Un-servile Servants: Misfits of the Azorean Diaspora in Charles Expilly’s Le Brésil tel qu’il est (1862)

Focusing on the “problem” of domestic un-governability in mid-century Brazil, this essay discloses early stereotypes of white (Portuguese Azorean) servants as arrogant, lazy and self-interested. If, on one hand, such degrading stereotypes provided elite Brazilians with what Michael Pickering has called a “comfort of inflexibility,” on the other hand, these representations also shed light on the vulnerability of employers’ domestic authority and social-conflict management in post-colonial Brazil, particularly in the decades leading up to the abolition of slavery in 1888.

The [enslaved] negro women available at the hiring agencies are incapable of doing anything right; the [indentured] white servants refuse to work.Given this reality, here's my advice for those who might be looking to seek a fortune in Brazil: Don't even think of travelling if you can't afford to buy a well-domesticated slave.(Charles Expilly, Le   Brésil tel qu'il est 247) 1 I Despite the racially diverse spectrum of servants in historical records of colonial domestic life, blackness was a shared component of servitude in the Americas and worked to define the grounds of domestic service in many countries of the region."The association of domestic service with the lower end of the class/caste/color system, " Elizabeth Kuznesof has argued, intermingled domesticity with racial and social hierarchy, leading to "a loss of status for the occupation of domestic service" (22).By the same token, black servitude functioned within New World colonialism as a racial definer, emerging in the criollo elite's racialist discourse as the suitable occupation for the perceived inferior races.Servitude, after all, typecast blacks as lacking intelligence and skills, unfit for anything but attending to other people's personal needs-and, by implication, dealing with their "dirt." The racialization of servitude, besides contributing to the low social esteem accorded to domestic service and endorsing racist stereotypes, also set the tone for the extremely harsh and precarious working and living conditions affecting most domestic servants in the region.As Sandra Lauderdale Graham points out, "any servant might experience long hours of exhausting labor, damp quarters, inadequate diet, or the illness that generally characterized the life of the working poor" (7).
The conflation of blackness and domestic service was particularly prevalent within Brazilian colonial discourse, as Brazil comprised the largest constituency of slaves (almost 40% of all slaves traded to the Americas), and by implication the highest number of slaves and free Afro-descendent females in domestic service.Although servitude persisted in the national political and cultural imaginary as a proper occupation for black women [serviço de negras], its racial configuration nonetheless began to change in the 1850s upon the legal suspension of African slave traffic. 2 As the end of forced immigration of enslaved Africans brought about a growing scarcity and, therefore, a rise in the value of commodified black bodies, household heads frequently saw in the hiring of "criadas" (free servants) a new solution that preserved the colonial culture of domestic servitude and privilege.Poor white Brazilian women and former slaves were thus sought after as alternative suppliers of the domestic labor force.Additionally, white European immigrants figured in the public records as an alternative source of house labor.Thousands of impoverished women from Germany and Portugal, in particular from the northern region of Minho and the Azores, headed across the Atlantic from the 1850s onward under the spell of misleading advertisements casting Brazil as a sort of tropical Promised Land.Not surprisingly, however, given the country's historical absence of upward mobility for the lower economic classes, and above all due to the conflation of black slavery and servitude, these immigrants' dreams of social mobility seldom came true.
My paper proposes to analyze race and domestic servitude in nineteenth-century Brazil, and in particular the pivotal role played by white Azorean maids, through an especially paradigmatic travel narrative of the period: the French merchant Charles Expilly's Le Brésil tel qu'il est [Brazil as It Is] (1862).It is not my intention to address the white European governesses who entered the elite domestic scene as a symbol of ascendancy among the emerging nobility in the aftermath of Brazil's independence.The Azorean servants under scrutiny here were largely uneducated, extremely poor, and as previously noted, employed as surrogate suppliers of the domestic labor primarily associated with black slaves.I am particularly interested in examining Expilly's version of the conflicts between employers and immigrant maids generated by such a deceptive association of servitude and slavery.According to Expilly, the cross-social/national tensions in mid-nineteenth century Brazilian households derived primarily from employers' resistance to go along with the changes in the work relations imposed by free labor, as well as immigrant maids' refusal to bear the social status as well as to perform the house chores associated with black slaves.Without entirely questioning the validity of Expilly's rationale for the perceived problem of domestic un-governability, I contend that he problematically endorses the elite Brazilians' stereotype of the racially proud and arrogant immigrant servant, in particular their view of such qualities as inappropriate for the servile occupation.As recent historiography of domestic service has demonstrated, in fact, employers feared that the European maid's imagined sense of national and racial superiority would compromise the longestablished social hierarchy underlying their domestic authority.
If the Brazilian criollos contemplated the cultural benefits involved in attenuating the racial gap between servants and their family members by way of hiring the services of a white immigrant, records also reveal a "countering apprehension" that European servants would impose, and possibly instill among national servants, "modern" forms of work-related contracts (Graham  22).In addition to their presumptuous and insubordinate behavior, immigrant European workers, and domestic servants in particular, were frequently seen as greedy and self-interested, endorsing the mainstream ideal of docile servitude in a country where slavery paved the way for work relations and contracts.In fact, the circulation of stereotypes of immigrant maids was central to the preservation of what might be called the "docility ideal" in the second half of nineteenth century.However, such demeaning representations also shed light on the vulnerability of their employers' domestic authority and social-conflict management in post-colonial Brazil, particularly in the decades leading up to abolition in 1888.
