Projects & Studies Log

The Slum/O Cortiço (1890), by Aluísio Azevedo, is one of the most brutal portraits of Brazil's socioeconomic formation. Beyond merely describing an environment, the novel stands as a powerful critique of the power structures of 19th-century Brazil, exposing how the nation-building project was constructed upon the systematic exploitation of marginalized bodies and territories. The naturalist narrative, with its relentless determinism, serves as a lens to reveal the inner workings of savage capitalism, patriarchy, and racism, which do not operate in isolation but in destructive synergy.

At the center of this machinery is the relationship between João Romão and Bertoleza, a microcosm of the country's foundational violence. The rise of the avaricious Portuguese immigrant is built upon the unpaid labor and constant surveillance of the enslaved Black woman. Bertoleza is not a helper, but the initial productive foundation, whose body and toil are appropriated as a natural resource. The false promise of manumission and marriage symbolizes the perverse mechanism of an unpayable debt, which perpetuates servitude under the illusion of mobility. The moral climax of the work is the moment this logic reaches its paroxysm: in seeking to ascend to the white bourgeoisie, João Romão must erase his exploitative origins. Bertoleza, from a financial asset, becomes a social liability and is discarded, handed over to the slave hunters. Her suicide is the tragic confirmation that, for the logic of capital he represents, her existence was always "nothing." This dynamic makes explicit how the nascent national wealth fed on slave labor only to later try to exclude that same population from the narrative of progress.

Azevedo's critique, however, is multifaceted and also targets the hypocritical moral codes governing private life, especially that of women. It is here that the contrasting trajectories of Pombinha and Rita Baiana become paradigmatic. Pombinha, the "flower of the tenement," is raised with the bourgeois ideal of purity and submission, a pedestal that is, in reality, a cage repressing her physical and psychological development. The visit to the prostitute Léonie, orchestrated by her own mother, unveils the cynicism of this system: to achieve the socially accepted end of an "honorable" marriage, the most "impure" means are valid. For Pombinha, however, the so-called "fall" is not a condemnation but an awakening and a form of subversion. Freeing herself from her husband's yoke and pursuing an independent life is her ultimate act of agency. Her "perversion" thus becomes a tool for liberation from suffocating puritanism.

In radical contrast, Rita Baiana is born, in the social imagination of the work, already stereotyped. Her exuberant sexuality is not seen as an achievement or a transgression, but as a "natural" attribute of her race and social condition. While Pombinha's transformation is a psychological journey with contours of rebellion, Rita is constantly animalized and treated as a force of nature, an object of desire that destabilizes the masculine order (as seen in Jerônimo's ruin). This contrast reveals society's double standard: the sexuality of a white woman is a moral battleground, while that of a Black woman is pre-destined and naturalized, robbed of complexity and agency. Both are victims, but of distinct mechanisms of oppression: one through class repression, the other through racist animalization.

Finally, the tenement itself as a collective character completes this anatomy of exploitation. Its description as a living organism that grows, sucks in, and expels individuals is the ultimate metaphor for the economic system. The residents (Portuguese immigrants, washerwomen, etc.) are consumed by João Romão's profit-driven logic, who rents out filthy cubicles and feeds on their misery. The promiscuity and violence that erupt there are not random, but a direct result of the dehumanizing conditions imposed by capital. Miranda's townhouse, with its plots of adultery and ambition disguised behind lace curtains, shows that the bourgeois "order" is as corrupt and driven by instincts as the disorder of the tenement; only its trappings are different.

It is concluded, therefore, that O Cortiço is much more than a depiction of customs. It is a fierce diagnosis of a society sick at its root. Azevedo uses the tools of Naturalism (environmental determinism, zoomorphization, the pathologization of behavior) not to simply record, but to accuse. He shows how the Brazilian modernity project was consolidated upon the inseparable triad: the exploitation of class (in the tenement), of gender (in the women's trajectories), and of race (in the figure of Bertoleza and the representation of Rita). The work's disturbing relevance lies precisely in this denunciation: more than a century later, the mechanisms of dehumanization and disposal by class, race, and gender, albeit in new guises, continue to operate at the heart of our social structures. The novel's power lies in forcing us to confront, without romanticism, the often bloody foundations upon which we stand.