper), the serial Mistério da Tijuca (Mystery of Tijuca), and presents the play “Flor de Lis” (Fleur-de-lis) in collaboration with his brother Artur Azevedo.
1883 Publishes Casa de pensão (Boarding house), based on the “Capistrano Affair,” a famous crime that occurred in the capital. He puts on several of his plays and publishes more serials to the end of the decade.
The Slum (Library of Latin America) Page 26