Perhaps better than any other travel account of the period, Expilly's Le Brésil tel qu'il est exemplifies such domestic power anxieties, as the French traveler includes an extensive chapter, "Domestic Service-The White Slave Trade, " in which he addresses the nascent public consciousness of a "servant problem" in Brazil-that is, the dearth of well-domesticated servants in the nation's expanding cities. Due to his anti-slavery convinctions, Expilly builds his "servant problem" narrative around the stereotype of a tyrannical and indolent local elite, thereby endorsing his own and his French peers' "superior" humanitarian values concerning the life and working conditions of the socially/racially lowly.Expilly's abolitionist thought even leads him to provide a uniquely detailed picture of the then-emerging practice of indentured domestic servitude, propelled by clandestine Azorean immigration, and the ways in which this white form of bonded servitude overlapped with black slavery.However, Expilly's self-victimizing role as a patrão (employer) in the insubordinate servant drama that he narrates reveals, perhaps involuntarily, his alliance with the elite Brazilians in dealing with this emergent domestic crisis.Additionally, despite his efforts to relegate the genuinely-Brazilian "servant problem" to the vicious behavior and fraudulent businesses generated by the institution of slavery, Expilly ultimately blames his servants' un-servility, above all their "Azorean-ness, " for his predicament as head of household in the tropics.Allusions to Azorean women's "natural" penchant for vanity and laziness, combined with references to their darkness due to supposed ancestral miscegenation, constitute his Africanized caricature of the Azorean maid.
Since Expilly engages in a process of othering his maid through a racially inflected narrative of economic and moral destitution, I conclude that Azorean servants function in his travelogue as both a sign of his social/racial pedigree and a useful symbolic counterpart to his own self-portrait as a desirable immigrant in the New World.As he suggests in Le Brésil tel qu'il est, his interest in the topic of immigration sprang primarily from a necessity to defend himself and other French immigrants against the climate of xenophobia that followed Brazil's independence in 1822, and in particular against intolerance toward his main occupation in Brazil as an entrepreneur.According to several scholars, in fact, the fast-growing presence of immigrant businessmen in the face of Brazil's burgeoning commercial capitalism produced many instances of "urban nationalist hostility, " including pro-autonomy campaigns in favor of the nationalization of internal commercial activities (Alencastro and Renaux  309-10).In order to counter such an anti-immigration backlash (which liberal urban Brazilians themselves associated with the "less-enlightened" social sectors), Expilly defines the commercial trade between Europe (namely France) and Brazil as an antidote to the country's economic and cultural backwardness.Indeed, contrary to the selfish foreign adventurer or, worse, the clandestine immigrant, Expilly configures himself as the sort of humanitarian traveler-entrepreneur whom Mary Louise Pratt has identified as the "capitalist vangardist, " one who "reinvents America as backward and neglected, to encode its non-capitalist landscapes and societies as manifestly in need of the rationalized exploitation the Europeans bring" (148-8).At any rate, references to Brazil's aversion to, and ill treatment of, its immigrants (including, as we shall see, the scandalous business of "white slave trade") circulated in Europe in the 1850s and 1860s, spoiling the nation's international reputation and certainly the local elite's interest in attracting mass European immigration for at least two decades, or until the 1880s.

II
On the cover page of Le Brésil tel qu'il est, Charles Expilly includes the following quote: "In Brazil the system of political representation is a myth […] Public education is awful […] the country is demoralized" (qtd.from Mr Moura's speech-Deputies' Assembly of October 3, 1857).By selecting this quote on the ineptitude of the Brazilian ruling classes as the epigraph of his book, Charles Expilly sets the tone of his critical-or, in his preferred terms, "neutral" and "selfless"-portrait of the country.As Expilly writes in the preface to his book, his memoirs of his years in Brazil were not meant to please Brazilian political and diplomatic authorities, nor did Expilly endeavor to narrate the living conditions within Brazilian society so as to conform to the travelogue protocols imposed by most European emigration agents at the time-those false promoters of a "paradisiacal" version of Brazil designed to recruit and dispatch a cheap European labor force with which to supplant enslaved plantation workers.In fact, according to other testimonies from that time, the bilateral campaign in favor of the European laborers' exodus to the Brazilian plantations invested heavily on commissioned newspaper articles as well as books such as Charles Reybaud's Le Brésil (1856) or Charles Perret Gentil's Colonia Senador Vergueiro (1851), works that may have affected European readers' assessment of the authenticity of most mid-nineteenth century travel literature on Brazil (Davatz  238).In order to counter his readers' anticipated skepticism, Expilly not only claims for himself an ethical, disinterested commitment to Brazil's "reality;" he also alleges that he held a more privileged testimonial position than most of his contemporary foreign travelers.First of all, he had lived in Rio de Janeiro for several years (1852-1858).Additionally, his activities abroad as both a merchant, more specifically a manufacturer/seller of matches, and a dilettante writer, granted him a few trips to other regions of the country, as well as an acquaintance with people from different ethnic, regional and social origins, thereby "allowing me to examine Brazilian society in its deepest secrets.From work spaces to elegant ballrooms, from the sovereign to the courtier, the Portuguese to Brazilians […], the masters and the slaves are all equally familiar to me" (xiv).
