A Escrava Isaura 10.5 · 10.5

A 'sarau' is the evening gathering of nineteenth-century polite society — music, dancing, conversation — and 'sociedade escolhida', a chosen society, names exactly the exclusivity of it: a self-selecting elite that decides who belongs. Guimarães is setting a stage where belonging is everything and where an outsider's origins are the constant, unspoken question. Into this world of insiders will walk Isaura, the ultimate outsider, a fugitive slave passing as a lady. The word 'escolhida' — chosen, select — hangs over the whole chapter's suspense: this society prides itself on knowing its own, and the drama will turn on whether its sharp social eyes can read what Isaura truly is beneath the borrowed name.

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