Marriage, business and wills in “Luís Soares”, by Machado de Assis: a reading proposal

Abstract

The short story “Luís Soares” narrates the story of a bankrupt boy who tries to approach an uncle aiming at becoming his heir. Initially published on the Jornal das Famílias, in January 1869, Machado de Assis collected “Luís Soares” to take part on the Contos Fluminenses, a collection that is all about the theme love, always associated to marriage, usually by one’s interest and with pretty upsetting results to women. In this study, of bibliographical-analytical purpose, dedicated to the exam of the short story “Luís Soares”, we call the attention to the way Machado mobilizes a discussion on marriage and masculine and feminine expectations and the idea of male-controlled inviolability from a narrator who only apparently adheres to the world presented by Soares. For such, the study is organized in three sections: on the first, we reflect on the positioning of the narrator in the short story; on the second, we discuss the way Machado uses the characters’ opposition for the construction of his protagonists with the objective of unveiling masculine and feminine expectations towards marriage; on the third, we aim at reflecting about how the rupture happens with the male dominant desires through an agent who is external to the family, but also responsible for the patriarchal  structure maintenance. The short story points to important aspects of the social conformation of marriage in the eighties of Brazil, confronting the female (which preserved the idea of personal election) and the male (centered on personal and / or economic interests) expectations and the idea of manorial inviolability.