The royal heron
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Parecia a garça real, alçando o collo garboso e altaneiro, entre uma chusma de passaros vulgares.
She seemed the royal heron, lifting its graceful, lofty neck, among a throng of common birds.
The set-piece simile that seals the portrait: the garça real, the great white heron, its neck lifted 'garboso e altaneiro' — graceful and haughty — over a mob of ordinary birds. The comparison is frankly hierarchical, and modern readers will feel its edge, since the 'passaros vulgares' are her fellow enslaved women. Guimarães means to exalt Isaura, but he does it by setting her above her sisters — the blind spot of a sympathetic 1875 pen.
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A Escrava Isaura 7.101 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/7.101/