XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Literature and Law in Machado de Assis's Helena

• In Event: Fiction As Archive

Abstract

This presentation examines Helena (1876), the understudied novel by Afro-Brazilian Machado de Assis, in order to analyze an aspect neglected by its literary critics: the complex relationship Machado proposes between literature and the law in this novel. It argues that the key to understanding Helena’s plot lies in this relationship. The novel opens with the reading of Counselhor Vale’s last will and testament, and with him leaving part of his fortune to an “illegitimate” daughter, Helena. Approaching the novel from the perspective of social history and literary studies, in my presentation I will observe how Machado rewrites the last will and testament to create an alternative, new life for Helena who moves in with Vale’s family despite being a dependent woman. The presentation puts historical evidence of last wills and testaments into conversation with an analysis of this novel’s literary depictions of the last will in order to show the size of this transgression. In doing so, it shows how the novel renders the power of imaginative writing to transform social history even as Machado himself is hesitant about the limits of literature to transgress social hierarchies. I argue that Machado, who is writing in the 1870s, is still pessimistic about the power of literature to subvert social history, which can be seen in his choices to have the family question Vale's decision and to conclude the novel with Helena’s original social position being restored at her death, making her new life only temporary. The plot that Machado builds is, thus, twofold: he manages to integrate this possibility of a new life in the novel, establishing a kind of law through the testament that is immanent to Helena, and at the same time, in this integration, he maintains the forces that oppose the last will. In other words, the novel’s plot does not hide its own illegitimate or fabricated construction and Machado makes it clear that there is a demarcation or limit between the power of literature to transverse irreversible social barriers, and that of the law to reinstate them.

Author

• Ingrid Brioso Rieumont, Mellon Faculty Fellow, Dartmouth College