Vulnerability, Resistance, and the Street in the Work of Machado de Assis

Abstract

Few authors from Brazil explore the concepts of risk and vulnerability like the writer Machado de Assis. In particular, street scenes in Machado’s work reveal aspects of vulnerability that may not be readily acknowledged or understood. Machado’s fictional representations of the street expose inequalities correlating to both race and gender, failures by the state to ensure public security for all, and limits to human agency. A study of the conditions of vulnerability that are uniquely manifest in the streets of Machado’s fiction elucidates our understanding of social organization in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.