The (Lack of) Feeling of What Happens: Machado de Assis' "Dom Casmurro"

Abstract

Abstract: This essay analyzes Dom Casmurro in the perspective of contemporary theories about feelings and emotions. Feelings like hunger, pain, and joy are basic forms of human self-awareness that must be encoded continuously into culturally communicative emotions. Emotions reach out into the world but can never connect to it directly. In its sketch of the role played by the arts (texts, plays, opera) as both personally and culturally relevant mediators in this process, Dom Casmurro displays a peculiar kind of theoretical sophistication. Within this framework, a trivial story about jealousy turns into a complex, if unreconciled exploration of what Martha Nussbaum has called the intelligence of emotions.