Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre's Oeuvre

Author(s): Jeffrey D. Needell

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 51-77
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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 Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity in the Origins of
Gilberto Freyre's Oeuvre

JEFFREY D. NEEDELL

THIS STUDY OF THE SEMINAL WORK of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) involves both
biography and intellectual history and suggests the way in which this Brazilian
intellectual, like so many colonial and postcolonial thinkers of the interwar era,
adapted elements of European and American thought and experience to create a
new understanding of his national culture.
In Freyre's case, biography is especially central. Much of his creation of a
national identity was an attempt to find his own identity and reconcile conflicts
within himself. Readers will find that his personal conflicts touched on issues of
race, gender, sexuality, and modernity in ways suggestive for other places and
other people. Freyre sought to understand his own country through a perspective
and comparisons framed by his experiences in the United States during 1918-
1922 and 1931, particularly with regard to the heritage of plantation slavery. In
that understanding, he came to employ an image of hierarchical racial domina-
tion that was explicitly gendered. Moreover, I will argue that his embrace of a
patriarchal, racial domination as essential to the Brazilian tradition was also a
personal identification with seigneurial heterosexuality toward women of color
that allowed him to resolve ambiguities in his own sexual orientation. Finally, I will
demonstrate that his attachment to a patriarchal planter mythology and espousal
of political authoritarianism was a reaction against the dramatic, "modern"
changes threatening the constructed world of his childhood, a reaction in which
anti-Semitism played a key symbolic role.
There are, of course, more specific justifications for studying the origins of
Freyre's work. Aside from his exemplary value in this generation of Latin
American intellectuals, a generation noted for its attempt to rehabilitate native
and creole peoples and national and regional cultural traditions, Freyre has a
I note with gratitude the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities in
1990-1991, which made possible much of the research on which this study is based. I also wish to
acknowledge the constructive criticism of the AHR's anonymous readers. Part of this study derives
from a longer paper delivered at the American Historical Association annual meeting, December
1992, Washington, D.C. A substantially revised paper was given at the meeting organized by Thomas
Cohen of the Oliveira Lima Library, Catholic University of America, "Reflections on Culture and
Ideology in the Americas: A Conference in Honor of Richard M. Morse," Washington, D.C., March
1993. I am grateful to Professor Cohen for permission to publish this study separately and indebted
to Dain Borges, David Haberly, Tulio Halperin Donghi, Efrain Kristal, and Robert M. Levine for their
criticism, encouragement, and comments on this work in its various stages. This work has been done
in homage to Richard M. Morse as a tribute to his contributions to understanding Latin American
civilization.

51

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52 JeffreyD. Needell

special place in Brazilian intellectual life. He first popularized and legitimized the
notion that Africans had made a positive contribution to Brazil. He joined others
in championing the positive role of the plantation and its patriarchal family. Both
stances were connected to his effort to establish the colonial slave plantation as
the origin and classic expression of Brazilian civilization. These arguments have
passed from being iconoclastic to being part of an assumed and often disparaged
dominant heritage. Long the butt of liberal and leftist outrage-partly for his
support of authoritarian political solutions, especially the post-1964 military
regime Freyre was, until recently, often more acknowledged and dismissed than
read in academic circles. However, the many editions of his principal books
suggest that his ideas have remained compelling for the broader public. Indeed,
Freyre has been charged with principal authority for the myth of racial democracy,
an enduring element in Brazil's national self-image.
Freyre continues to be cited in the international and, especially, U.S. scholar-
ship devoted to comparative slave societies and their legacies. Casa grande e senzala
(1933), published in 1946 as The Masters and the Slaves, had three subsequent
editions and was joined in 1963 and 1970 by English translations of two sequels.
All three have recently been reissued in paperback. Casa grande has long figured
in the debate, introduced by Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen (1946), over
the question of comparative race relations as a product of distinct slave societies.
For Americans concerned with Brazilian social and cultural history, Freyre
remains an important point of departure, either for framing a debate or sug-
gesting an approach.'
In this article, I will reexamine the emergence and significance of Freyre's work
in the era in which he gained preeminence, the Brazil of the 1920s and especially
the 1930s.2 The burden of the analysis will be to suggest the origins of Freyre's
preoccupations with race and patriarchy, to reconsider the centrality of miscege-
nation in his thought, and to demonstrate the profoundly reactionary position

1 On Freyre's role in Brazilian intellectual life and U.S. scholarship, see Freyre's obituary by
Thomas E. Skidmore in the Hispanic American Historical Review [hereafter, HAHR], 68 (1988): 803-05;
and Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York, 1974), 190-92,
274-75. See also Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, 1985),
234-35, 244; David H. P. Maybury-Lewis, "Introduction to the Paperback Edition," The Masters and the
Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (Berkeley, Calif., 1986); Carlos Guilherme
Mota, Ideologia da cultura brasileira, 1933-1974: Pontos de partida para uma revisdo hist6rica (Sao Paulo,
1978), 53-74. Notice and analysis of the most recent pieces on Freyre are in Dain Borges, "Brazilian
Social Thought of the 1930s," Luso-Brazilian Review (forthcoming), which provides a succinct
treatment of the intellectual trends and historiography of the era. For the intellectual context of
Brazilian racism, see Skidmore, Black into White, chaps. 5, 6. On Freyre's current importance in U.S.
scholarship on Brazil, see the comments on Freyre's positions in the introductions of such recent
works as Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835
(Cambridge, 1985), xv-xvi; George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in Sdo Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988
(Madison, Wis., 1991), 7-10, 152-54; Dain Borges, The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1945 (Stanford,
Calif., 1992), 4-6 and passim.
2 I should note regarding Freyre's writing that I use only those materials completed in the 1920s
and 1930s; the vagaries of his career after 1936 and the continued references, additions, and analyses
he made concerning his fundamental work of those two decades raise other issues and are
methodologically problematic in terms of understanding the origins of his work. Freyre commonly
changed his earlier writings by adding to them in subsequent editions and constantly tried to control
or influence the reading of his works by framing or contextualizing them in new introductions to his
earlier works. See, in this regard, my caution in using Tempo morto (n. 4, below).

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 53

regarding "modernity" and politics manifest in his structuring of all these

elements. For Freyre, hegemonic race relations, miscegenation, and a reactionary
authoritarianism joined to compose the matrix for what was essentially Brazilian.

GILBERTO DE MELLO FREYRE was born in Recife, the descendant of distinguished

planter families of Pernambuco, families that had only recently entered the liberal
professions. The world of the sugar plantation, the milieu of coastal Pernambuco,
indeed, of the whole coastal Northeast region since the 1530s, was thus familiar
to him in a literal sense.3 Soon, however, Freyre went to a select "progressive"
school, run by U.S. Baptist missionaries. He abandoned Catholicism briefly as a
Baptist, even preaching in shantytowns. At eighteen, he followed an older brother
to take a bachelor's degree from Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco,
Texas. He went on for a master's degree at Columbia University and for travel and
study in Europe, returning to Recife a stranger in his early twenties.4
There, Freyre soon reintegrated himself into the milieu of "good" families and
regional intellectuals. Before long, he was a pivotal figure in regionalismo, the
regionalist cultural movement of the Northeast, which centered on Recife and
contrasted with certain aspects of modernismo,the movement of nationalist cultural
renovation influenced by European postwar experimentalism and rooted in the
south, in Sao Paulo. In the late 1920s, a tense era in the urban labor movements
and rural economy of Pernambuco, Freyre accepted an offer from the state
governor, Est'acio Coimbra, his cousin's husband, to become Coimbra's personal
secretary and the editor of A provincia, a state-subsidized periodical. As such,
Freyre was a part of the Old Republic's political establishment when the
Revolution of 1930 destroyed the regime.5
3 The best introduction to the sugar plantation and its world is the most recent study, Schwartz,
SugarPlantations; although centered on the present state of Bahia, it is plainly intended to address the
Northeast region as a whole (xiv). Note the author's homage to Freyre's work (xv-xvi).
4 There is no suitable biography of Freyre to date. See the bibliography in Edson Nery da Fonseca,

