The aim of this article was to analyze the dialogical relationship between Alphonse Bué’s eugenics described in his work “Le nez, l’être dévoilé par sa forme” (1872) and the literary narrative of Machado de Assis, based on his short story “O segredo do Bonzo” (1882). According to the dialogical perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin, it was found that Machado criticized, through satires and parodies, the eugenic bias of psychiatry which sought, by means of a supposed morphology of apelike features — based on the nose, in the case of Alphonse Bué —, the etiology of social behavior.
Eugenics; racism; Alphonse Bué; Machado de Assis