Women's Voices in the Short Fiction of Machado de Assis and Chesnutt: Realism, Romanticism, and the Poetics of Intersubjectivity

"Madness is law, the law is madness," writes jacques Derrida in "The Law of Genre," the well-known essay that deconstructs the stability of genre—as a taxonomic approach to science, to texts, to gender, to race. In an era when positivist science dominated Brazilian academia, Machado de Assis's "O Alienista" ("The Psychiatrist," 1881), his most avant-garde short story, anticipates the alienation of a world of classification and, through allegory, interrogates the binary "sanity and madness," and by implication, reductive academic approaches to human classification.¹ In recent decades, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) and joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), whose works stylistically blur generic boundaries, have both garnered intense critical attention, yet their parallel careers have not been compared, nor has their attention to an early form of narratological intersectionality received notice. Assessing the literary careers of Machado and Chesnutt, critics diverge widely, amassing textual evidence of their romanticism, realism, or modernism. What approaches to both authors' output cannot fail to notice is their commitment to exploring the experiences of and relations between the marginalized and the powerful in society, an approach that may be considered a hallmark of various realist movements.² Walking the line of realism and romanticism, their fiction is highly attuned to the plight of women, to those of African descent, to women of African descent, and to individuals between races—figures at the intersection of societies divided by rigorous lines of race, gender, and class. In the attenuated form of the short story, there is a convergence of intersectional concerns, and Chesnutt and Machado de Assis, both masters of the novel and of short fiction, approached themes of race and gender as essential to their craft. In two different settings in the Americas, the U.S. and Brazil, they push the limits of the realism of verisimilitude, blending romantic and realist techniques, producing works that do not correspond to the "bad faith" of bourgeois consciousness, in terms of the modernist critique of realism, but instead correspond to the progressive realism of defamiliarization, theorized by Roman Jacobson in "On Realism in Art." In an era of racial violence that they dramatized in ironic and allegorical vignettes, Machado and Chesnutt, in their quest to negotiate aesthetic and didactic concerns, pioneer an impressionistic layering of perspectives in order to integrate and value the voices of women as vital in themselves and as important to the nuanced representation of male-dominated racial oppression.

To suggest that Machado's and Chesnutt's narrative art involves the interplay of gender, class, and race is not necessarily intended to appropriate a feminist category for two male authors, but to show that in their attention to multiple forms of alienation and intersubjectivity across social barriers, their fiction challenges dominant social narratives. Their non-fiction writings and biographical details maintain a certain relevance but can also cloud interpretive practices of fiction rather than illuminate them. Earl Fitz posits, for example, that Machado's marginality as a biracial individual impels him to sensitivity to women's issues, drawing upon José Luiz Passos' recent introduction to Machado's Ressurreição (Resurrection, 1872), in which he equates female oppression to that of the slave or the household dependent (agregado) in the system of patronage in Brazil, the system under which Machado lived in his youth. Without discounting this possibility, one also finds that his sparse journalistic comments on women's suffrage do not clearly mark him as overtly progressive.³ Machado advocates for women's suffrage, in a crônica published on 1 April 1877, marred by an ill-timed flattery that appears condescending even in its era: "Let the day when women have the vote arrive; I hope for it not only because it is the idea of notable publicists, but because it will bring an aesthetic element to elections, where no aesthetic element existed before."⁴ In his introduction to his study of Machadoan female characterization, Fitz writes pages on the background of the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel, but only a couple of sentences on...