Um livro completa meio seculo (Recife, 1983), 105-13; and the review of very recent studies in Borges,
"Brazilian Social Thought." For biographical data, I rely on Gilberto Freyre, Tempo morto e outros
tempos (Rio deJaneiro, 1944); LuisJardim, "Prefacio," Gilberto Freyre, Artigos dejornal (Recife, n.d.);
and Paul Freston, "A carreira de Gilberto Freyre," Serie e hist6ria das cieinciassociais, no. 3 (Sao Paulo,
1987). I should note that my use of Tempo morto is tempered by the knowledge that Freyre charac-
teristically reworked his early writing; thus the veracity of Tempo morto as a diary of his youth is
problematic. On various occasions, he may well have rewritten old entries or even inserted new
material to reflect his interest in constructing a persona and a position for himself at the time he
published the book (1944). Whenever possible, then, I bring other, especially archival, sources to
bear in conjunction with citations of Tempo morto, as corroboration.
5 See the references in n. 1, above; and Souza Barros, A decada 20 em Pernambuco (Rio de Janeiro,

1974); Robert M. Levine, Pernambuco in the Brazilian Federation, 1889-1937 (Stanford, Calif., 1978),
chaps. 2-3; Jose Aderaldo Castello, Jose Lins do Rego (Sao Paulo, 1961), pt. 1. The Old Republic,
1889-1930, was called that to differentiate it from later regimes with republican constitutions. It was
put in place after a military coup against the parliamentary government of Brazil's second emperor,
Dom Pedro II (r. 1840-89). Its Constitution of 1891 was explicitly modeled on that of the United
States; the realities of power involved control of the federal government by the oligarchies of the two
strongest exporting states, which traded favors for political support with the local oligarchies of the
weaker states. The Revolution of 1930 toppled the regime when a series of political miscalculations
divided the most powerful oligarchies over a presidential succession and lent themselves to the
aspirations and frustrations of the urban middle and working classes, lower-rank military officers, and
disgruntled, oligarchical rivals at the local level. For an introduction to these matters, seeJoseph L.

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54 JeffreyD. Needell

Freyre, like many whose prospects were knotted up in that regime's patronage,
went into exile (1930-1932). He traveled to Portugal and continued research
begun at Columbia. From Europe, he returned to the United States as a visiting
professor at Stanford University. After a semester, he traveled across the South,
went on to some brief anthropological study in Germany, and returned to Recife
(1932). Living in genteel poverty at his brother's suburban country house, he
completed Casa grande e senzala (The Big House and the Slave Hut) in 1933. The
book's unprecedented success led to a sequel, Sobradose mucambos (Mansions and
Shanties) in 1936 and publication of various anthologies.6 Although his fame
brought university positions and occasional public office,7 his only real career was
that of author-that is, the author of Casa grande e senzala. All of his subsequent,
voluminous writing turned on subjects announced there and in Sobrados e
mucambos. It was his success as a writer that made him the force behind the
Instituto Joaquim Nabuco, a social-science center for the advanced study of the
Northeast.8
How did the stranger return home? How did a young man trained in an
environment alien to the traditions and culture of his country come to write a
work widely considered Brazil's best explanation and apologia? It is a seeming
contradiction that requires both biographical and intellectual analysis; a seeming
contradiction that will be the first of many, for the resolution of conflicted
opposites is the great motif of Freyre's life and work.
As a boy and adolescent, Freyre was perceived by his family and the recifenseelite
as a prodigy. He blossomed under the care of private tutors, acquiring French and
English at home and at the select American school his father chose for him. By the
time he completed secondary school, he was being asked to give talks as a
celebrated local phenomenon.9 Freyre's attendance at a Baptist school and his
taking a degree at Baylor were unusual. Elite sons were more often sent to a
Catholic colegio or a prestigious lay school that emphasized the classics and liberal
arts. The next step would have been four years in one of the two traditional law
schools, at Recife or at Sao Paulo; poorer families might consider Rio's Escola

Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882-1930 (Stanford, 1971), chaps. 3, 4, and his
concluding chapter; and Boris Fausto, "Society and Politics," in Leslie Bethell, ed., Brazil: Empire and
Republic (1822-1930) (Cambridge, 1989), 257-307.
6 Freyre, Tempo morto, entries for 1930, passim; Diogo de Mello Meneses, GilbertoFreyre (Rio de
Janeiro, 1944); Gilberto Freyre, "Prefacio," Casa grande e senzala (1933; rpt. edn., Rio de Janeiro,
1934), i-xi. The anthologies, Nordeste (Northeast) (1937), 0 mundo que o portugues criou (The world
that the Portuguese created) (1940), Tradifdo e regido (Tradition and region) (1941), etc., often
contained essays written in the regionalist period of the 1920s. The texts noted are only a few of the
best; Freyre was prolific if somewhat redundant. The great work, of course, was Casa grande and its
sequel, Sobrados e mucambos.Freyre completed a third volume of this work, clearly conceptualized and
at least partially researched in the 1930s, in 1959 (Ordem e progresso) and announced plans for a
fourth, which he never completed.
7 The thirteenth edition of Casagrande (1966) noted appointments to the Escola Normal in Recife,
the Faculdade do Direito there, the Universidade do Distrito Federal, and the universities of Michigan,
Indiana, and Virginia, as well as Columbia. Freyre was elected a deputy (UDN) for Pernambuco
(1946-50) and vice president of the Commisaio de Educaaio e Cultura da Camara, and appointed
Brazil's representative to the United Nations in 1949.
8 See Paul Freston, "Um imperio na provincia," in Sergio Miceli, org., Historia das ciencias sociais
no Brasil, Vol. 1 (Sao Paulo, 1989).
9 Freyre, Tempo morto, 3-22, passim; Meneses, GilbertoFreyre, 35-63.

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 55

Politecnica or the medical schools at Rio or Salvador. Schooling abroad was

generally for specialized, postgraduate training. In Gilberto's case, the advanced
pedagogical ideas of his father (a positivist educator), the links between the local
Baptist school and Baylor, and the success at Baylor of his brother and a few other
local elite sons determined this unusual course.'0
With his strong English and his American preparation in Recife, Gilberto made
a relatively easy transition to Baylor. He quickly earned the support of A. J.
Armstrong, a noted professor of English literature, who thought Gilberto a genius
and urged him to give up Brazil for an academic and literary career in the United
States."I Armstrong and others in this country whom Gilberto met, often through
introductions from Armstrong and another patron, the Brazilian diplomat,
Manuel de Oliveira Lima,'2 were struck with the skills Gilberto displayed as a
verbal Wunderkind.Given his alien background and handsome, if foreign, personal
appearance, one wonders if something in this reception had to do with the
embrace of an exotic pet-a Latin American completely familiar with Anglo-
American culture and eager and able to prove himself, despite his age and
supposed racial inferiority.'3
Gilberto failed to succumb to the attractions Armstrong urged upon him. After
matriculating at Columbia, in 1920, his gaze was fixed steadily on Brazil. At Baylor,
Freyre had already begun to validate his foreign identity in studentjournalism and
in Latin American student organizations. It was in New York, however, that he first
felt compelled to understand that identity.'4 While attending Columbia, Gilberto
had begun to spend time with Oliveira Lima, whom he had met as a schoolboy in
Recife. Lima, retired from Brazilian diplomacy to an academic position at
Catholic University in Washington, D.C., maintained a wide range of friendships
as a former consul in Europe, South America, and Japan, and as a well-known
historian and scholar of international law. His collection of Latin Americana
included some 40,000 books. Gilberto was welcomed by the diplomat and his wife,

10 Ibid.; Freston, "A carreira," 3-9. On elite education ca. 1900, see Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical
Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-CenturyRio de Janeiro (Cambridge, 1987), 52-58,
passim.
11 Freyre, Tempo morto, 28-29, 30-31, 36-37. Armstrong urged Freyre to become a U.S. citizen,
compete for the Rhodes Scholarship, and become a scholar of English literature.
12 On Lima, see his Memorias (Rio de Janeiro, 1937) and its preface by Freyre; as well as Gilberto
Freyre, Oliveira Lima, Don Quixote gordo, 2d edn. (Recife, 1970). Lima, a distinguished diplomat,
sometime prospect for minister for foreign affairs, founding member of the Brazilian Academy of
Letters, and distinguished historian, is best known for his three-volume biography, Dom Jodo VI no
Brasil (1908). He was born in Pernambuco and married into a distinguished local family.
13 Through Armstrong, Freyre met literary figures such as Edwin Markham, Harriet Monroe, Amy

Lowell, William Butler Yeats, the Barrymores, and Vachel Lindsay; through Lima, he met James
Robertson and, probably, made connections to Percy Alvin Martin and John C. Branner. On
perceptions of Freyre, one need but read between the lines of the quotations Freyre makes in Tempo
mortoor the letter of introduction Martin wrote to E. E. Robinson (in which he cites Robertson): P. A.
Martin to E. E. Robinson, Stanford, February 5, 1931, SC 29b Box 6 Folder 40, courtesy of the Special
Collections of the Stanford University Libraries (hereafter, SCSUL).
14 See Freyre's responses to Armstrong's pressure to remain in the United States in Tempo morto,
entries for 1919-20; his activities in Latin American student organizations are noted in Tempo morto
and in his correspondence with Lima and Branner for the era. The correspondence with Branner
is in the SCSUL; with Lima, in Gilberto Freyre, Cartas do pr6prio punho sobrepessoas e coisas do Brasil e
do estrangeiro, Sylvio Rabello, ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1978), in Freyre, Oliveira Lima, and in the Arquivos
Hist6ricos da Fundaao Gilberto Freyre, Recife (hereafter, AHFGF).

