Júlia’s Maids

Abstract

Around 1906, in a little-known village in the state of Rio de Janeiro called Areal, an equally little-known lady, Amanda Augusta Fernandes, decided to brutally end her life with a double-barreled crossbow. In a chronicle titled, “Por que?” [“Why?”], writer Julia Lopes de Almeida (1863–1934) reveals the motive of the suicide, reproducing ipsis litteris the suicide note of the “unfortunate woman”: “I want to die because I can’t stand [my] maids” (Donas e donzellas 63). To be sure, in a historic period overwhelmed by many social, economic, and cultural changes that directly impacted domestic and family life, news of a middle-class lady’s suicide caused by the “unbearable” presence of her domestic servants would have been shocking to several Brazilian elite families. In the first place, the end of slavery in 1888 shattered the “protection and obedience” cross-racial agreement that had hitherto shaped, and at times pacified, the master and the slave liaison in the colonial and nineteenth-century slave regimes. Additionally, although the masters (or, even better, the patroes, as they were properly called after the abolition of slavery) managed to establish other mechanisms to control their maids, such as requiring references from previous employers and health examinations, they remained skeptical toward these mechanisms’ power to entail obedient and loyal servitude.