Perhaps one of the passages that best reveals Expilly's "realist" pretentions as a travel narrator can be found in his preface to a subsequent book on Brazil, Les femmes et les moeurs du Brésil [Women and Customs in Brazil] (1863); according to him, this book was a mere "complement" to Le Brésil tel qu'il est (entirely focused on the Empire's capital city of Rio de Janeiro), meant to present his impressions on the Brazilian backlands.In this preface, Expilly explains that if, on one hand, Le Brésil tel qu'il est contributed "accurate descriptions and sincere judgments" (17) to the nineteenth century Brazilianist literature, on the other, it was not meant simply to produce an "arid and insipid monograph" (18).In a fashion common to other travel writers, as Edward Said's Orientalism reminds us, Expilly actually claims both a "factual and a fictional authority" for his narrative: although its content was grounded on hard facts, it relied on narrative devices to make these facts more dramatic and thus more palatable to a wider non-academic audience (Lisle 29).Expilly goes on to say that his intentions were less to "compile" officially released data on the Brazilian institutions than to provide a "psychological portrait" and a study of the "moral and religious conditions of the Brazilian people" (19).In other words, as he puts it, his unflattering moral portrayal of the country would capture "the masses' abject illiteracy, the whites' excessive arrogance, the clergymen's un-evangelical manners, and above all the harmful effects of slavery" (Le Brésil vi).Since natural as well as "precarious" urban environments also served him in demonstrating the Brazilians' deplorable moral state, Expilly's representation of Rio made repeated allusion to the excessive heat, catastrophic thunderstorms, and the hosts of annoying and frightening insects that plagued the capital, with an emphasis on the city's lack of basic sanitation services, dirtiness and fetid smells. 3s several travel scholars have already argued, however, the rationale for authenticity and epistemological authority common to a number of nineteenth-century travelogues failed to acknowledge the political "localizing strategies" involved in any practice of cross-cultural interpretation: "Every focus excludes, " James Clifford argues, and "[s]ome strategy of localization is inevitable if significantly different ways of life are to be represented" ( 19).In addition, despite Expilly's claims of his narrative's exceptional veracity and superior mimetic value, the fact remains that it was not the only instance of discontentment and criticism to be found in nineteenth-century travel literature on Brazil.Whereas past generations of travelers would have suffered restricted mobility, or worse, impediments to entering the country under Portuguese colonialist jurisdiction, the aftermath of Brazil's independence saw a sharp increase in the number of published travel narratives due to the gradual improvement of travel conditions and incentives.In her bibliographical survey of this boom in Brazilian travel literature, Barbara Stein views a number of mid-century accounts, in particular those written in the wake of the US Civil War, whose optimistic views of Brazil's agriculture, and above all its stable monarchy and slave economy, may have influenced the so-called "Confederate exodus to Latin America" (67).On the other hand, as Stein also points out, "less reassuring" accounts of Brazil, such as Expilly's strong convictions about slavery's deeply degenerative effect on Brazilian society, "merely continued a tradition of pessimism about Brazil generated by earlier visitors" (78).
As Claudia Andrade dos Santos has argued, this co-existence of favorable and critical/pessimistic sketches of national social life generated a number of "myths" as well as "contradictory theses" in the historiography of nineteenth-century Brazil-such as those regarding Brazil's racial relations and the social status of Afro-Brazilians, the contingency of the indigenous population in post-colonial Brazil, and finally the urban conditions of the country's main cities (n/p).If, according to dos Santos, Brazilian historians have finally begun to question the truth value previously associated with foreign travel literature, this does not mean that earlier readers abstained from criticizing the genre's mimetic function.Almost certainly due to its bleak perspective on Brazil's civilizing aspirations, Expilly's Le Brésil tel qu'il est was immediately challenged as a reliable historical document.In fact, several nineteenth-century Brazilian readers were quick to question the book's realism by citing the author's "anti-Brazilianism" (10) or, worse, his "negative predisposition toward the country" (9) due to his unsuccessful financial adventure in Brazil (Lacombe, "Expilly e o Brasil"). 4Insulted by the "abusive" observations they found in Expilly's book, important intellectuals that would emerge later, like sociologist Gilberto Freyre, described Expilly's text as "unfair, " "malicious, " and "caricaturesque, " an account barely "disguised as what nowadays some would call objectivity" (qtd. in Scoville 117).As a result, Le Brésil tel qu'il est was left out of the national canon of travel literature and, to this day, there is no translation of the book into Portuguese.Expilly acknowledged the negative reception his book suffered in Brazil, contrasting it to the relative popularity and numerous editions it received in France (a total of three editions over two years)."Serious [non-fictional] books, " he writes, "never enjoy the same good fortune of novels.They are targeted to a more enlightened, though smaller, public.In this sense, I feel genuinely proud to acknowledge the successful reception of Le Brésil tel qui'il est" (Mulheres e modos 17).
The "successful reception of Le Brésil tel qui'il est" and France's profitable market for travel writing may have encouraged Expilly to write and publish many other narratives on Brazil.Indeed, despite all the controversies surrounding his "anti-Brazilian" books, Expilly's record of publications certainly made him one of the most prolific nineteenth-century brasiliana writers. 5Among all the debasing aspects of Brazilian reality addressed in his books, I propose concentrating on his early observations of daily life in Rio as a middle-class householder, in particular his personal cross-cultural "misencounters" with domestic servants, and his reflections on the historical meanings and conditions of servitude under a slave-based regime.In painting a vivid "moral and psychological portrait" of Brazilians, on one hand, Expilly uses "real" cases of masterservant interactions as evidence of his thesis on the degenerative aspects of slavery.However, as previously argued, despite his initial intention to associate the "domestic servant problem" (that is, the lack of "reasonable servants") to their Luso-Brazilian employers' abusive authority, as well as the unscrupulous business of Rio's hiring agencies, Expilly nonetheless ends up including debasing stereotypes of both black and Azorean servants in his account.His frequent complaints about his former "stubbornly proud" and yet under-qualified servants, moreover, ultimately reveal his own idealization of humble servitude informed by an assumed "superior" (French) standard of housekeeping and cooking skills.

