Dom Casmurro

About the work

Author

Machado de Assis

Publication

In book form in 1899, by Garnier

Genre

Novel

Setting

The Rio de Janeiro of the Second Reign: Matacavalos Street, the seminary of São José, Glória and Engenho Novo

Era

From 1857, when Bentinho is fifteen, to the return of Ezequiel as an adult, many years after 1872, told by Bentinho near the end of the century

Narrator

First person: Bento Santiago, now old, who recounts his own life and is the interested party

Protagonist

Bento Santiago, Bentinho, and Capitu, the childhood neighbor he marries

Central Theme

Bento Santiago, old and alone in a house in Engenho Novo, writes his own life to answer a question he never quite formulates: whether his wife, Capitu, betrayed him with his best friend, Escobar. The book is not about Capitu's adultery; it is about the construction of an accusation. The reader receives all the material from the hands of the accuser, and the novel is built so that this condition becomes visible without ever being stated.

What makes the piece work is that Bentinho is not a liar. Right at the start he confesses that the project of the house failed and warns that he is selecting what he tells, and it is precisely this partial honesty that lends authority to the rest. It is the same mechanism as in The Alienist: there, the good faith of the man who defines madness is what makes the result frightening, not hypocrisy.

The Thread That Runs Through the Work

Does the distance between the reported fact and the narrator's reading of it support the novel's thesis, or is it already retroactive contamination by someone writing decades later, convinced? There is no way to separate the two things, and that is what the book is demonstrating. The proof is not in any single chapter: it is in the course of the two images that decide Capitu's reputation.

The Two Images of the Eyes

The first is born in chapter XXV, from the mouth of José Dias, in the same meeting in which he changes his position on the seminary out of self-interest.

The second is born in chapter XXXII, from the pen of the old Bentinho, who looks for the comparison for what he felt as a lover, at fifteen, between fascination and threat, right after he examines her eyes for the dissembling that José Dias had pointed out and finds nothing extraordinary.

Ninety-one chapters later, at the wake, the second image returns, now applied to the wife's gaze upon her friend's corpse.

And the two, which were born in different mouths and for different reasons, and which in chapter L the narrator himself had denied together ("they were neither oblique nor undertow"), return side by side at the end of the book, in chapter CXLVIII, as if they were a permanent trait of a person.

The two visual proofs that condemn Capitu in every reader's memory have, within the text itself, a dated origin, an identified speaker and a motive. The novel gives these facts away for free. The one who joins them as a trait of character is the narrator, on the last page, and with the conclusion already in hand.

The Resemblance the Book Had Already Explained

In chapter LXXXIII, Gurgel, Sancha's father, shows Bentinho the portrait of his late wife and says that Capitu resembles her, in features and in temperament, with the book giving no kinship at all between the two.

In chapter CXL, with the separation already decided, Bentinho himself remembers these words, and even so reads Ezequiel's features as proof.

The book places, some fifty-five chapters before the accusation (from LXXXIII to CXXXVIII), the case of a resemblance with no guilt at all, and the narrator recalls it at the moment of deciding. He has not forgotten the argument against himself: he recalls it in chapter CXL and, in the same stretch, lets the memories of Escobar and Capitu run him over.

In Favor of the Reading of Betrayal

Four elements support it, and none is negligible: Ezequiel's resemblance to Escobar, first remarked at the table by Capitu; her silence before the photograph; the separation proposed by her own self; and the image of the fruit inside the rind, which denies a change of character.

Against Her

Each of the four admits the opposite reading with equal force. And there is an asymmetry of standard, which appears only by crossing the seminary years with the married ones: the same narrator who absolves himself in a few lines of the desire he himself confesses to feeling for his friend's wife does not grant his own wife the equivalent doubt in the face of a look.

And the coldest line in the book is the one that dismantles the inquiry itself, because it reveals that proving was never the goal.

Othello, Named and Refused

The common question about the book is whether Capitu cheated, and it seems that the well-trained reader is the one who knows how to answer with grounds. The question is a trap set by the novel itself, and answering is already falling into it: the tribunal is not convened to judge Capitu, it is convened to see what the reader does with a dossier assembled by one of the parties.

The novel names its own model and diverges from it at the decisive point. In Othello the spectator knows that Desdemona is innocent, and the tragedy lies in watching the error; here that certainty is never granted, and the tragedy passes outside the book. Bentinho sees the whole play and leaves it with the decision made, not the suspicion.

Machado puts in one handkerchief fewer than Shakespeare: Othello's proof is flimsy, Bentinho's is the resemblance between a child's face and a dead man's, and the sentence comes out the same all the same.

Whoever Defines Decides What Others See

It is the bridge to The Alienist. There it is Simão Bacamarte who states the criterion of madness and no one feels authorized to examine it; here it is José Dias who states, in passing and out of self-interest, the first criterion about Capitu's eyes, and the narrator, decades later, examines it in chapter XXXII without finding anything, denies it in chapter L and in the end inherits it. In both cases the definition arrives before the examination, and whoever pronounces it is never neutral.

The Problem Always Solved by Someone Else

Dona Glória's promise is not broken, it is paid off by proxy, and the one who formulates the way out is Escobar, in two lines of dialogue that the text does not mark as a turning point. Before him, José Dias had already offered the trip to Rome; none of the ways out is Bentinho's.

It counts against the common reading of Bentinho as a passive victim of circumstances: he is passive, but the book shows this by construction, not by complaint.

The Memory That Does Not Close the Circle

In chapter II, the declared project of the house fails in the very next sentence, and the narrator says so himself before narrating anything.

In the end, the same rule he applies to Capitu, the fruit inside the rind, is the one he had applied to himself in chapter CXL, when he asked himself whether he was not "merely a man in disguise."