A Escrava Isaura 1.51 · 1.51

This is the sentence to carry out of the chapter. 'Uma vida que faria inveja a muita gente livre' — a life that would make free people envious — is offered as comfort, and it is the purest distillation of the slaveholder's self-soothing: as if comfort were the thing at stake, as if a well-kept captivity answered the loss of freedom. Malvina genuinely believes she is being generous. And the terrible thing is that she is half right about the comfort and wholly blind to the point — which is exactly the blindness Guimarães is writing the book to cure. Isaura's reply, in the next paragraph, will put the whole speech in its place with a single image.

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