Dom Casmurro 21.52 · 21.52

The word 'affectação' names the thing directly and the trailing ellipsis lets it hang, as if Justina cannot find words fatuous enough to match his. Affectation is the sum of everything she has catalogued: the speeches, the church-praise, the private vocabulary, all of it studied, none of it sincere.

Machado sets 'affectação' as the keystone of her portrait. It is the charge that unites style and character — José Dias performs feeling he does not have, and the performance is his whole method of survival in a house where he owns nothing. The ellipsis is expressive too: it enacts her exasperation, the giving-up before a mannerism too thick to describe. In three words and a pause she has drawn the agregado more sharply than pages of narration might, and readied the blow that follows about his hollow piety.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I