In Pai contra Mãe, author Joaquim Machado de Assis suggests to readers that Cándido Neves captured and killed mulata Arminda because she threatened his advancement in the slaveowner-dominated patriarchal hierarchy of nineteenth-century Brazil. By ambiguously describing Cándido’s racial background, Machado de Assis causes one to contemplate that Cándido asserted dominance over Arminda by violently denying his mixed roots in killing her. Furthermore, one notes that Cándido focused his violent domination of Arminda’s womb in terms of religion, key to maintaining order in assuring slave regeneration. Together, Cándido’s own overlapping racial identities, implied by Machado de Assis and embodied by Arminda, and Arminda’s vociferous resistance to…show more content… These challenges and confusions caused Cándido to marginalize Arminda and suppress any possibility of his own deviance from white male patriarchal norms.
Intriguingly, Machado de Assis uses suggestive yet vague language to describe Cándido’s racial background, prompting readers to recognize that Cándido likely has mixed racial roots, but values his perceptible white origins over the black and/or indigenous blood that Arminda possesses. The author alerts readers to but does not define Cándido’s racial identity. Machado de Assis mentions that “even [the family’s] names-Clara, Neves, Cándido [were] all about whiteness and purity” and that, “blinded by necessity [as] a faithful servant doing an errand for his master,” Cándido grabbed free people of color, whose relatives beat him “black and blue.” Machado de Assis does not explicitly state that Cándido was white, black, indigenous, pardo or mulato. Nevertheless, his description of Cándido as an individual who did physical work amongst slaves in service to Arminda’s white master Tolosa, causes readers to believe that Cándido may have…show more content… Arminda fought to birth her child as Cándido dragged her along the cobblestones of Goldsmith Street while Cándido reluctantly acquiesced to Aunt Mónica’s demand that the Neves family send his baby boy to the local convent that had the resources necessary to raise his son. However, as Cándido dragged Arminda to her miscarriage, Machado de Assis points out that Cándido and Arminda differed in their evocatively expressed religious motivations according to gendered emotions. Upon her seizure by Cándido, Arminda cried for the gentle “love of God” to help save her child from Cándido’s brute force while Arminda’s kicking and screaming against Cándido capturing her obstructed Cándido’s worship of the “sanctity of property.” In this heated scene, Cándido felt that Arminda’s likely default on her contract to give birth in Tolosa’s material interest threatened the chance that Tolosa would promote him to, say, a more advanced supervisory post. Conversely, Arminda demanded better and more gentle care from her superiors, Cándido and Tolosa, while defying capture, and felt that her underlying vocal ties to the aptly-named Catholic “Lady of Good Birth” would convince Cándido to free
