'Better to have been born ugly'
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não era melhor que tivesse nascido bruta e disforme, como a mais vil das negras,
would it not have been better to have been born brutish and deformed, like the lowliest of the black women,
The novel's most uncomfortable line, and it must be read with open eyes. Isaura, fair-skinned, wishes she had been born 'bruta e disforme, como a mais vil das negras' — brutish and deformed, like the lowliest of the black women — so that beauty would not have drawn her persecutors. The wish exposes the colorist hierarchy of 1875 Brazil, which the sympathetic narrator shares as much as his heroine: dark skin is casually equated with ugliness and lowness. The tragedy the book intends — that beauty is a curse for a slave — is real; but it is built on a racial ranking that the same book leaves unquestioned, and a modern reader should see both the pain and the prejudice woven together here.
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