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56 JeffreyD. Needell

who had no children and were apparently delighted with the young scholar.
Gilberto, desperate for Brazilian cuisine and fascinated with the collection, began
to visit.'5
These visits constituted an intellectual turning point for Freyre. They are
associated with two interests in Freyre's maturing thought; one in Brazilian
childhood socialization, the other in Brazil's distinctive identity, which he
connected to the specificity of its race relations. Childhood socialization had
begun to pique his curiosity in New York-Lima's library may have offered him
access to his own origins. As a key to his own foreignness? As a way to get at the
essential in national differences? There is reason to think so. In one diary entry of
1921, Freyre noted,

What I would like is to write a history . . . of. .. the Brazilian child, from colonial times
until today . . . I believe that only by means of such a history-sociological, psychological,
anthropological, and not chronological history-will it be possible to arrive at an idea
concerning the Brazilian'spersonality. It is the child who reveals the man. But no one ever
applied that criterion to the study of the national development or formation of a country.16

Initially, these interests were joined; childhood and Brazil intermingle in his diary
and correspondence.17 Freyre consulted with Lima and with John C. Branner, a
noted geologist, Stanford's president, and an old Brazil hand.18 He began reading
nineteenth-century travelers' accounts and visiting Lima's library and the Library
of Congress.
Although Freyre began to focus on childhood and the distinct nature of Brazil
at about the same time, he separated the two, doubtless for practical reasons, and
conceived of them as two projects-one, a future great study, the other, a master's
thesis. The origins of the impulse for the thesis, at least at the conscious level,
seem clear. In his diary and the preface to Casa grande, Freyre recalled the crucial
moment. The sight of several mulattoes on leave from a Brazilian navy ironclad
docking in New York struck him with disgust and shame. He was taking courses
with Franz Boas at the time; the coincidence thrust forward the question of race
as a possible thesis topic. As he reported the incident twelve years later, it was
pivotal:

15 Lima's collection is now the Oliveira Lima Library at Catholic University; Freyre describes it in
Tempo morto, 56-57; and in his preface to Lima's Memorias, vi-vii.
16 Freyre, Tempo morto, 60.
17 On childhood and socialization, see Freyre, Tempo morto, 54, 59, 60, 76. On Brazil, see 56-57, 59,
60, 68, 69. In the correspondence with Lima in 1920-21, it is clear that the idea of a Brazilian focus
was something that only emerged over time. See M. 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington,
December 25, 1920, February 14, 1921, August 3, 1921, and September 23, 1921, AHFGF. Regarding
race, the issue emerges twice in 1921: a diary entry corresponding to the central event recalled in the
preface to Casa grande (the sight of the mulatto sailors; see below) and the question of U.S.-Brazilian
comparisons in correspondence with Lima, in which the diplomat notes his own perplexity regarding
the most appropriate solution to the problema negro, in a context where both correspondents
apparently assume African racial inferiority. M. 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington, February
20, 1921, AHFGF.
18 M. 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington, August 3, 1921, AHFGF; Gilberto Freyre to Meu
caro amigo, New York, September 21, 1921, AHFGF; Gilberto Freyre to Meu prezado amigo
[Branner], Silver Bay, New York, August 2, 1921, SC 34, SCSUL; same to same, New York, August 18,
1921, AHFGH.

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 57

I believe that no Russian student of the nineteenth-century Romantics was more intensely
concerned with the destiny of Russia than I for that of Brazil in the phase in which I
became acquainted with Boas. It was as if everything depended on me and on my gener-
ation . . . And of Brazilian problems, none bothered me as much as that of miscegenation.
Once, I saw, after more than three heavy years of absence from Brazil, a group of the
nation's sailors-mulattoes and cafusos-disembarking ... in the soft snow of Brooklyn.
They gave me the impression of caricatures of men. And the phrase from an American
traveler's account of Brazil .. . came to mind: "the fearfully mongrel aspect of most of the
population." Miscegenation resulted in ... the individuals whom I judged represented
Brazil. 19

It may have been Lima who dissuaded Freyre from a thesis on either abolition or
miscegenation in Brazil. Lima mentioned that abolition was being researched
already and responded to Freyre's racial concerns by noting that these were very
delicate and complex matters.20
The concern with national identity, however, remained. In the end, Freyre's
attempt while abroad to understand his nation took the form of a study of Brazil
at mid-nineteenth century, based largely on research in travelers' accounts,
memoirs, contemporary periodicals, and oral history.21 References to childhood
were minimal, although the Proustian motif of recovering the past through its
incidental, intimate detritus and personalized evocation is clear.22 In this impres-
sionistic mosaic, the questions of slavery and race relations are idealized to the
point of caricature. Those who read it will note the passage concerning musical
appreciation among the elite, where Freyre's logic takes on gossamer wings: "Most
of the [elite] men in those days played the piano or the violin or the flute. My
19 Freyre, Casa grande, xi. The term cafuso, in northern and northeastern Brazil, refers to the
offspring of an Afro-Brazilian and an Amerindian. The "mongrel" reference was to C. S. Stewart,
Brazil and La Plata: The Personal Record of a Cruise (1856), cited in Gilberto Freyre, "Social Life in Brazil
in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century," HAHR, 5 (November 1922): 601. Compare Tempo morto,
68, where Freyre's reaction seems much more studied, cool, "scientific"-and, possibly, defensive; he
cites a piece by Branner in which the geologist commented on the surprising capacity of people of
multiple racial origin and apparently "unfavorable" aspect. Compare also the clearly racist response
to the same incident in the letter to Lima quoted in n. 20, below.
20 M. 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington, December 25, 1920, February 14, 1921, Febru-
ary 20, 1921, AHFGF; it was Freyre's professor, William R. Shephard, who apparently first suggested
the topic of abolition (see letter of February 14, 1921, cited above). Note that Lima's letter (February
20, 1921, cited above) on miscegenation was in response to one in which Freyre mentioned
(seemingly in reference to the mulatto sailors) his being "alarmed" by the proportion of people of
color and race "mixture" in Brazil (see Freyre, Cartas, 174-75).
21 Gilberto Freyre, "Social Life in Brazil in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century" (M.A. thesis,
Columbia University, 1922), published in HAHR, 5 (November 1922): 597-630. Freyre announced his
topic and tentative title to Lima in a letter of August 16, 1921, Cartas, 187-88.
22 In the thesis itself, Freyre relates, "In a way, the preparation ... was begun years ago when, as
a child, I used to ask questions of my grandmother ... [I]n studying, more recently, my grand-
mother's days, I have approached them neither to praise nor to blame-only to taste the joy of
understanding the old social order ... Some of the facts ... were gathered from survivors of the old
order" (597-98). In Tempo morto, 59, he mentions interviewing a survivor and viewing a photograph,
which then shows up in the thesis (614). The reference to Proust is an anticipation; as noted below,
he did not read A la recherchede tempsperdu until 1923 (when the volumes were also making their great
impact in France). Gallic influence at this point was supplied by Edmund andJules de Goncourt (see
Freyre's epigraph to the thesis); Freyre also mentions Walter Pater (597; see Tempo morto, 46) but not
with the sort of precision regarding inspiration that he does when he notes Pater's influence, by way
of The Child in the House (1894), years later in introducing the Portuguese edition of his thesis; see
"Prefacio a terceira ediacio em Lingua Portuguesa," Vida social no Brasil nos meados do seculo XIX, 3d
edn., rev. (Recife, 1985), 37-38.

