A Escrava Isaura 9.80 · 9.80

Leôncio meets her declaration of death not with alarm but with a sneer — 'satanico sorriso' — treating her resolve as theatre. The word 'romantismo' is the tell of his class and his moment: to a jaded senhor, a slave who speaks of freedom and death has merely caught a fashionable literary fever, the Romanticism of the novels she was foolishly taught to read. He cannot let her be serious, because a serious Isaura is a person, and a person cannot be owned. Mockery is his defense against her reality. The 'satanic' smile is the narrator's verdict on where such willed blindness leads.

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