Princess Isabel of Brazil: Gender and Power in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Roderick Barman's biography of Princess Isabel is a puzzling book. One of his goals, he says, is to "present, so far as it is possible for a male to do so, a 'feminist' analysis of D. Isabel's life" (p. xi). Why would it not be possible for a male to write persuasive feminist analysis? Surely it is less a matter of who does the analyzing than of how it is done. Barman's attempt produces such inflexible and exaggerated characterizations as: "A mother was the only woman whom a man could defer to and retain his honor" (p. 36); Isabel "daydreamed about attractive men only in the context of marriage" (p. 54); "That night and every night thereafter that [her husband] chose, [Isabel] was under the duty to submit her body to his sexual gratifications. Her own pleasure and her own needs were irrelevant" (pp. 63-4). He cites no evidence for these characterizations (how does he have access to the interior world of daydreams?), and without locating specific actions in their particular settings and circumstances, they offer little usefulness for understanding relations between actual women and men. The last statement is especially baffling because he goes on to say that Isabel "reveled in the physical side of marriage" (p. 64), and both partners reported themselves extremely content in all aspects of their marriage. It is hard to see how the underlying assumptions of the 1804 Code Napoléon contribute much to understanding Isabel and Gaston's arranged marriage (pp. 54-5). Barman might have done better to consult the 1870 Brazilian edition of the Código Philippino and its laws on inheritance, for example, by which women inherited equally with their brothers from the parents' estate, a dramatic contrast to the situation of women in Britain and the United States.

Barman chose to order his account according to "the female life cycle" (p. xi), (as though there were always and everywhere only one) and the cumulative roles Isabel played: daughter, bride, wife, mother, and finally empress-in-waiting, a contrast with his impressive biography of her father, Pedro II, emperor from 1840 to 1889, which pivots on key political issues. Does he dismiss the importance of male puberty or the responsibilities of fatherhood? And conversely, why could not Isabel's signing of the Rio Branco Law which declared in 1871 that henceforth the children born of slave women would be born free, and her forcing of events in 1888 that culminated in the abolition of slavery in Brazil—why could such watershed events not serve as the focus for her biography? Barman has assigned Isabel to a private sphere and her father to a public one without noticing how thoroughly her life belonged to both just as his did, and that the connections between private and public were complex, overlapping, and often contradictory.

Still more puzzling, Barman wants "to explain why women have had such difficulty in challenging these structures [of male authority] and their premises and in creating a system that gives autonomy and equality to women" (pp. xi-xii). On the one hand, he sees nineteenth-century women in the person of Princess Isabel as bound in "subordination and exploitation" by the conventions of their upbringing and the expectations imposed on them, while on the other, he faults them, and Isabel in particular, for not shaking those structures loose. Although she never became empress because the monarchy was overthrown, for three periods during her father's reign Isabel did act as regent: for ten months in 1871 and early 1872 when she was only 25 years old; for about a year and a half from 1876 to 1877; and from June 1887 to August 1888. Each regency was to be relatively brief, and Isabel's assignment, as she, her...