Mothers, orphans, and the Law of the Free Womb

In 1871, the Brazilian legislature passed the Rio Branco Law of the Free Womb, which aimed to abolish slavery gradually by mandating that all children born to slave mothers would henceforth be free, but only upon reaching the age of twenty-one. In their youth and adolescence the newborn children of slaves would be known as "ingênuos" and would occupy a new and ambiguous social status between slavery and freedom. This dissertation argues that the Law of the Free Womb was critically important in shaping not only the slavery debate, but also the rhetoric of freedom and citizenship in Brazil. The law helped define the themes of abolitionist propaganda and stood as a central point of reference in late nineteenth-century Brazilian literature. This dissertation proposes new readings of both major and lesser-known nineteenth-century Brazilian fictional works that take into account the philosophical and social problems introduced by the law and how they preoccupied Brazilian writers. By examining some popular motifs of nineteenth-century Brazilian literature--the virtuous mother, the roda dos expostos, and the abandoned orphan child--this dissertation argues that writers had difficulty envisioning how the children born to the newly freed womb could be incorporated into the nation. This project examines articles and cartoons from the popular press, dramatic works by authors like Arthur de Azevedo and Francisco Corrêa Vasques, as well as fiction by Machado de Assis, Aluísio Azevedo, Joaquim Macedo, and Bernardo Guimarães. It ends by considering how the nineteenth century figure of the "ingênuo" resonates in contemporary Brazilian culture, in works like Plínio Marcos's Uma Reportagem Maldita (Querô) and films like Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco and Ônibus 174. It is through close analysis of the intersection between legal and literary discourses in Brazil that this dissertation demonstrates a new context in which to study how black citizenship is portrayed elsewhere in the fiction of the Americas, particularly in the work of late nineteenth century writers of the United States such as Charles Chesnutt and Kate Chopin.