Dom Casmurro is an 1899 novel written by Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Like The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Quincas Borba, both by Machado de Assis, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of realist literature. It is written as a fictional memoir by a distrusting, jealous husband. The narrator, however, is not a reliable conveyor of the story as it is a dark comedy. Dom Casmurro is considered by critic Afrânio Coutinho "a true Brazilian masterpiece, and perhaps Brazil's greatest representative piece of writing" and "one of the best books ever written in the Portuguese language, if not the best one to date." The author is considered a master of Brazilian literature with a unique style of realism.
Its protagonist is Bento Santiago, the narrator of the story which, told in the first person, aims to "tie together the two ends of life", in other words, to bring together stories from his youth to the days when he is writing the book. Between these two moments, Bento writes about his youthful reminiscences, his life at the seminary, his affair with Capitu and the jealousy that arises from this relationship, which becomes the main plot of the story. Set in Rio de Janeiro during the Second Reign, the novel begins with a recent episode in which the narrator is nicknamed "Dom Casmurro", hence the title of the novel. Machado de Assis wrote it using literary devices such as irony and intertextuality, making references to Schopenhauer and, above all, to Shakespeare's Othello.
Over the years, Dom Casmurro has been the subject of numerous studies, adaptations to other media and interpretations throughout the world, from psychological and psychoanalytical in literary criticism in the 1930s and 1940s, through feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, to sociological in the 1980s and beyond, with its themes of jealousy, Capitu's ambiguity, the moral portrait of the time and the character of the narrator. Credited as a forerunner of Modernism and of ideas later written by the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, the book influenced writers such as John Barth, Graciliano Ramos and Dalton Trevisan, and is considered by some to be Machado's masterpiece, on a par with The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Dom Casmurro has been translated into several languages and remains one of his most famous books and is considered one of the most fundamental works in all of Brazilian literature.
Plot The story is told in the first person and the main character is 54-year-old Bento de Albuquerque Santiago, a solitary, well-established lawyer from Rio de Janeiro who, after having rebuilt his childhood house "in the old Rua de Matacavalos" (now ) in Engenho Novo, wants to "tie together the two ends of life and restore his adolescence in old age", in other words, recount his youthful moments in middle age. In the first chapter, the author explains the title: it's a tribute to a "train poet" who once pestered him with his verses and called him "Dom Casmurro" because, according to Bento, he "closed his eyes three or four times" during the recitation. His neighbours, who found his "taciturn, recluse-like habits" strange, and also his close friends, popularised the nickname. He was inspired to write the book by medallions of Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Masinissa: Roman emperors who killed their adulterous wives.
In the following chapters Bento begins his recollections. He recounts the experiences he had when his mother, the widowed D. Glória, sent him to the seminary. Glória sent him to the seminary to fulfil a promise she had made: if she were to conceive a second child after her first, who died in childbirth, she would send it to the seminary. The idea was revived by the dependent José Dias, who tells Uncle Cosme and D. Glória about Bentinho's flirtation with Capitolina, the poor neighbour with whom Bentinho was in love. At the seminary, Bentinho meets his best friend, Ezequiel de Sousa Escobar, the son of a lawyer from Curitiba. Bentinho left the seminary and studied law in São Paulo, while Escobar became a successful businessman and married Sancha, Capitu's friend. In 1865 Capitu and Bentinho get married; Sancha and Ezequiel have a daughter they name Capitolina, while the protagonist and his wife conceive a son named Ezequiel. Bento's companion Escobar, who was an excellent swimmer, paradoxically drowns in 1871, and at the funeral both Sancha and Capitu stare at the deceased: "There was a moment when Capitu's eyes gazed down at the dead man as the widow's had, [...] like the swollen wave of the sea beyond, as if she too wished to swallow up the swimmer of that morning." according to him.
Soon the narrator starts to suspect that his best friend and Capitu were secretly cheating on him. Dom Casmurro also begins to doubt his own paternity. He says in the last lines: "[...] were destined to join together and deceive me..." The book ends with the ironic invitation "Let's go to the History of the Suburbs", a book he would have thought of writing at the beginning of the novel, before the idea of Dom Casmurro occurred to him. The novel takes place from approximately 1857 to 1875, and the narrative, although set in psychological time, allows us to perceive certain units: Bento's childhood in Matacavalos; Dona Glória's house and the Pádua family, with relatives and dependents; his acquaintance with Capitu; the seminary; married life; the intensification of jealousy; the psychotic outbursts of jealousy and aggression; the break-up.
