Letters, slaves and women: three versions of a same trope

Abstract

This paper intends to study and explain a literary trope – a domestic slave as the bearer of a love letter – and its modifications in three nineteenth-century Brazilian works, namely: Rosa (1849), b y Joaquim M anuel de Macedo; O demônio familiar (1857), by José de Alencar; and, last, Iaiá Garcia (1878), by Machado de Assis. By using a slave as t he bearer of a love letter, these writers discuss, in different ways, all historically determined, the same social problem, which concerns patriarchal authority and its dissolution throughout nineteenth-century.