III
Le Brésil tel qu'il est includes a long chapter on personal disillusions with domestic servants/service in Brazil, in which Expilly first narrates his stressful encounters with costly and yet "stupid and vicious" (179) alugadas (rented black slaves) and later his illusory resolution to regain domestic peace by hiring the services of a young Azorean servant named Candida.According to the French author, the first problem encountered by someone seeking to hire the services of a domestic worker was lack of a labor force.As he argues, due to the maligning of domestic service directly associated with slavery, free(d) Afro-Brazilian women refused to work as servants."Instead of forging a bond with an honorable household" (171), he writes, these négresses libres "launch [ed]  themselves thoroughly and immodestly into the pleasures of [their] young age;" that is, they preferred either to rely on the "dirty money" obtained from prostitution and other suspicious street business, or simply to fall into vagabondage and other disorderly pursuits.As this passage on the Brazilian "servant problem" suggests, however, Expilly's main purpose in attacking slavery does not keep him from perpetuating derogatory images of Afro-Brazilian women.In the first place, he shares with the Brazilian elite the well-established notion of domestic service as a form of protection for poor women, and as a moral necessity for those, in Nara Milanich's words, "whose sex, class status, and age often rendered them inherently vulnerable to vice" (12).Under the "patriarchal tutelage of a father-master and a mistress-mother" (12), on the other hand, a maid was promised a symbolic gain in respect.
One may easily question Expilly's reference to "honorable households" within a system that institutionalized domestic slavery.As many feminist studies of the public/ private sphere split have already claimed, the institution of paid or forced domestic service by itself collapsed the bourgeois home ideal and its related images of caring motherhood. 6Expilly, in several passages, identifies the careless "unfeminine" housewife as a major character in the Brazilian domestic scene, with allusions both to her laziness and indifference to house responsibilities, as well as to her frequently abusive behavior toward her subordinates.In addition, one may also problematize the author's exclusive reference to free(d) Brazilian black females as potential domestic servants, since it ignores Rio's vast population of poor whites who in fact employed their skills in all manner of domestic work.Besides revealing the author's superficial, or at least selective, representation of Brazilian servitude, such a sizeable lapse in his knowledge can perhaps be explained by hegemonic representational practices that have consistently racialized menial occupations, as if blacks were not naturally fit to perform other more challenging and intellectually demanding tasks.As the French writer concludes, "it's only among male and female slaves […] that one may find domestic servants in Brazil" (171).
According to Expilly, another aspect of the "servant problem" in Brazil was the lack of qualified labor.Once again, a problem apparently generated by institutional vices and fraud is turned against Afro-Brazilian women as well.On the one hand, Expilly blames the scarcity of competent servants on unscrupulous slave owners who would send off their least valuable slaves to low-reputed slave rental agencies, thus making some profit over those slaves "who were too bad to be kept at home" (179).Such hiring agencies, although licensed, were not subject to public surveillance and therefore "failed to conduct themselves decently or deal in reliable servants" (Graham 19).In addition, Expilly blames the dearth of qualified servants on Brazilian masters' abusive authority that produced mentally as well as physically mutilated slaves.On the other hand, he also filters his notion of unreliable domestic service through the putative divide between "civilized" (white European) and "un-civilized" (black African) domesticity, which the French writer constantly employs in order to enforce his servants' stupidity, fanaticism, and improperness.For example, he ridicules superstitious black wet nurses, ultra-religious (Catholic) cooks who would refuse to kill "sacred" animals, and others whose precarious knowledge was reduced to "two or three recipes imported from Loanda or Tombouctou, but completely unknown to civilized stoves" (473).In addition to employing ridicule, Expilly also reinforces racial aversion by using numerous tropes of abjection in his bodily and moral depiction of his black servants.He mentions the unpleasant physiognomy of most blacks (60), including their threatening "beast-like" sounds and cries (195), and their hateful eyes, which gazed "with such steadiness they froze me" (194).In addition, Expilly expresses contempt for blacks' natural "dirtiness" and distasteful catinga, "that sui generis odor which all blacks exude" (75); and he worries about his female slaves' lack of pudeur (modesty), keeping close watch on them so as to inhibit their supposed penchant for depraved sexual encounters (194).
In order to distance himself and his family from the "polluted" presence of black slaves, Expilly decided to hire a white immigrant servant.As he explains, he became particularly disdainful of black servants after hiring a wet nurse, Julia-an "obedient-turned-tyrannical" servant who realized her "whimsical" demands would be fulfilled as long as she remained content and peacefully produced "healthy" milk (202).Although the French employer managed to tolerate his servant's whims generated by slavery's "mercenary" milk trade, he denied her any power over his household authority.In fact, Julia was sent back to her owner as soon as she refused to obey his orders by reminding him "[she] was employed as a wet nurse, not as a [do-all-the-work] servant" (194).Upon this demonstration of domestic un-governability, then, Expilly decided to replace Julia, and he was helped by the growing number of immigrant maids in Rio in the years following the suspension of African slave traffic.If even a black slave refused to be treated or considered as a servant, however, why would a young white woman subject herself to such a low esteemed occupation?"Are there white women so careless of their dignity, " wonders Expilly, "as to accept a job that black women consider degrading for themselves?" (209).The remaining pages of his chapter on domestic service in nineteenth-century Brazil are devoted to answering this question, as well as explaining how white servants were introduced into the Brazilian Empire-a historical fact that Expilly, emulating contemporaneous intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic, preferred to call "the white slave trade" (207).
Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze at length the nineteenth century transatlantic intellectual debate on the traffic of semi-slave immigrants, it is at least worth alluding to the culture of indentured servitude that co-existed with domestic slavery in the second half of nineteenth century. 7s revealed in the author's personal account, Expilly's Azorean maid, Candida, was a clandestine emigrant from Fayal Island-another victim of the commodification of young single women involving illicit agreements between ship captains, emigration agents, and most likely local consular employees.Deprived of the means to afford the considerable costs involved in legally leaving their home country, thousands of Azoreans had in fact resorted to clandestine means of departure. 8In addition, many former slave traders discovered clandestine emigration as a substitute for their now defunct business.As Expilly informs us, proletarian Azorean immigrants in 1850s and 1860s were sent to Brazil through the same agencies and even ships that in a not-so-remote past were used to trade and transport slaves from Africa.Once in Brazil, Azorean indentured servants were frequently subjected to cruel working conditions, including a harsh regime of captivity, that lasted until they had paid off the debt incurred in travel expenses, food and clothing. 9he terms of Expilly's contractual relationship with his Azorean maid did not differ from other indenture contracts of that time: Expilly covered the costs of Candida's transportation and other emigration services; as for the maid, she would have to stay under his tutelage until paying him back in house service.Yet, from the beginning, Candida rejected the living and working conditions imposed on a servant.According to Expilly, Candida was too "stubbornly proud" of her whiteness to associate herself with what was considered "negro women's work." According to the French author's biased notion of the moral character of the women from the Azores, such inflated race pride "pushed their [inherent] laziness, coquettishness, and authoritarianism beyond the limits of the acceptable" (238).As is clear from this and other passages in his chapter on domestic servants, what rendered Candida's "stubborn race pride" particularly reproachable to the French traveler's eyes was the threat it imposed on his authority as a patrão.By virtue of her whiteness only, he argues, Candida claimed the status of a "lady […] made to give orders and not to obey" (237), and therefore saw being assigned chores that in Brazil were considered slave work as something that was humiliating to her.According to Expilly, Candida also resisted being "corrected" by her patrões, and attempted to imitate her mistress in manners and clothing habits as an alternative means to social equality.
In addition to the long-established maligning and racial profiling of domestic service, other factors might account for Candida's seeming arrogance, such as the harsh and precarious working and living conditions affecting most servants regardless of legal status or race.Indeed, as noted above, the nature and conditions of European immigrants' work in domestic service, tobacco factories and coffee plantations offered little to distinguish them from African and Afro-descendent slaves.In fact, the economically and morally debasing lives of most immigrants in the aftermath of the suspension of the African slave trade reveals that these foreign laborers were not sent to Brazil primarily to "whiten" or civilize the nation.According to Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, in the 1950s, the ideal of civilization through white (European) immigration did not represent a priority for most plantation owners and traders, more interested as they were in solving the problem of the nation's deficient labor supply than in "improving" its social/moral state ("Proletários e escravos" 31).This vision of white immigrants as civilizers would only dominate the government's immigration policies a few decades later (in the 1880s), and would not assert itself strongly until the so-called Old Republican period (1890s through the 1920s).Regardless of the hegemonic view of the economic, racial and/or cultural benefits of white immigration, however, there have been thousands of cases of exploitation, impoverishment, as well as cultural and social conflicts surrounding the issue.In the mid-nineteenth century, employers' usual response to immigrants' complaints echoed Expilly's comments on his Azorean servant's penchant for luxurious clothing and food.In other words, these immigrants' demands for better working conditions, and for certain types of food and clothing that still were considered luxuries in pre-industrial Brazil, defined the grounds for the demeaning stereotype of European immigrants as "luxuriously voracious" (Alencastro and Renaux 301).
In order to gain the sympathy of his French peer readers, Expilly contrasts Candida's extreme poverty and dependence with the mainstream notion of immigrants' luxurious voracity and vanity.His first encounter with Candida took place in the cargo ship (ironically named Amizade, or Friendship) that had just brought her to Brazil, an overcrowded vessel "in awful disorder and incredibly filthy" (209).Candida was poorly attired, Expilly writes, and yet she demanded luxurious clothing from her new patrão, as if she imagined, "in her stupid pride, that she would do the house work in silk robe and varnished pumps!" (232).Expilly also disqualifies Candida's sense of racial superiority by likening her to his former black servants.First of all, he contrasts Candida's "whiteness pride" with the common nineteenth century European perception of the Azoreans as dark-skinned mulattos.In his brief visit to the Atlantic islands, for example, French writer François-René de Chateaubriand alludes to peasants as "half-naked, and bronzed by the sun, " and the women as "small and yellow-skinned like mulattoes" ("Voyage" N. pag.).In a similar fashion, Swedish sailor Johan Gustav Hebbe writes: "As one examines attentively the Azorean inhabitants, one notices that their physiognomy resembles that of their mixedrace ancestors.The climate has also generally affected their dark skin, eyes and hair" (311).Finally, in his A Trip to the Azores, M. Borges de F. Henriques also highlights Azoreans' swarthy physical appearance."In most cases, " he writes, "they are handsome, or rather lively and interesting, dark in complexion, and more resembling the daughters of the sunny south than those of the north" ( 23).