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58 JeffreyD. Needell

paternal grandfather-a sugar planter-was a violin virtuoso. The keen taste for
music was perhaps what made Brazilian slaveholders kind and gentle."23 This
saccharine treatment and a brief assertion of mulatto social mobility are hardly
accidental, given Freyre's sensitivity to Jim Crow in the United States. Perhaps
Freyre wished, if only in passing, to draw the strongest possible contrast to the
violent and exclusionary racism ubiquitous in the United States. One senses an
attempt to balance out the mulattoes in New York, to suggest that the burden of
Brazil's "mongrel" race was outweighed by benign racial harmony.24

AFTER COLUMBIA, Freyre, possibly in response to Lima's urgings, decided to study

and travel in Europe. His thesis, perhaps through connections he owed to his
Columbia adviser, William Shepherd, or to Lima, would be published in 1922, and
to critical acclaim.25 Lima, like Armstrong and others, argued that Freyre should
remain abroad and make his career there, the only fitting context for a mind like
his.26 All to no avail; although he took enormous and enduring pride in his
achievements overseas, Freyre had decided to go back to Brazil. He was eager to
test himself abroad and to meet the intellectual elite there, with which he
identified, but he seems to have seen all as preparation for his return home.27 If
he had initially been tempted by Armstrong to make a life in American letters or,
later, by Lima, to find his natural ambit abroad, his attachment to his country
seems to have increased overseas. The thesis was apparently a first step back, not
just to Recife, or to his childhood memories, which preface the study, but to the
"childhood" of his country. A personal identification with a reconstructed
Brazilian past was emergent. When only a third of his thesis had been completed,
Freyre wrote to Lima of his aspirations for the larger project of which the thesis
was but a "'preliminary inquiry' . . . My plan is to deepen the exploration. It is
possible that one day this friend of yours will appear with two volumes under his
arms-a Social History of the Brazilian Family (during the two reigns). "28
23 Freyre, "Social Life," 615; see also 600, 604-05, 606-09, 614, 616.
24 Freyre's shock at the brutalities of U.S. racism is marked in his diary (Tempo morto, 32-33), in
which he reports the lynching and burning of a black man. Freyre's widow recalled, some seventy
years later, the impression this incident made on him, and she ascribed his loss of the Baptist faith
to the incident, which occurred during his days at Baylor (Magdalena Freyre, interview, Appipucos,
January 22, 1991). She also revealed that Freyre had earlier hoped to become a Baptist pastor (an
ambition confirmed in an interview with Francisco de Assis Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro, March 14, 1991).
Freston, while noting the impression made by the violence, discounts the linkage to Freyre's
abandonment of the Baptist faith (see "A carreira," 8, 10). The passage and note regarding mulatto
social mobility are in Freyre, "Social Life," 611.
25 Freyre's history adviser, Shepherd, figured among early HAHR contributors. On Lima's
influence regarding Robertson and the HAHR, see M. 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington,
October 21, 1921, AHFGF; Gilberto Freyre, Perfil de Euclydes e outros perfis, com desenhos de Candido
Portinari e Thomaz Santa Rosa (Rio de Janeiro, 1941), 68. On the success of the thesis, see the letter
noted just below and P. A. Martin's comment in the letter to Robinson cited in n. 13. Regarding
Europe, see M. 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington, March 30, 1922, AHFGF.
26 M. 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington, November 22, 1921, AHFGF.
27 See the entries for 1922-23 in Freyre, Tempo morto; and the letters for the same period to Lima

in Freyre, Cartas.
28 Gilberto Freyre to Meu ilustre amigo, New York, April 3, 1922, Cartas, 198. The reference to "the
two reigns" is an allusion to the era of the monarchy in Brazil, customarily divided between the First
Reign (Pedro I, r. 1822-31), the Regency (1831-40), and the Second Reign (Pedro II, r. 1840-89).

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 59

Going home to Brazil, Lima warned, would be a poor choice; returning to

Recife, a worse one. Writers could not earn a good living in Brazil. The rare
person who lived by the pen lived poorly, dependent on the large dailies and
wretchedly paid. The great literati almost all worked as liberal professionals or
lived on sinecures as public servants. Most of these traditional opportunities were
to be found in the great urban centers-Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Recife
had nothing to offer a cosmopolitan literary genius with a talent for modern
social science. It was provincial, clique-ridden, and relatively impoverished. Lima
declared, "To do criticism in Recife, God in Heaven! It's the same as wanting to
ice-skate under that fiery sky."29 Yet Freyre did not hesitate. Although he would
travel within Brazil and abroad often and for the rest of his life, he never made his
home anywhere else but Recife.
Even though he had written an irregular column for Recife's Didrio de
Pernambuco since 1918, Freyre returned home a stranger in 1923. Abroad five
years, he had departed as a provincial prodigy and returned a cultivated man of
the world. Curiosity about him was rampant in the port's tiny intellectual com-
munity. Shortly after his arrival, so were envy and hostility. Although open to
criticism, charming, curious, and friendly, Freyre with his foreign clothes,
intellectual "airs," accomplishments, and aggressive opinions was a provocative
figure. Nonetheless, he soon helped create an important clique of young literati
and artists, particularly including those who treasured provincial traditions.30
This was the local context of the Northeast's regionalismo. As a broad theme,
regionalism had already proved attractive to Freyre at Columbia in 1921 and in
France in 1922.31 In Recife, it emerged as one of several responses across Brazil to
the failed academic cultural milieu of the Old Republic. The younger generation
of Brazilian intellectuals associated the frenchified culture of Brazil's belle epoque
with the sagging facade of the social and political status quo. Indeed, the 1920s in
Brazil were both a cultural and political watershed, linking regionalismo, the
aesthetic and intellectual revolt of Sao Paulo's Week of Modern Art (1922), and
the political alienation and military rebellions of the Tenentes' movements (1922
and 1924). Regionalismo and Sao Paulo's modernismowere reactions against what
was increasingly seen as an imitative, official high culture divorced from Brazilian
reality.32

29 O. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington,

November 22, 1921; compare same to same, Decem-
ber 25, 1920, both in AHFGF.
30 0. Lima to Meu caro amigo, Washington, July 15, 1922, citing Monteiro Lobato, AHFGF;
Gilberto to Meu caro amigo, Recife, August 14, 1923, Cartas, 209; Gilberto Freyre to Caro mestre e
amigo [Recife], July 9, 1924, Cartas, 212; Magdalena Freyre, interview; Jose Antonio Gonsalves de
Mello [Freyre's younger cousin], interview, Recife, January 30, 1991; Nilo Pereira, "Prefacio,"
Gilberto Freyre, Tempo de aprendiz: Artigos publicados emjornais na adolesce^nciae na primeira mocidade do
autor, 1918-1926, 2 vols. (Sao Paulo, 1979), 1: 17-20; Meneses, GilbertoFreyre, chap. 4.
31 The reference in his diary, New York, 1921 (Tempo morto, 49) is to "Geddes, Le Play, Mistral and

Maurras ... and above all Yeats ... I have been guiding myself toward the study of the social and
cultural problems categorized as regional: and toward the promotion of the regional in the arts." He
notes the contacts with Charles Maurras and his circle in Paris on 84-85.
32 On regionalismo, see note 33 below. The Week of Modern Art was a public exhibition put on in
Saio Paulo that was soon consecrated as the first great challenge of modernismoto the canon and taste
associated with francophile academicism in the fine arts and literature. On the cultural milieu
challenged by modernismo, see Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, esp. chap. 6. On the national context of
paulista modernismo, see Wilson Martins, The Modernist Idea: A Critical Survey of Brazilian Writing in the

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60 JeffreyD. Needell

At the time of Freyre's return, the regionalist movement in the Northeast did
not exist, although a regional intellectual world did, long centered in Recife.
Paulista modernismo, with its dramatic, nationalist iconoclasm, influenced some
writers who figured in that world, such asJoaquim Inojosa; the noted recifensepoet,
Manuel Bandeira, resident in Rio, was likewise embraced by the paulistas. It is also
true that Mairio de Andrade, one of the preeminent figures of modernismo,set great
store by regional folklore and traveled to the Northeast to sample and encourage
the local cultural renovation. Soon, however, the dominant group in Northeastern
literary and artistic circles was closely identified with Freyre and a distinct, hostile
position regarding modernismo.The regionalistas deplored the European influence
on paulista ideas and their embrace of "modernity." Instead, Freyre and his circle
championed local tradition. Although Freyre was cosmopolitan in his formation,
he led the regionalistas in an embrace of a provincial authenticity that set them
against urban Europeanization, bemoaned the passing of the rural planter elite
and its way of life, and sought the preservation of the old-old buildings, old
streets, and anything else that seemed specific to the region's distinctive past-
including Afro-Brazilian cuisine (Freyre's contribution to the Regionalist Con-
gress of 1926, in which he later claimed to have played the central role) .33
Freyre was central to the group in a number of ways. His training and charm

