'You live to play piano and read novels'
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bem mostras, que és uma escrava, que vives de tocar piano e ler romances.
You show well that you are a slave who lives to play the piano and read novels.
The jibe is meant to shrink her, and it accidentally paints the tragedy exact. A woman formed for the drawing room — 'tocar piano e ler romances' — is held as chattel in the senzala's shadow; the gap between what she was made to be and what the law says she is opens right here. Leôncio uses the accomplishments as evidence of frivolity; the reader sees them as evidence of a stolen life. There is also a wink at the novel's own kind: Isaura reads romances, and she is in one — a heroine of sensibility trapped in a plot that the sentimental fiction of the age existed to protest. Guimarães lets his villain sneer at the very genre that is, at this moment, indicting him.
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