O decoro de uma cortesã

Abstract

Among the changes that rocked the sensitive landscape of late-19th century Europe, one of the most disquieting concerned the literary fabulation of the prostitute. The general view on venal love accompanied the changing taste of a public that identified less and less with the virtues of romantic heroines. These transformations resonated in Brazilian literature in a very particular way. After all, in the 1800s, the country was far from sharing the sociability that had provided the bedrock for these changes in France, and the old patriarchal, Catholic and slave-owning values were holding firm against the more modern equations between literary form, eroticism and morality. It is against this backdrop that the present paper interprets Machado de Assis’ 1883 short story “Singular ocorrência” (A Singular Event), perhaps the first literary text in Brazil to register a change in the way the prostitute was represented. In this apparently banal story of a relationship between a powerful man and a strumpet, what calls attention is the protagonist’s performance, whose “discreet theatricality” echoes the attributes of the exuberant European courtesans.