Twentieth Century, Jack E. Tomlins, trans. (New York, 1970), pt. 1; and his Hist6ria da inteligencia
brasileira, 7 vols. (Sao Paulo, 1977), vol. 6; Joaio Cruz Costa, A History of Ideas in Brazil: The Development
of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution of National History, Suzette Macedo, trans. (Berkeley, Calif.,
1964), 249-55; and Joseph L. Love, Sdo Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889-1937 (Stanford, Calif.,
1978), 87, 98-100. On modernismo,see Martins, Modernist Idea; Antonio Candido, Literatura e sociedade,
5th edn. (Sao Paulo, 1976), 160-67; Richard M. Morse, From Community to Metropolis (Gainesville, Fla.,
1958), 258-70. The Tenentes' revolts were military uprisings led by the so-called tenentes (lieuten-
ants). These young men, military officers often of that rank, twice attempted (1922 in Rio, and 1926
in Sao Paulo) to overthrow the Old Republic by launching defiant revolts and calling for a general
revolution on the part of the public. They were associated with a nationalist idealism and a
condemnation of the backwardness and corruption of the regime; parallels in other contemporary
Latin American armies (or other armies in the Third World) are clear. See Virginio Santa Rosa, 0
sentido do tenentismo (Rio de Janeiro, 1933); John D. Wirth, "Tenentismo, the Brazilian Revolution of
1930," HAHR, 44 (May 1964): 229-42; Jose Murilo de Carvalho, "As forcO as armadas na Primeira
Repuiblica," in Boris Fausto, ed., Historia geral da civilisafdo brasileira (Sao Paulo, 1977), t. 3, v. 2:
183-234; Neill Macaulay, The Prestes Column: Revolution in Brazil (New York, 1974).
33 On regionalismo and modernismo,see Martins, Modernist Idea, 111-19, 142-56, 285-88; Castello,Jose

Lins do Rego, pt. 1; Barros, A decada 20 em Pernambuco, pt. 2; Levine, Pernambuco, 66-70; Francisco de
Assis Barbosa, "Milagre de Uma Vida," in Manuel Bandeira, Manuel Bandeira, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro,
1958), 1: lxxxv-xc. On Freyre's role, see his articles in Tempo de aprendiz and Artigos; and Jardim,
"Prefacio," 16-33. There has been considerable dispute over Freyre's role in the 1926 regionalist
congress. Joaquim Inojosa has made the case that Freyre exaggerated his leadership by publishing a
manifesto in 1952 that defined the regionalist movement, a manifesto that Freyre deceptively claimed
was delivered to the congress in 1926. See, on this and other aspects of regionalismo and its linkages
to modernismo,Joaquim Inojosa, Sursum corda!:Desfaz-se o "equivoco"do manifesto (Rio deJaneiro, 1981);
or his 0 movimento modernista em Pernambuco, 3 vols. (Rio deJaneiro, 1968-69). There is a clear parallel
between the turn to regionalismo (with its new valuation of folkloric roots) and the influence of the
European avant garde's "modern" sensibility in Brazil and similar developments throughout
contemporary Latin America, for example, Argentina's regionalista writers, the Afro-Cuban preoccu-
pations of Alejo Carpentier and Fernando Ortiz Fernandez, the aesthetic and political trajectory of
Peru's Jose Carlos Mariategui, and the postrevolutionary aesthetic and intellectual explosion in
Mexico. See Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (Cambridge, 1969), chap. 7;
Richard M. Morse, A volta de McLuhanaima (Sao Paulo, 1990), chap. 4, esp. 182-86; Charles Martin,
"Literature, Music and Art of Latin America, 1870-1930," in Leslie Bethell, ed., CambridgeHistory of
Latin America, 8 vols. (Cambridge, 1986- ), 4: 433-526.

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 61

made him a resource and a natural leader. He was credited by regionalismo's

outstanding novelist, Jose Lins do Rego, with a creative, decisive influence on the
style and substance of his writing. Others, too, were drawn to a more self-conscious
creative position through Freyre's work as a columnist, his conversation, and his
aesthetic rehabilitation of local civilization. Finally, Freyre, through his hostility
toward the more influential modernista movement, helped distinguish regionalismo
by defining it in contrast to the southern school.34
All in all, Freyre's return to Recife was decisive for him. The voyage home,
begun in the old accounts studied abroad, was completed in its first phase by the
embrace of a regional past and culture, which he rehabilitated and helped define
in reaction to local "modernization" and paulista modernismo.He fought to recover
the Recife of his childhood, but he had not forgotten his proposed study of Brazil's
childhood. By the late 1920s, now the state governor's secretary, he returned to
this project. He wrote to Manuel Bandeira of his plans, binding the poet to
strictest confidence.35 What Freyre asked was help in securing both old sources
and new studies-modern legitimization for his project to construct a past. He
described his hopes and the books he had acquired with his public official's salary,
noting,

This work and this collection of books ... is linked to a study, from the psychological and
historical point of view, that has held me for years . .. a study of the life of the child in
Brazil ... One more year and a half [and] I am free of these government complications
and of [this] confrontation with [government] opposition elements who are without
scruple-affairs that call for bullets and whips. I cannot stay in politics. It would end badly.
But one and a half years from now [and] I am free-and I only see one thing capable of
interesting me, [and] that would be that study. It is a virgin, original field.36

34 See Castello,JoseLins do Rego;Jardim,"Prefacio";Jose Lins do Rego, "Prefacio," Gilberto Freyre,

Regido e tradirdo (Rio deJaneiro, 1941); and Freyre's writings in ibid., "Algumasnotas sobre a pintura
no Nordeste do Brasil," "Regiao, tradi(caoe cozinha," and "Regresso a provincia."
35 Gilberto Freyre to Meu caro Baby Flag [Recife], December 6, 1929, MB47 111211,Arquivo
Manuel Bandeira, Centro de Literatura Brasileira, FundaOCio Casa de Rui Barbosa (hereafter, AMB).
("Baby Flag" was a pet name Freyre used for Manuel Bandeira, the youngest sibling of his family,
whose last family name means "flag" in English, the language whose poetry was a common ground
between the two literati.) On his 1920s studies, see Gilberto Freyre to Max Fleiuss, Recife, April 16,
1927, L347P76, Arquivo Hist6rico, Instituto Hist6rico e Geografico Brasileiro (hereafter, AHIHGB).
Meneses claims Lins do Rego was also in on the idea (GilbertoFreyre, 113). Meneses, Freyre's cousin,
also offers (113-14), if only briefly, an analysis similar to mine: that there was linkage between
Freyre's search for childhood and his reintegration into Recife and Brazil (contrast Freston, "A
carreira," 37, who demonstrates the autobiographical and historical consequences without such an
analysis). Freyre himself, unsurprisingly, was rather self-conscious about what he was doing, as his
introduction to "Social Life" suggests. He recorded, for example, in Tempo morto, 134, his reaction to
his Recife return: "Through sentiment I already feel the restitution to my Brazilian infancy ... [T] his
is the principal [matter]: this sentimental recuperation. The intellectual adaptation is secondary."
This sense of recovery was closely tied to Freyre's preoccupation with regional cuisine (his offering
to the Regional Congress of 1926 and something Meneses mentions, 113-14), a sentimental,
sensuous attachment that had figured in his visits to the Lima household in Washington. Many
readers will recall how this subliminal tie to national cuisine, childhood, and national identification
has a superb, parallel evocation in the concluding pages of Alejo Carpentier's El recurso del metodo
(novela) (Mexico City, 1974).
36 Gilberto Freyre to Meu caro Baby Flag, December 6, 1929.

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62 JeffreyD. Needell

Old sources and new studies were to make for a fruitful conjunction, but the book
Freyre finally wrote was to be a different one. The political conflicts he disdained
forced themselves upon him. A revolution intervened.

