The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil Read Free

nineteenth-century science, but he doubted that science held the answer to all of Brazil’s problems. Now in his early fifties (which was relatively older then than now, so to speak), he was feeling a bit curmudgeonly, perhaps, but it was more than that. The positivists believed that scientific logic and assessment of evidence would automatically produce wise social policies, and they had little time for anyone disposed to question the certainty of their beliefs. “Positive certainty,” one could say, was a typically positivist attitude, and Machado de Assis mistrusted it. Scientists, after all, were human, and Machado de Assis had made a long study of human failings. Many of his stories show how often selfishness masquerades as pure logic in people’s minds. Among the things that Brazilian positivists did not question were theories of European racial superiority. This was the heyday, in fact, of scientific racism and social Darwinism—two misguided attempts to apply evolutionary theory to contemporary societies. The positivists believed that government application of these ideas to Brazil would result in an “improved” (which to them meant “more European”) population. Eugenics, the science of “improving” populations, would gain many adherents around the world until the 1930s, when the Nazis finally gave racial science a bad name, hopefully forever.
    The vogue for European genes may seem a bit less grotesque when one sees it as simply part of a more general vogue for all things European. Indeed, the mystique of Europe had a powerful hold on the minds of nineteenth-century Brazilian readers—which is to say, on the upper crust of a few cosmopolitan cities, among which Rio de Janeiro was first and foremost. Twenty-first-century readers of English are likely to be surprised by the slight presence of local color in most of Machado’s writing. Change the names to French, delete the few references to slavery and African descent, and one could often think that Machado’s characters inhabited a fictional Paris. The women’s clothing is very carefully modeled on the most recent French fashion plates, the men’s suits, cut on English lines and usually of dark wool more appropriate to a London fog than a tropical sun. His stories are peppered with references to European authors like Voltaire or Shakespeare, mention of European composers like Mozart and Beethoven, and allusions to the history and mythology of classical Greece and Rome. None of this was particular to Machado de Assis; rather, it illustrates the extent to which the ruling classes of nineteenth-century Brazil had a Eurocentric worldview. Britain and, above all, France were most central to this perspective; Portugal was distinctly less important. Britain stood for trade and political stability; France, for artistic and intellectual achievement. The economically dynamic United States also had its admirers, though it could not compete in the minds of nineteenth-century Brazilian readers with the prestige of Britain and France. Likewise, Brazilian readers had very little interest in their South American neighbors (whom they compared unfavorably to Brazil, with its coffee-driven prosperity and its monarchical stability) until the closing years of the century. By the 1880s, though, Buenos Aires, with its Italian-immigrant population and urban reforms based on a Parisian model, had taken the lead in the continental contest to imitate Europe. Rio de Janeiro (and Mexico City) hurriedly followed that lead and created their own simulated Parisian avenues shortly before Machado’s death in 1908.
    The Brazilian elite’s self-refashioning on a European model was not so much actual as aspirational. Aside from the renovated downtowns and the best neighborhoods of a few cities, little about nineteenth-century Brazil reminded anyone of France. Brazil’s tropical plantations with their enslaved workforce and its interminable cattle ranches sprawling across arid plains