The Elegy of Dom Casmurro

The objective of this article is to investigate to which extent we can consider Dom Casmurro (1900), by the Brazilian author Machado de Assis (1839–1908), as an elegiac romance (Bruffee, 1983). The elegiac romance appeared first in the early fiction of Joseph Conrad and was subsequently developed by a number of major writers influenced by Conrad, including Nabokov and Fitzgerald. This article will present the main characteristics of the elegiac romance and compare Dom Casmurro to Lord Jim (1900) in order to highlight what makes the relationship between narrator and hero(es) in Dom Casmurro unique. Dom Casmurro can be considered a double elegy: the bitter and mournful laments for the death of Capitu and Escobar are intertwined in the self-reflexive narrative, shedding light on the changing sexual, gender and social relations in the end of the nineteenth century.