THE UNSCRUPULOUS OPPOSITION MERITING BULLETS AND WHIPS is one of only a

few references in Freyre's writings from the 1920s to an extraordinary period of
class conflict in Pernambuco. Just as in the urban centers of the south, workers in
Recife had begun to organize. One memoir alludes to the influence of Russia's
1917 revolution and another to the rise of leaders of state-wide fame. In the cane
fields, the economic difficulties of the era felt from Cuba to Brazil pitted cane
farmers against usineiros and drove the rural proletariat from the wretched horror
of the safra to the sordid squalor of burgeoning urban shantytowns.37 In this
context, Governor Estacio Coimbra, a representative of both the old plantocracy
and the newer usineiro interests, apparently sought to maintain the status quo by
a combination of reform, political charm (for the powerful), and ready police
action (for the proletariat).38
Such a political balancing act, either in Pernambuco or other states, hardly
helped avoid a growing sense of crisis and malaise. While many intellectuals
throughout Brazil responded politically to the increasingly obvious incompetence
of the Old Republic,39 Freyre's preoccupations with regionalist cultural particu-
larism were seemingly uncolored by any sustained concern with such matters,
despite his public position. Nothing in his contemporary writing suggests anything
but shock and disdain for the Revolution of 1930, which focused the alienation of
urban groups and dissident local oligarchies on the corruption and failures of the
regime. Freyre wrote of the revolution in Pernambuco in terms of personal
ill-fortune, like an event of nature, of which anonymous, selfish, and brutal forces
took advantage, destroying a selfless statesman (Coimbra) and greedily violating
traditionally sacrosanct property rights. The selective destruction of his family's

37Usineiros are the owners of the highly mechanized (and capitalized) sugar mills, usinas, which
emerged throughout the Americas in the increasingly competitive world of late nineteenth-century
sugar (in Cuba, they were called centrales). Safra means the harvest of the sugar cane, a period when
plantation workers labored under terrible conditions most hours of the twenty-four in order to bring
the ripe cane into production rapidly and limit the loss of liquid that began immediately after it
was cut. On the era analyzed in the paragraph, see Barros, A decada 20 em Pernambuco, pt. 1; Levine,
Pernambuco, chaps. 1, 2; Funda(cao Getfilio Vargas, Centro de Pesquisas e Documenta(cao [hereafter,
FGV/CPD], "Barbosa Lima Sobrinho (depoimento, 1977)" (Rio de Janeiro, 1981), entrevistas 1-3,
passim. On Cuba, see Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York, 1971), chaps. 46-47. A
succinct comparative survey of the sugar cane industry and labor in the era immediately preceding
this is RebeccaJ. Scott, "Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and
Louisiana after Emancipation," AHR, 99 (February 1994): 70-102.
38 See Barros, A decada 20 em Pernambuco, chap. 3; Levine, Pernambuco, chap. 4, esp. 70, 80, 83, 90,

121; FGV/CPD, "Barbosa," 30-48; Gilberto Freyre, "Estacio Coimbra, governador de Pernambuco,"
in Perfil, 185-96.
39 On the intellectuals' response, see Costa, Histo?y of Ideas in Brazil, 240-71, passim; Bolivar
Lamounier, "Forma(,-o de um pensamento politico autoritaria na Primeira Repuiblica," in Histr6ia
geral da civilizardo brasileira, t. 3, v. 2, chap. 10; Peter Flynn, Brazil: A Political Analysis (Boulder, Colo.,
1978), chap. 3. An introduction to the milieu is best provided by the recent reedition of a seminal
anthology first published in 1924: Vicente Licinio Cardoso, org., A margem da hist6ria da Repuiblica,
2 vols. (Brasilia, 1981).

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 63

residence is something that deeply affected him: references to it appear repeat-

edly in his correspondence, diary, and the memoirs of his circle.40
Freyre had identified Coimbra with an aristocratic, enlightened, planter
tradition; now, that had passed. The deposed governor asked Freyre to accompany
him into exile. Freyre shared Coimbra's impoverished flight to Salvador and then
to Lisbon, living hand to mouth in borrowed clothes. In a matter of a month or
two, Freyre had gone from a position of power and patronage to one of genteel
penury in Portugal. Only his intellectual occupations were left to him there. A
network of patronage allowed him to pursue his research in private libraries and
restricted collections. Then, Freyre's relations in the United States came to his aid.
Percy A. Martin, Stanford's Latin Americanist and a specialist in Brazilian history,
impressed with Oliveira Lima's protege' and his thesis published in the Hispanic
American Historical Review, arranged for Freyre's appointment as a visiting profes-
sor of history at Stanford in 1931.41
At this point, Freyre's correspondence indicates that his proposed great work
remained a study of Brazilian childhood. He had researched it in Portugal and
must have anticipated continuing to do so in the collection of Braziliana that
Branner had left to Stanford; he also wrote home for more recent Brazilian
social-science works.42 Between the nourishing past (Portugal) and the supportive
present (Stanford and social science), Freyre focused on self-discovery through
the recovery of a lost childhood. A stop in Dakar made en route to Lisbon had
brought no apparent shift in focus to Africa instead. Indeed, I can find no direct
evidence from 1930 to 1932 of what might have submerged Freyre's preoccupa-
tion with children's socialization within another study. But there is clear evidence
in the preface to Casa grande to suggest that Freyre's turn to a valuation of Brazil's
patriarchy, racial hierarchy, and miscegenation occurred when he returned to the
United States.
The context is suggestive. In Stanford, Freyre was once again expected to
explain (and, in effect, defend) his country to foreigners, the experience that had
been the germ of his master's thesis a decade earlier. National comparisons must
have been much on his mind when, at term's end, he decided to cross the United
States through the South. He traveled with two former Columbia colleagues, by

40 On Freyre's response to the revolution, seeJulio Bello to Meu

caro Gilberto, Queimados,July 24,
1926, AHFGF;Francisco de Assis Barbosa, interview; Magdalena Freyre, interview; Gilberto to Meu
caro amigo [Oliveira Lima], Recife, December 4, 1926, Cartas,219-20; Gilberto to Ulysses [Freyre,
Gilberto's older brother], Lisbon, December 18, 1930, Cartas,279; Gilberto to Dearest Baby Flag,
December 4, 1930, Cartas,155; Freyre, "Estacio Coimbra," 185; Freyre, Tempomorto,237-38, 246-48;
Freyre, Perfil, 169; Meneses, GilbertoFreyre,142-43. Compare Freston, "A carreira," 34-35. On the
revolution itself, see the references in note 5 above; further orientation is provided in the
bibliographical essay Fausto wrote, "Society and Politics," in Bethell, Brazil,340. For the revolution
in Pernambuco, see the oral testimony in FGV/CPD, "Barbosa."
41 On the exile, see Freyre, Tempomorto,246-51; Freyre, "Estacio Coimbra"; on the continued
studies, see besides Tempomorto,246-51, Casa grande,ix-xi; Gilberto Freyre to Max Fleuiss, Lisbon,
November 6, 1930, L472P14, ColefdoMax Fleiuss, AHIHGB. On Stanford, see Gilberto to Dear Baby
Flag, Lisbon, n.d., MB47, I11212, AMB; Martin to Robinson, February 5, 1931; telegram, E. E.
Robinson to Gilberto Freyre, Palo Alto, February 12, 1931; telegram, Gilberto Freyre to Edgar
Robinson, Lisbon, February 14, 1931; Gilberto Freyre to Professor Robinson, Lisbon, February 26,
1931, all courtesy SCSUL.
42 Gilberto to Dear Baby Flag, Lisbon, n.d., MB47 111212,AMB; Gilberto to Dear Flag, Stanford,

June 9 [1931], MB47 III213, AMB.

