A Escrava Isaura 9.76 · 9.76

Stung by her nobility, Leôncio reaches for the oldest lie of the slaveholder: that the enslaved are lowly by nature, not by force. 'Rasteiros e abjectos como a tua condição' — base and abject as your condition — collapses the person into the status, as if being held down proved one was low. Guimarães has spent the chapter demonstrating the opposite; Isaura's reasoning has been finer than her master's throughout. The insult is thus self-refuting, and the reader hears it as the flailing of a man who has lost an argument and reaches for the one weapon status still hands him — contempt.

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