Perhaps influenced by some of these authors, Expilly also alludes to the Azorean sang créole (racially-mixed blood) in a long passage on "the deplorable state of the population from the two archipelagos (the Azores and Cape Verde)" ( 222).In La traite, l' émigration et la colonisation du Brésil [Slave Trade,  Emigration and Colonization in Brazil] (1865), he would reiterate his thesis on Azoreans' racial degeneration, which for him explained the English preference, reflected in British Caribbean immigration policies, for Madeiran over Azorean emigrants (77).For Expilly, besides "the fervorous Creole blood that inflames desire" and "the hot climate that invites laziness, " other important factors such as a lack of formal education (civilization) "contributed to the [Azorean] moral decline" (Le Brésil 221).Azorean women, Expilly writes, "[tended] to make rudely coquettish advances [typical of] non-cultivated natures lacking in solid principles" and also frequently engaged in "practices of a superstitious devotion" (221-22).Perhaps due to the Azores' liminal geo-political status (the westernmost point of the islands is almost halfway between Europe and America), and certainly for lack of geographical and historical information, Expilly portrayed the Azores by resorting to some of the landscape tropes common to the Romantic imaginary of the colonies.Such cultural bias also kept him from representing Azoreans as possessing the moral virtues consistent with hegemonic models of nineteenth-century whiteness.According to Luiz Felipe de Alencastro and Maria Luiza Renaux, Azorean immigrants were similarly perceived by the local elites, especially when such servants competed against mucamas (domestic slaves) for a share of the female labor market ("Caras e modos" 311). 10he outcome of Expilly's account of cultural misinformation and prejudice hardly comes as a surprise: Candida finally left the French author's house after having found a "protector" who paid for her debt and later forced her into prostitution.Although further research needs to be conducted before we can better grasp the full range of Azoreans' vocational activities in nineteenth century Rio, a few scholars have identified small-business ownership and employment as the most important occupations among young men.Since immigrant women faced far more restricted work options than men, they were primarily recruited as servants or prostitutes, and not uncommonly as both.In her study of female immigration and prostitution during the second half of nineteenth century, Lená Medeiros de Menezes notably examines the conflation of prostitution and certain "artistic" occupations culturally associated with French women: "[French] actresses, dancers and singers, " she writes, "often had to combine their stage performances with sexual favors to their customers" (235).Domestic service, like popular entertainment, has frequently been associated with prostitution.As Expilly writes: "It is part of the Brazilian tradition that wealthy men, and sometimes simple employees, seek to hire among recently arrived immigrants a young and joyful female companion who agrees to manage their small house and at the same time cheer up their monotonous existence" (210).According to Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, although both male and female Azoreans (among them children and adolescents) fell victim to the illicit traffic of clandestine immigration, Portuguese consuls in Brazil seemed more concerned about-and certainly more ashamed of-the work opportunities and conditions imposed on Azorean single women.Some of these consuls urged that the Portuguese authorities encourage feminine emigration only when they travelled in the company of their father or husband, because "in addition to all the dangers they are subject to when aboard on a ship surrounded by sailors (which is already immoral), other new risks await them on land, ones which are beyond my control and which dishonor all of us [Portuguese]" (qtd. in "Mulher no contexto da imigração" 655).
In sum, according to Expilly, the business of white semi-slave trade carried to Brazil the least qualified and respected working women from the Atlantic islands.In nineteenth-century Brazil, the term ilhoa, used to refer to an Azorean female, was also a synonym for prostitute.Other stereotypes conveying pride and arrogance, laziness and vanity, completed the unflattering portrait of the Azorean domestic servant.In fact, Expilly's depiction of his former maid Candida echoes the image of immigrant maids widely circulated in Brazilian literature and newspaper columns of the period.In his study on nineteenth century servants in Recife and Salvador, Maciel Henrique Carneiro da Silva has encountered jokes mocking the image of the Portuguese servant (most likely from the Azores) "whose body matured faster than her morality [and intelligence]" (113). 11Probably in response to such humiliating cultural stereotypes, hiring agencies frequently saw it necessary to take out newspaper advertisement stressing servants' moral virtues over their professional skills.An 1826 ad in Diário do Rio de Janeiro, for instance, announced that "[a]ny single gentleman seeking for a live-in maid from Portugal, free of any vices since she's no longer an immature child, please go to Lapa do Desterro Street" (qtd. in Barbosa 183).
In the unstable years between the end of the slave trade and abolition, degrading stereotypes no doubt provided certain Brazilians with what Michael Pickering has called a "comfort of inflexibility" ( 3).Yet such cultural biases also fixed feminine emigration, in particular unmarried, travelling female bodies, as an undesirable mode of femininity at a time when Brazilian intellectuals were also engaged in reconfiguring the national feminine ideal.In other words, the association between emigration and ex-patriation, or better yet "out-of-homeness, " ran counter to the ideal inspired by the nineteenth-century model of the "domestic woman" (Armstrong 96).As Amy Kaplan argues, the divide between foreign and domestic-"one which depends on the sense of the nation as a domestic space imbued with a sense of at-homeness" (581-2)-could nonetheless be deconstructed, provided the resident alien went through a process of domestication.Through such a process, Kaplan writes, "the home contains within itself those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed" (582).
According to Expilly, however, his Azorean maid obstinately resisted the imposed "taming" of the acculturation process.On the one hand, just like Expilly's former African maids, Candida lacked the virtues of "civilized" domesticity."Candida knew how to plow the soil, " writes Expilly, "but she had no clue about the culture and basic knowledge of cooking" (234).On the other hand, for the reasons mentioned above, she resisted "going through a process of domestication, " preferring to follow a path toward prostitution.As such, Candida could not be (re)incorporated into the home, and by implication could not assimilate the national culture.As May Bletz argues in her analysis of the imagery of women immigrants in the late nineteenth-century Brazilian Naturalist novels, the female immigrant is "inevitably trapped": As someone who has detached herself from home (understood as both nation and family), she can hardly be associated with the highly valued "cult of domesticity." At the same time, the configurations of "femininity" would not allow her to associate with the attributes of the ideal (male) immigrant (42).Perhaps as a consequence of such cultural entrapment, according to Bletz, there was a tendency among Naturalist writers to represent their immigrant characters as either insane or prostitutes.
Contrary to Expilly's account of the "un-domesticability" of Candida and her Azorean peers, however, Rio de Janeiro's census data of the period in fact reveals a high number of female immigrants working as domestic servants (most of them identified as Portuguese).According to Graham, [f]rom the 1860s domestic work became less and less the province of slaves.
