A Escrava Isaura 9.124 · 9.124

Isaura names her future as 'martyrio' — martyrdom — and the word, after the Mater Dolorosa tableau, lands with its full religious charge: she is to be a martyr, an innocent tortured, 'da alma e do corpo', in soul and body both. The pairing recalls Leôncio's boast that he owned her 'em corpo e alma'; she throws the phrase back, transformed from a claim of ownership into a description of suffering. What he called possession she calls martyrdom, and the reader hears the two meanings collide. This is the peak of her despair, and it is the sentence just before she asks for the knife — the martyr, denied even the mercy of death, reaching for the one exit left.

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