An Unbridled Bride

Abstract

Eça de Queirós’s O primo Basílio became an object of controversy almost as soon as it appeared. Shortly after its publication in 1878, the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis wrote a highly critical review in O Cruzeiro, which generated such debate that two weeks later he published a defense of his reaction in the same journal. Much of the initial controversy revolved around the eroticism of the novel. Its graphic representations of illicit pleasure seemed gratuitous to many readers, among whom Machado was perhaps the most vociferous. Though the novel ended chastely, he claimed, it was permeated by a “boudoir aroma”: the reader might read through the final pages, but they would surely not be the ones that he or she would reread (137–138). For Machado, this moral deficiency was the symptom of a deeper aesthetic flaw. The heroine of the novel, he complained, never became a convincing character. Lacking ethical judgment or guilt, Luísa Mendonça was but a “títere” (puppet) without compunction, passion, perversity, or any other logic that would make her seem human or real. In her adultery, “Luísa falls into the mud, without will, without repulsion, without consciousness: Basílio does nothing more than push her, like the inert material that she is” (131). At one point, Luísa flips a coin to decide what to do next. For Machado, the randomness of this gesture characterized the novel as a whole, the action of which developed not from the complexity of its characters’ psychologies but rather from the arbitrary whims of stick figures.