Free Brazilian and immigrant women and former slaves combined with the remaining slaves to supply the demand for servants, so that already by 1872 free women accounted for nearly two-thirds of female domestics in Rio de Janeiro.( 8) Oblivious to the growing employment of immigrant labor in housework, perhaps, Expilly insists on his caricaturesque representation of Candida, and even argues that only through a personal network with Brazilians or well-established Portuguese should a foreign householder be able to hire a "reasonable servant." 12 IV Expilly's narration of the horrors of his domestic life in the tropics reaches its climax on one specific day when he finds his maid Candida crouched in a monkey-like fashion, playing with his little daughter with one hand while killing lice from her own hair with the other.Faced with her employer's fear of contamination, Candida reacts with indifference, or perhaps feigned indifference, as if she were unable to grasp his verbal and bodily signs of shock and disgust.She even offers to transfer some of the lice in her hair to the author's wife's in a sign of solidarity, explaining that in her home island a woman deprived of lice would be seen as unhealthy (161).Another debatable misunderstanding happens when Expilly surprises Candida in his wife's robe and perfume, mimicking a lady's coquettish gestures and expressions (241).Again, the Azorean maid reacts with the calm indifference of someone acting in her or his own right.Perhaps, as in Expilly's interpretation, Candida was claiming the status of a lady by symbolically rejecting the role of a Negro woman.Or perhaps she was performing an inversion of roles in order to highlight the cruelties of the Brazilian domestic pecking order.What her real intentions were, we certainly do not know.
According to Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, the lives of poor free women in nineteenth-century Brazil remain a riddle for today's historians.This historical enigma is even more critical in the case of women immigrants.As Nizza da Silva argues, the cultural archives of nineteenth-century Brazil fail to acknowledge women's ethnic diversity (653).Another analytical obstacle is determining the actual number of immigrants from the Azores to Brazil, especially because "clandestine emigration was the deepest and most significant trademark of the history of Azorean emigration to Brazil in the nineteenth century" (Leite 62).The marginality of the Azorean maid within the field of immigration and Diaspora studies in Brazil is even more problematic in the face of an increase in scholarly research on the history and legacy of Azoreans and Azorean descendants, particularly in southern Brazil.According to João Leal, scholarship on the Azorean Diaspora in Brazil originated from a desire to recast the image of early Azorean immigration in the South-previously seen as a failed or unproductive experience when compared to German and Italian counterparts in the region.One may well wonder if such a restorative project would take an interest in including the histories of single immigrant women, most of them relegated to the least esteemed occupations of the Brazilian Empire: servants and prostitutes.
Given the scarcity of documentation, Expilly's Le Brésil tel qu'il est constitutes a valuable historical document of urban female immigration in postindependence Brazil.To this day, it is one of the few available records documenting the reality of women immigrants, and is one that brings to the fore the preponderance of Azorean women in domestic service.Expilly not only provides a general collective account of these poor women's experience, but also grants at least one of them a name and subjectivity, not to mention a life worth narrating.As Ileana Rodriguez notes, "this act of intrusion of subaltern humanity shifts the category of the 'other' into 'self '" (364).No matter how truthfully Expilly's travelogue aims to make of Candida a "paradigm of humanity" (364), however, as a maid Candida enters the narrative to serve the author, more than to be served.Literary servants, writes Bruce Robbins, are "taken up with the performance of peremptory aesthetic duties" (6); and just like any "real" servant, they function as signs-"signs of their masters' status" (15).
Besides assuring the author's place in the Brazilian "servant-keeping" class, Candida also works for him to promote his cultural superiority, specifically his unique role as a civilized, non-abusive patrão.Despite the fact that his version of domestic service in Brazil is impregnated with tropes of power anxiety, Expilly endeavors to distance himself from the local elite's culture of servitude; one which, as he insists, is marked by a backward "logic of slavery" (Expilly, Le Brésil 150).As previously stated, slavery and indentured servitude in Expilly's narrative constitute recurrent signs of Brazil's backwardness and lack of civilization.By implication, they also emerge as important markers of difference between Expilly's own "civilized" ethical principles and his Brazilian counterparts' "primitive" use of tyranny and brutality to secure obedience and loyalty from their servants.Speaking from a culturally and politically hegemonic standpoint, Expilly thus uses slavery and other forms of bonded servitude to locate Brazilians not only "elsewhere, " but also "back in time" (Lisle 43).His journey to and in Brazil allows him not only geographical mobility, but also the opportunity to "[look] back upon the linear grand narrative of Western history" and to show "how others are always scrambling up the ladder of modernization" (43).It is therefore within the context of liberal Europe's opposition to slavery, in a period already dominated by free labor, that we need to examine Expilly's narration of his personal frustrations as a patrão in the tropics, or his unfortunate encounters with too proud, un-servile rented slaves or indentured immigrant servants.In other words his "misencounters" with his maids, as he puts it, derive from the cultural and temporal gap that he experiences as a modern patrão trying in vain to exercise authority over servants who, according to him, would obey him only under the threat or exercise of physical punishment.