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64 JeffreyD. Needell

then scholars of Brazilian slavery and the South, Ruediger Bilden and Francis
Butler Simkins.43
Freyre had known something of the South as a Baylor student. His wife later
recalled that he had been shocked by the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.44 As noted
earlier, his master's thesis partly focused on what might easily have been an
implicit comparison with southern racism, in his apologia for Brazilian slavery
during the mid-nineteenth century.45 The trip through the Deep South, then,
accompanied by two scholars sensitive to the issue of comparative slavery, was a
return to a set of earlier concerns but with a perspective profoundly affected by a
decade of experience. The master's thesis had gilded a society Freyre had
glimpsed through the eyes of his childhood, the memories of his aged planter
kinfolk, and the evaluation of foreign travelers. He had branched out from it, by
his late twenties, into renewed research on childhood socialization in old Brazil.
His intermediate embrace of regionalismo could be understood as the glorification
of a past society whose essential nature he also continued to associate with his
childhood. The link between all three interests, thesis topic, regionalismo, and
renewed research on childhood, was a personal search to redeem his own
childhood and its context, the planter patriarchy of Pernambuco.
At this point, however, the continuities with the world in which he had grown
up, and to which he constructed a return in 1922, had collapsed. Pernambuco's
patriarchal ancien regime, still palpable in the Old Republic, was reeling from an
uncontained, ideologically threatening political revolution galvanized by pro-
found social and economic conflicts. The house of his fathers, both literally and
figuratively, had been destroyed. The continuities with the past were threatened-
and, with them, the personal search for identity on which Freyre's student exile
had set him.
The fundamental similarities with and contrasts to old Pernambuco that Freyre
encountered in the South confronted him with the question of his national as well
as his personal identity again, and he bound them together. In 1921, Freyre had
attempted a straightforward narrative analysis of mid-nineteenth-century Brazil,
putting aside a sociological interest in the playthings of childhood to study past
society as a whole. In Recife, in the late 1920s, successfully involved in regionalismo,
he shifted back to an intimate study of childhood socialization. Now, he would tie
the two together; he would join his search for a lost childhood with a search for
the society challenged by the fearsome modern forces he associated with the
Revolution of 1930. In essence, Freyre, in exile once again, seems to have decided
to fight back. His project was to reconstruct Brazil's past as the nation's childhood,
thus defining and defending its essential identity and, with it, his own. Something
of this is made explicit through Freyre's evocation of Marcel Proust in the
introduction to Casa grande:

43Freyre, Casa grande, x-xi; Freyre also mentions the influence of Ernest Weaver, a colleague in
Boas's class. Simkins had already written The Tillman Movement in South Carolina (Durham, N.C.,
1926); South Carolina during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1932) was apparently under way.
44 Magdalena Freyre, interview.
45 See Freyre, Tempo morto, 33; and compare Freyre, "Social Life," 607-08, 614.

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The study of the intimate history of a people has something of a Proustian introspection
to it . .. [O]ne senses the character of a people [in the analysis of everyday family life].
Studying domestic life in the past, we feel ourselves completed bit by bit: it is another way
of searching for "lost time."46-

As before, Freyre had his vision of Brazil while abroad, but this time, he
returned to his country to construct its past. It had been in Brazil that he had lost
his father's house, and it would be in Brazil that he would rebuild it. And this time,
Freyre would write of a casa grande e senzala-a big house and a slave hut. Freyre
sought to contain the new forces that had arisen and engulfed the old ways in
1930. He sought to address, indirectly, the conflicts he had ignored in the 1920s
by vindicating the social order that they had rent in two. He turned to Brazil's
majority-its people of color-but only to return them to "their place." Freyre
would reach out to the masses by reaching down to his servants and back to his
past. The 1921 pastiche of the slaves singing in the fields would be made flesh in
the celebrated form of the mulata: the mixed-race object of sexual desire.

FREYRE HAD CONFRONTED THE QUESTION OF HIS IDENTITY when he beheld his
countrymen through foreign eyes: at Columbia, beginning his study of foreign
travelers' accounts, he came upon Brazilian mulatto sailors and recalled the racist
response of foreigners. As a Brazilian abroad, Freyre felt compelled to identify
with people whom he most likely would have ignored in Recife. If they were the
same as he, what was the link? If they were part of the same nation, what was their
role in it? What did their physical and social condition, so easily fitted within the
offhand racism of the era, suggest about the fate of the nation, much of which was
made up of similar people? In a letter regarding the incident written in 1921 to
Oliveira Lima, Freyre linked it to a racist preoccupation with miscegenation:

Have you read The Rise of the Color Tide and The Passing of a Great Race? ... They are
interesting studies of the race problem, mixing, etc., from which our Brazil suffers. We
need to oppose the white immigrant to the "salt atroz"[sic]. The more I study the problem
from the Brazilian point of view, the more alarmed I get. I noted the crew of the Minas the
other day: 75 percent must be people of color.47

Nonetheless, the joined issues of racism and miscegenation had gone largely
unresolved in the early 1920s. Freyre emphasized the glories of the planters in his
thesis; when he mentioned planter miscegenation, he defended its results on
racist grounds: he argued that mulattoes were often naturally able and socially
mobile, as the children of aristocratic white fathers.48 In his mid-1920s essays on
regionalism, the same focus on planters is present. Slaves again provide only a
46 Freyre, Casa grande, xx.
47 Gilberto Freyre to Meu caro amigo, New York, February 18, 1921, Cartas, 175. Salta atras (literally,
"jump back") is a particularly telling, racist regionalism for a person of mixed black and mulatto
origin; the Minas, one of the prides of the Brazilian navy, was the battleship whose crew concerned
Freyre. The titles Freyre cites are apparently references to Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color
against White World Supremacy (New York, 1920); and Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or
the Racial Basis of European Historwy,3d rev. edn. (New York, 1920).
48 Freyre, "Social Life," 611.

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66 JeffreyD. Needell

happy and exotic tone. Yet, although these essays recall the thesis in this regard,
there is an important addition-a positive treatment of Afro-Brazilian contribu-
tions and an aesthetic, sexual valuation of Afro-Brazilian women: "the mulatas,
with much hip swinging, their hair fragrant with coconut oil, their breasts jumping
inside their lace blouses, their trinkets tinkling like bells, the light mulatas even
more vain than the others with their reds and yellows that they used to color their
clothes,. . . [entered the dance] to tap with their little slippers."49 Thus Freyre
still replicated his sources' perspective. He recreated the society from the outside,
the view of the travelers' accounts. But, as the sensual description of the mulatas
suggests, a significant shift occurred in what he made of the society observed. It
was not simply the championship of Afro-Brazilian cuisine in 1926; there was a
glimpse of a general appreciation of an Afro-Brazilian contribution, a sketch of
what was later developed fully in Casa grande. In a pivotal 1925 essay, "Aspectos de
um seculo de transicio no Nordeste do Brasil" (Aspects of a Century of Transition
in Brazil's Northeast), Freyre was already writing,

It is fitting to recall the ... Negress of the stove ... [i]nfluencing nutrition as she
influenced the social type-influenced social morality itself-we all underwent, in this
regard, African influence ...
Nor let it go unnoticed that the melodic sensibility [and] the rhythmic sense were
developed in the Northeastern child under the principal influence of the songs of African
flavor with which at another time the chambermaid and, still today, his grandmother or his
own mother made him sleep.50

More important, in this same essay, while Freyre accepted that miscegenation was
a cultural pathology, he reversed Raymundo Nina Rodrigues's claim that misce-
genation was at the root of a biological pathology.51 He argued, "Would not the
mixing, on the contrary, have brought to the Brazilian appearance a note of new
beauty ... Would not the mixing have given to the Brazilian a special resistance
to the climate in certain respects ... hostile to whites and favorable to people of
color? "52

In the mid-1920s, Freyre had begun to touch on what would be the main themes
of his great work. In these quotations, it is clear that his perceptions of Africans
and Afro-Brazilians were racist; yet, in the Brazil and the United States of his time,
such views marked a significant advance. He was, as a subordinate part of his
reevaluation of regional civilization, placing Afro-Brazilian elements in a positive
and active light, rather than ignoring them as passive or condemning them as
corrupting elements, the prevailing assumption among Brazilians at the time. But
49 Freyre, Regido, 179-80, 182. This essay, "Aspectos de um seculo de transiko no Nordeste do
Brasil," was Freyre's contribution to the 1925 centenary celebration of the Didrio de Pernambuco, which
took the form of a book, 0 livro do Nordeste, which Freyre was commissioned to edit. The essay is, to
my mind, the true antecedent of Casa grande e senzala and the key transition between his thesis and
his great work.
50 Freyre, Regido, 183-84.
51 Raymundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906), an Afro-Brazilian medical professor and pathologist,
was a great pioneer of Afro-Brazilian studies; trained in the era of scientific racism, however, he also
made his mark as a proponent of Afro-Brazilian racial inferiority. See Freyre, Perfil, 211-18; Skidmore,
Black into White, 57-62; Dain Borges, "'Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert': Degeneration in Brazilian
Social Thought, 1880-1940," Journal of Latin American Studies, 25 (1993): 235-56.
52 Freyre, Regido, 185.

