| Summary: | The novel La familia del Comendador (1854), written by Juana Paula Manso, leads the reader to the stunning landscape of the nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. However, it also denounces the conflicts faced by the members of a wealthy family in Engenho de Macacu and Chácara de Botafogo. Through a seemingly innocent love story, the novel unmasks the painful face of slavery and reveals the racism rooted in the nineteenth-century Brazilian society. In this paper, we aim to analyze the episodes of physical violence in the novel, employing the narrator and the character as the analytical categories. Our theoretical framework is based on the studies of Ginzburg (2012, 2013), in the field of Literature and Violence. In the investigated excerpts, we demonstrate that the motives behind the pictures of violence painted in the novel can be characterized as authoritarian and racist.
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