As an impoverished clandestine maid, Candida also functions in the narrative as a social counterpart to Expilly's self-representation as a model immigrant.As previously said, as a merchant himself, Expilly had to contend personally with the derogatory image of immigrants as morally suspect adventurers lacking in nationalist sentiment.According to him, the word "foreigner" held a derogatory meaning for specific circles of the Brazilian elite: "They resent us for coming to Brazil to build up a fortune, and afterwards, our pockets overflowing, for returning to Europe to live a comfortable and tranquil life" (124).In his writings, Expilly thus countered widespread, sometimes hostile xenophobia by proposing a taxonomy in which immigrants were divided by race/nationality and commended for their historical contributions to remedy Brazilian backwardness.In La traite, l' émigration, et la colonization du Brésil, he argued that French immigrants embodied the best qualities of the Swiss and the Scandinavian combined: "just like the mountaineers from the Alps, the French leave their own country already committed to return; however, their inherent mobility blends so well with their exploratory nature that they also feel compelled to assimilate the new environment, or else be assimilated by it" (70-1).Expilly's contention that French immigrants combined bondage to their home culture with a natural faculty for assimilation was certainly aimed at rendering himself immune to standard xenophobia.Even those immigrants who, once they made their fortune, relinquished life in the tropics, Expilly argues in Le Brésil tel qu'il est, left behind "precious seeds, which might one day flourish into civilization if not damaged by slavery institution" (73).Not surprisingly, these "precious seeds" were precisely associated with commercial activities between Brazil and Europe."Business is a precious tool of progress, an intelligent channel of enlightenment, " he writes."It is through such a contact with Europeans, in sum, that [Brazilians] will feel shame and indignity at their own moral decadence" (123). 13uch an "enlightening" contact with Europeans did not include the Portuguese, much less those from the "Africanized" Azorean Islands.Indeed, despite the fact that a high number of Portuguese immigrants devoted themselves to mercantile activities in the Brazilian Empire, in Expilly's as well as in several other French travelogues, the Portuguese played the roles of "bad former colonizers, " frequently blamed for Brazilians' "superstitions, selfish prejudices, oppression, stagnation, or, better yet, lack of vision and intelligence" (Lisboa 279).As revealed in a series of newspaper articles from the mid-1850s, "Os estrangeiros no Brasil" ["Foreigners in Brazil"], signed by a Belgian immigrant, incest imagery was also commonly invoked to reinforce a preference for Northern and Central Europeans (over the Portuguese) as ideal partners for the improvement of the Brazilian race: "[The formers'] seeds are healthy, vigorous, and their moral and physical character is essentially different from the Luso-Brazilian nature" (Paridant 1).The fact that these articles circulated in Brazil by means of Rio's popular newspaper, Correio Mercantil, is also indicative of a similar propensity among several members of the Brazilian elite to disassociate the Portuguese from the moral/physical attributes of hegemonic whiteness.According to Alencastro and Renaux, as a consequence of their daily contact with Portuguese immigrants' vagabondage, criminality, prostitution and servitude, several white Brazilians began to doubt the social and racial purity of their own ancestors ("Caras e modos" 311-12).
As I have suggested in this paper, Expilly's portrait of poor, undocumented Azorean immigrants reveals profound racial prejudice and genderrelated preconceptions that added nuances to the general bias against the Portuguese.Toward the end of his chapter on domestic service in Brazil, Expilly recounts how he accidentally ran into Candida as he walked through Rio's prostitution zone.Only six months had passed since her indenture or debt was transferred to another patrão, and yet, to the author's surprise, she had already "fallen so low" (217).Although expressing compassion for his former maid, his stated purpose in narrating their last encounter was to reiterate his (biased) criticism of Candida's insane ambition, and above all to belittle her sense of racial superiority in a country where slavery and servitude were all too often conflated: "These two qualities alone lead to a vicious life; vice produces disease, and afterwards…death" (217).His sympathy for his fallen maid, in other words, did not translate into solidarity.For Expilly, after all, Candida was little more than an arrogant servant whose ultimate fault was to question his authority and worse, to deny herself the benefits of serving a civilized, and civilizing, patrão.
order to strengthen and/or expand Portugal's imperialist frontiers.Contrary to these assisted colonial Azorean settlements that encouraged the migration of married couples, in the mid to late-nineteenth century the majority of emigrants from the Atlantic islands were single, mostly single males.In addition, while several were allocated to work in sugar and coffee plantations, the majority of Azorean emigrants settled in major cities, especially Rio de Janeiro and Recife. 10In the same study, Alencastro and Renaux include a revealing newspaper crônica of the local perception of the Portuguese "race" as white and yet disassociated from hegemonic whiteness.The article in question, significantly titled "A Comparison between the Africans and the Portuguese" reads as follows: "Although they are physically different, when it comes to comparing the morality of their actions the Africans are often superior […] The Africans plow our fields (though against their will) [while] the Portuguese destroy our industry and commerce […].The Africans who came to Brazil may have been the children of established families, since there still survives the barbaric tradition of keeping war slaves.The Portuguese are usually criminals, road thieves, gang leaders, counterfeiters; in sum, galegos suited to what we here call negro cangueiro (a Black carrier of heavy loads)" (310).In other words, because of their "wicked" behavior (engaged in criminality and economic greed, but also employment in racialized occupations), the Portuguese were often equated with or even considered inferior to blacks.Studies such as the one by Matthew Fry Jacobson or Jeffrey Lesser focus precisely on the vicissitudes of whiteness construction vis-à-vis immigration policies and cultural representations.As Lesser argues, "'whiteness' remained one important component for inclusion in the Brazilian 'race, ' but what it meant to be 'white' shifted markedly between 1850 and 1950" (4).
11 Da Silva quotes the following joke from Diário de Pernambuco (March 4, 1861): "Mrs.X… hires a new servant, a Portuguese woman whose body matured faster than her morality."My daughter, " she says to her maid, "you will earn four cruzados novos a month, and on top of your salary I will also dress you." The following morning, Mrs. X… calls on her new servant, but she doesn't show up or answer; she calls on her again and all remains in silence.The lady impatiently decides to track her servant down."What happened Catharina; didn't you hear I was calling you?" "Yes, Milady, of course I heard!" the stupid servant promptly answered, opening up her arms."However, Milady told me you would dress me.I was waiting to be dressed" (113).
12 Good servants, as Expilly writes, "[…] only speak when they are spoken to, they obey at [our] first signal-no matter the nature of the order they receive-they slip through the house like a shadow, without disturbing any of the furniture.With eyes that don't see anything, ears that hear nothing, bare feet that seem like they are padded, they can provide a silent, discreet service full of charm and mystery" (187). 13As Mary Louise Pratt has already argued, however, such a representation of contact between Europe and "its peripheries" as a one-way colonizing or civilizing act actually hides "the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis-beginning, perhaps, with the latter's obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself.Travel writing, among other institutions, is heavily organized in the service of that imperative" (6).