A BRIEF NEW READING OF THE CHARACTER HELENA AND THE BREACH IN ROMANTICISM

Abstract

This text proposes a brief new reading of the character Helena from Machado de Assis’s homonymous novel. It starts from João Hernesto Weber’s review (2008), going through the proposition and denunciation of the African Diaspora, according to Edimilson de Almeida Pereira (2021), to demonstrate that this novel, usually considered as belonging to the author’s romantic period, cannot be easily accommodated in this aesthetics of triumphant expression in the nineteenth century. The permanence of this narrative where critics have placed it survives mainly due to the nationalist character announced in critical texts by the author himself, and it becomes questionable when we look again, a little further in time, at the character Helena and her tensions in the slave-based society.

Keywords:
Helena; Machado de Assis; Placement of bodies; Romanticism