A Escrava Isaura 10.88 · 10.88

The cruelest line in the ladies' talk is also the one thick with unwitting irony: 'a minha mucama tem melhor gosto para se trajar' — my housemaid dresses with better taste. A 'mucama' was an enslaved domestic, a house-slave — and the lady, meaning to sneer at 'Elvira's' plainness, compares her, contemptuously, to a slave, never dreaming she is looking at one. Isaura, who really is a mucama in the law's eyes, is scorned for looking less well-dressed than a mucama. The layers of irony fold in on themselves: the fine lady defines her own status against her slave's, and unknowingly ranks the fugitive slave below the domestic one. Guimarády, the abolitionist, lets the whole vicious little economy of status show in a single catty sentence — a world where women measure their worth by how far above their slaves they stand, blind to the slave standing among them in silk.

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