TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

This essay closely examines the role played by the Crimean War in Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s 1900 novel Dom Casmurro. In portraying the narrator of the novel, Bento Santiago, nicknamed “Casmurro,” and his boyhood friend, Manduca, as quarreling over their preference in the 1854-56 conflict between Russia and an Anglo-French-Ottoman coalition, Machado delineates certain character traits in the two friends, differentiating the sympathetic Manduca, doomed or die young, and the dour, longer-lasting Casmurro. But Machado also comments on the global reach of the Crimean War (in which Brazil was neutral) and of the global canvas on which a Brazilian novelist of this era inevitably drew. Though the world was not as well-connected as it is today, these reverberations allow us to speak of a developing semi-global environment in the mid-nineteenth century. Given Machado’s own racial background, and the persistence of slavery and colonialism worldwide, examining the Crimean War reference in the novel can speak both to the narrative strategies within Dom Casmurro and to the novel’s wider sociopolitical applicability.