This essay discusses the theme Machado de Assis and the mulatto with a "greek soul". It will focus on Brazilian literary history, showing the aesthetic and ideological context of the Belle Époque in Brazil: Hellenism, Europeanism, scientific racism, miscegenation and ethnic prejudice. It will also show that the Machadean novel,Esaú e Jacó, published in 1904, can be interpreted as a dissimulated and subtle criticism by writer Machado de Assis of the ethnic prejudice of that period.
Machado de Assis; Criticism and Interpretation; Ethnic Prejudice