A Escrava Isaura 2.22 · 2.22

Guimarães is careful, and the care is the point: Leôncio was not born evil. 'Alguns bons e generosos instinctos, de que o dotára a natureza' — nature gave him some good and generous instincts — and they 'havião-se apagado', were snuffed out, at the mere 'roçar', the brush, of bad doctrine. Two things sit in that verb. First, the flame image, which makes Leôncio the exact anti-type of Isaura the 'alabaster lamp' whose inner fire shows through the stone: her light burns, his was put out. Second, the terrible lightness of 'roçar' — it took only a brush to extinguish him, because nothing had ever tended the flame. This is the book's quiet, radical claim: monsters are not born but raised, and the same society that starves Isaura into her suffering also blows out the good in the boy who will make her suffer. Two ruined children of one system, and the chapter has drawn them so we cannot look at the one without the other.

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

You are reading a page of the A Escrava Isaura — 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
• Dom Casmurro — Brazilian Portuguese