Summary
In the first appearance of the protagonist of Dom Casmurro, Capitu has simple ‘cloth shoes’ sewn by herself. In this little description by Machado, a whole world is hidden, in the same way that in each garment, costumes and props of the characters hide literary games – the games of light, shadow and irony that can be seen in the novel.
Through the descriptions of the garments, it is possible to perceive the first steps towards global capitalist expansion at the end of the nineteenth century, when consumer society was still forming. This book gives insight into Brazilian society in transition at the end of the nineteenth century, as observed by Machado de Assis.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fashion and Literature
- Chapter 2 Society and Fashion in the Nineteenth Century: The Ironic Game in Dom Casmurro
- Chapter 3 Machado de Assis and Dom Casmurro
- Final Considerations
- Bibliography
- Index
Figures
Figure 4Printout depicting d. Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, and his entourage in Pompeii, on 16 April 1888. Reproduced with permission from Casa Geyer – Museu Imperial/Ibram/MinC/nº 07/2020. Imperial museum. Petrópolis Historical Museum ←xi | xii→Collection. Historical Archive – Iconography (MHP). Anonym. Notation: MII-145
←xii | xiii→Introduction
Fashion is a phenomenon that can be understood as a form of individual expression in society. As a social phenomenon, it is able to expose the profound, everyday changes of individuals, of social groups in which individuals are inserted, and of the various societies. The thorough observation of the cultural objects created by individuals, including fashion, allows us to perceive social changes, be they surface or deep.
Powerful fashion images are interchanged throughout the timeline of human history. Objects from the past jump into the present, and here they can remain for a few weeks, months, or years. Someone who lived their youth in the 1980s and now experiences the period’s fashion being revived in the first decades of the twenty-first century will feel the effects of this merger between the old and the new.
The young Millennial experiences the 1980s through the period’s revival in the fashion of his youth, and what he perceives as new and innovative will not have the same meaning for generation X, who wore it in their own youth. This ‘new’ is new to the young Millennial, and he believes he is wearing something innovative. This process of revival – rereading, inspiration, or whatever else you might call it – has a burden of resignification that imposes different perspectives, different sensations, and different conjunctures which modify any individual experience. This illusory autonomy of fashion is commanded by numerous factors: political, social, economic, and cultural, affecting, at different levels, all individuals who need to dress themselves daily.
What power is this? Fashion has the power to make the individual feel renewed, and to enable his remembrance of the past through its movement. Fashion can make someone feel sensual, intelligent, modern, dynamic, professional, traditionalist, outdated (old-fashioned), cult, engaged, strong, delicate, transparent, and so many other adjectives that can emerge from a certain look, a certain fashion experience. Experiencing fashion will always ←1 | 2→instigate sensations, and wearing a new outfit always provokes changes, sometimes so subtle that the wearer is the last to notice them.
From fashion emanate two great powers that announce its state of constant instability and ambivalence: the power of expression and the power of denunciation. The first is related to fashion experiences with which the individual seeks to be/express themselves, feeding their desires, their fears, their neuroses, and their hopes, in garment compositions that reveal their true faces. The second one is related to the things this individual does not intend, but does express through fashion; to those things which are visible in his daily image, but not under his control; and to the subliminal message transmitted through his garment. These two great powers derived from fashion can be observed in various environments, real or imaginary, such as in the fictional field of literature.
For this study, the literary novel Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis, is analysed through the lenses of fashion. The master’s dissertation entitled ‘Realistic records of fashion as part of the ironic game in Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis’ was defended by me in 2007 and later published in book format in 2010, under the title Fashion and Irony in Dom Casmurro, by Editora Alameda. This version now presented has been compiled and revised by me. A few words from nineteenth- and twentieth-century excerpts have had their spelling updated for the reader’s sake. The images used in the original dissertation text and in the book’s first edition were changed with the intention of favouring images published in nineteenth-century Brazilian sources.
In the novel, those two powers of fashion work to inform the characters: not only through the suppositions their attire leads us to make, but also through that which can be manipulated by the author, aiming to gather as many elements as possible in a narrative strategy created to favour coherence in the literary work’s scenic imagery.
Details
- Pages
- XIV, 176
- Year
- 2021
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781800790100
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781800790117
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781800790124
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781789979725
- DOI
- 10.3726/b17620
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2021 (March)
- Published
- Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2021. XIV, 176 pp., 1 fig. col., 13 fig. b/w.