Characteristics
Genre After The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), Machado de Assis wrote books with different themes and styles from his earlier novels, such as Resurrection and The Hand and the Glove. These new novels – which include, in addition to the Posthumous Memoirs, Quincas Borba (1891) and Dom Casmurro – are labeled as realist because of their critical attitude, objectivity and contemporaneity. Some critics prefer to call this genre "psychological realism", because it presents the interior, the thought, the absence of action combined with psychological and philosophical density. However, there are also romantic residues in Dom Casmurro, such as the erotic metaphor in relation to Capitu, described with "gipsy's eyes, oblique and sly." Ian Watt has stated that realism refers to the empirical experiences of men, but the recreation of the past through Bentinho's memory, his "stains" of recollections, brings the book closer to an impressionist novel.
For , Dom Casmurro "is not a realist novel in the sense that it presents us with facts in an open and easily assimilated form. It presents them to us, but we have to read against the narrative to discover and connect them for ourselves. In doing so, we will learn more not only about the characters and the events described in the story, but also about the protagonist, Bento, the narrator himself." We can therefore conclude that Dom Casmurro is a realist novel that focuses on psychological analysis (or exposition) and ironically criticises society, in this case the elite of Rio de Janeiro, through the behaviour of certain characters. Critics have also noted certain elements of modernism in Dom Casmurro. Some, such as Roberto Schwarz, even go so far as to call it "the first Brazilian modernist novel", mainly because of its short chapters, its fragmentary, non-linear structure, its penchant for the allusive, the metalinguistic attitude of those who write and those who see themselves as writers, the interruption of the narrative and the possibility of multiple readings or interpretations; "anti-literary" elements that would only be popularised by modernism decades later.
Others see it as a detective novel, where the reader would have to investigate the details of the actions, distrusting the narrator's point of view to reach a conclusion about the authenticity of the adultery. because "from the beginning there are inconsistencies, obscure steps, disconcerting emphases, which form an enigma." Among these clues are the metaphor of the "eyes like the tide" and the "gipsy's eyes, oblique and sly", the parallel with the Shakespearean drama of Othello and Desdemona, the closeness to the opera of tenor Marcolini (the duet, the trio and the quartet), the "strange resemblances", the relationship with Escobar at the seminary, Capitu's lucidity and Bentinho's obscurantism, the ex-seminarian's delirious and perverse imagination, the biblical precept from Ecclesiastes at the end of the book.
Themes The main theme of the novel is jealousy and Bentinho's marital tragedy. From quoting the emperors Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Masinissa, who killed their wives accused of adultery, to quoting Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor who killed his wife for the same reason. His first hint of jealousy appears in chapter 62, when he asks José Dias, a dependent at his mother's house, when the latter goes to visit him at the seminary, "She's gay and happy as ever. What a giddy creature! Just waiting to hook some young buck of the neighbourhood and marry him." For Bentinho, the answer was a shock, as he writes: "[..] and it was accompanied by such a violent beating of my heart that even now I seem to hear it." According to Roberto Schwarz, in Dom Casmurro "the most dramatic instance lies in jealousy, which had been one of the boy's many imaginative outbursts, and now, associated with the authority of being the landowner and husband, it becomes a force for devastation". In Dom Casmurro, however, the theme of jealousy is presented from the point of view of a husband who suspects that he has been betrayed, with no room for the other characters' versions.
Another very clear theme of the book is its setting – Rio de Janeiro during the Second Reign, in the house of a member of the elite. Critics have written that, at the time of its publication, it was the book that "made the most intense psychological exploration of the character of Rio de Janeiro's society". Bento is a landowner who went to university and became a lawyer, and represents a different class from Capitu, who is intelligent but from a lower-class family. The narrator uses French and English quotations throughout the book, a common practice among 19th-century aristocrats in Brazil. The contrast between the two characters has given rise to interpretations that Bentinho destroyed his wife's persona because he was a member of the elite and she was poor (see Interpretations). In Dom Casmurro, the man is the result of his own duality and is incoherent within himself, while the woman is sly and charming. Thus, it is a book that represents the politics, ideology and religion of the Second Reign.
According to Eduardo de Assis Duarte, "the universe of the white, noble elite is the setting through which thenarrator character distils his resentment and distrust of the alleged adultery". Schwarz states that the novel represents the social relations and behaviour of the Brazilian elite of the time: progressive and liberal on the one hand, patriarchal and authoritarian on the other. Another point that has been studied is that Dom Casmurro is almost non-communicative with Capitu – hence the fact that only the girl's gestures and glances (and not her words) indicate that she may have cheated on him. Bento is a quiet man who keeps to himself. One of his friends once sent him a letter that said: "I am going to my old place at Petrópolis, Dom Casmurro. See if you can't tear yourself away from the cave in Engenho Novo and come spend a couple of weeks with me." This isolation, which becomes a reason for him to "tie together the two ends of his life", is also one of the themes of the novel. The critic Barreto Filho, for example, noted that it was "the tragic spirit that would shape Machado's entire work, leading destinies towards madness, absurdity and, in the best of cases, solitary old age."