The Slave Isaura

This summary tells the story of The Slave Isaura from beginning to end, including the ending. If you want to be surprised, save this summary for after you read the book or watch the telenovela. Bernardo Guimarães wrote the novel in 1875, thirteen years before slavery was abolished in Brazil, and he published the story first as a serial, bit by bit, in a newspaper, before it became a book.

The tone is pure melodrama: a cruel villain, a flawless heroine, an impossible love, a happy ending that arrives almost by miracle. That is how nineteenth-century Brazilian Romanticism liked to tell a story, with emotion turned all the way up and very little subtlety. That does not lessen the book's importance: it helped bring the violence of slavery into the parlors of readers who had never set foot on a plantation, at a time when a good part of the reading public preferred not to think about it.

The story takes place on a plantation near Campos dos Goytacazes, in the interior of the state of Rio de Janeiro, at a time when Brazil, by law, had people who could be bought, sold and punished like objects. That real backdrop is what gives weight to Isaura's invented story.

Isaura is born enslaved, but she grows up inside the big house, not in the slave quarters. The mistress of the plantation raises her as if she were a daughter, teaches her to read, to speak another language, to play the piano and to behave like a young lady, a girl from a rich family. Isaura learns all of this quickly and becomes, in the eyes of those who know her, more refined than many white girls in the region.

That refinement is also a double-edged sword. It brings Isaura closer, in the mind of the 1875 reader, to the heroine of an ordinary novel, and it is that same refinement that will awaken the sick desire of her future owner. Education, in this novel, does not set anyone free: it makes the cage prettier, but it is still a cage.

Physically, Isaura is described as nearly white, with delicate features, which in the logic of the book heightens the sympathy of the reader of the time. It is a detail that comes back strongly in the critique section further on, because it says a lot about who this kind of abolitionist novel was speaking to.

Isaura's mother was enslaved on the same plantation. Her father is Miguel, a Portuguese man who worked there as an overseer, the employee responsible for watching over and driving the work of enslaved people in the fields. From that relationship, marked by all the inequality of power between a free overseer and an enslaved woman, Isaura is born.

Over the course of the story, Miguel tries to buy his daughter's manumission, the act that would give her legal freedom. He is no longer poor as he once was, and he saves money for this negotiation, but he runs into the refusal of the plantation's master, who has no interest at all in letting Isaura go.

This is one of the book's first signs that, under slavery, neither money nor kinship guaranteed anything: a person's freedom depended entirely on the will of whoever owned them as property. Miguel returns to this request at other moments in the story, and each refusal makes it clearer that the bond between father and daughter carried no weight at all before the law of the time.