Gestures of Dissimulation. Negotiated Melodrama in Machado de Assis’s Helena (1876)

Abstract

A novel of the first phase of Machado de Assis´s production, Helena first appealed to the critic for approaching melodrama, a genre of great acceptance in the 19th century, although throughout the 20th century it came to be criticized for not fulfilling the expectations of the gender, especially when conceiving a villain who is far from fully incarnating the polarization between extremes, as good and evil, pure and impure, etc. However, little attention has been paid to the heroine who gives the novel its title, which, although she is read as the typical innocent victim pursued by the malefactor, she has an unacceptable inner conflict for the genre, if we believe in its main scholars (Heilman, Sharp, Brooks). Compromising with the villain, she ends up trying to manipulate characters and plot for her own benefit, seriously jeopardizing the genre's fundamentals. This suggests more than a failure of conception on the part of Machado, but, rather, a deliberate questioning of the genre and of the very nature of the narrative, a question that will be deliberately deepened in his mature novels, such as Dom Casmurro and Esaú and Jacó.