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the reassessment of the Afro-Brazilian role was tangential to his focus. Until 1930,
the project he had in mind centered on childhood, not race relations. If the 1925
essay is any indication, in such a project race would have remained a secondary
element. It was the experience of 1930-1931, the revolution and the trip through
the South, that had apparently brought race to the fore, as he sought to come to
grips with the specificity of the old Brazil he mourned.
In the company of his former Columbia colleagues in the Deep South, Freyre
recovered the teachings of Boas as he compared race relations in the realm ofJim
Crow to his perception of Brazil. He noted the similarities in the institutions
thrown up by slave plantations and the differences, which were apparently rooted
in the masters' language, race, and religion.53 In Brazil's case, these were
Portuguese, Iberian, and Catholic elements: ethnicity and culture. Here, Freyre
sought the basis of such different historical race relations-hostile separation
as opposed to a familiar miscegenation, conflictual exclusion as opposed to a
harmonious racial patriarchy.54 The transitions in his introduction show the logic
in his thinking. He relates, in order, the journey through the South, the incident
with the Brazilian sailors, the issue of miscegenation and Brazil's racial predica-
ment, and then his debt to Boas, the source of the cultural solution to that
predicament.55
Boas has rightfully been accepted from the beginning as Casa grande's patron
saint. It was he, after all, who broke away from commonly accepted, late
nineteenth-century scientific racism to suggest the importance of culture as a
contributing factor to (though not the exclusive cause of) racial differences.56 By
providing this cultural alternative to inherent African inferiority as an explanation
for such differences, Boas offered Freyre a way out of the taint implied by his
mulatto countrymen. Freyre would reconstruct the escape route into a triumphal
entry.
There are inklings of this use of culture in "Aspects of a Century of Transition."
In Casa grande, Freyre does not simply counter negative racist determinism and
argue that Brazilians were not irrevocably cursed by racial taint; rather, he holds
that they have benefited by the race mixing natural to Brazil's particular slave
society, which, despite its corruptions, had its own splendor. "Let us have the
honesty," he wrote, "to recognize that only great landholding and slaveholding
colonization could have been capable of resisting the enormous obstacles that
were raised against the European civilization of Brazil. Only the big house and the
slave hut."57 The mulatto, born of the union of the master of the big house and

53 Freyre, Casa grande, xi.

54 Here, as in "Social Life," Freyre is repeating the common assumptions and perceptions regard-
ing comparative race relations in the two countries. Miscegenation, for example, was common and
clear in the United States; it was perceived to be far more common and important in Brazil, and
mulattoes were thought to enjoy much greater social mobility.
55 Freyre, Casa grande, xi.
56 On Boas, see the anthology of his work and the useful commentary in Franz Boas, The Shaping
of American Anthropology, 1883-1 911, George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. (New York, 1974), esp. 189-91 and
following; see also Michael P. Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1987), 79. On Casa grande and
Boas, see Casa grande, xi, 318 n.1, 319 n.1, 323; Freyre, Perfil, 67; Francisco de Assis Barbosa, interview;
Darcy Ribeiro, "Pr6logo," Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande y senzala (1933; Caracas, 1977), xx-xxii.
57 Freyre, Casa grande, 274.

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68 JeffreyD. Needell

the slave of the hut, was the essence of this strength, for he derived from and
facilitated Brazil's triumph-the accommodation and adaptation of the two races
in the tropics:

The strength, or, better, the potential of Brazilian culture seems to us to reside wholly in
the wealth of its balanced antagonisms ... Not that in Brazilians subsist, as in the Anglo
American, two antagonistic halves, black and white; that of the ex-master and ex-slave. In
no way. We are two, fraternal halves ... that come mutually enriched by diverse values and
experiences when we complete one another in one whole.58

This celebration of patriarchal slavery and race mixing is the key to Freyre's
work. To arrive there, Freyre had begun by using Boas to attack the central
ideological charge against his nation-the generally accepted idea that Brazil was
inevitably crippled by its African heritage, because the African slaves had
transferred their racial corruption to Brazil through extensive "interbreeding."
The use of Boas allowed Freyre, first, to refute the problem of an inherent, racial
corruption by refuting the idea that social characteristics linked to race were
transferred through birth and, second, to pose the issue as one of culture,
specifically, a culture generated through miscegenation. Freyre's focus on sup-
posed racial corruption and miscegenation led to their patriarchal origins, as he
understood them to be the socio-cultural legacy of the Brazilian plantation.
The result brought him to a new evaluation of all the constituent elements of
colonial plantation society. The research on childhood had given him a broad
knowledge of colonial society, Portuguese culture, and family life. After 1931, he
turned to a reexamination of Africans, Amerindians, and miscegenation within
the confines of a racial, patriarchal hierarchy. If miscegenation were the origin of
most Brazilians, and if, as he had realized in his studies, it was inextricably
associated with Brazil's beginnings under Portuguese colonialism and the planta-
tion, then this was the locus classicus of the nation. Brazilian origins would have to
be rehabilitated if the slur against the nation's essential identity were to be erased.
Freyre did so with unnerving candor. To engage with the issue of miscegenation
as the key to Brazilian origins was also to address sexuality and gender relations
between the races. No one who reads Casa grande and Sobrados e mucambos is
unaware of their pervasive sexual charge. While a reader might not be surprised
to see sex arise in books on miscegenation, Freyre, in a shocking break with the
proprieties of his society and literary culture,59 not only presented miscegenation
as basic to the national identity and culture but also praised it, described sexuality
as pervasive, and used coitus as a metaphor for racial and social hierarchy.
Perhaps biography helps to explain his approach. For, just as one might argue
that Freyre was searching for his cultural and personal identity in the 1920s, one
can also argue that he was simultaneously searching for his sexual identity.
Indeed, he was apparently attempting to reach closure on all counts in the 1930s
in the great book at issue here. In his published diary and an interview printed in

58Freyre, Casa grande, 377.

59Jose Ant6nio Gonsalves de Mello, Freyre's cousin, noted that the work was considered porno-
graphic by some, especially by the religious, in an interview, January 30, 1991, Recife.

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Freyre's eightieth year, a number of missing facts surface.60 First, it becomes clear
that Freyre was caught up in the era of sexual experimentation that followed
World War I, and he thought of his own sexual experience and that of others as
a measure of cultural and ethnic difference. Second, much of Freyre's celebration
of miscegenation derives from an evocation of the sexual relationship between
privileged white boys and mulata servants.61 It is now evident that Freyre was partly
generalizing from a crucial experience of his own. He discloses in the interview
that his first sexual intercourse took place with a woman, a family servant whose
physical description appeared in Casa grande: a morena, with small feet.62 Third,
Freyre reveals that he experimented with homosexual intercourse in the early
1920s. He maintains that he did so only in Europe and that the experiment was a
failure; he thereafter rejected coitus with males as a personal preference.63
The new information suggests that Freyre, at the time when he was defining
himself intellectually, from fifteen to twenty-three, was also doing so sexually, and
as part of the same process. His penchant for the woman of his first coital
experience endured his whole life long, at least in terms of memory and sexual
aesthetics.64 Nonetheless, his exile from Brazil and his embrace of a cosmopolitan
intellectual life at Columbia and in Europe was matched by sexual experiments
with a young blonde American "puritan," a sexually mature Cuban, others of the
varied women of Columbia, Greenwich Village, and a number of European
capitals, as well as a brief fling with European males.65 His return to Recife was also
a return to the sexual use of mulatas: "that which feminine Recife has which is
most recifenseand that comes in a variety of colors . . . The hot colors of flesh with
which one cannot compare the clinical white."66 Freyre's embrace of a patriarchal
past was not only figurative; in a personal sense, it was quite literal. Freyre's return
home was a return to dominant sexual and racial relations and a rejection of the
cosmopolitan sexual experimentation of his early youth.
Miscegenation and identity with patriarchy are key here. For Freyre to engage
the issue of Brazilian origins at the level of race mixing was to address sexuality
and gender relations between the races. I have suggested how these issues are
linked to Freyre's sexual journey back to a remembered sexual past; now let us
explore how they bear on his intellectual journey to a similar, larger construction.

60 See Freyre, Tempo morto, 6-7, 52-53, 61, 63, 74, 75, 76-77, 80, 87-88, 91, 92, 166; and Ricardo

Noblat, "Playboy entrevista Gilberto Freyre," Playboy, 5 (March 1980): 27-37, esp. 29-30.
61 See the discussion of miscegenation in the text just below for a close analysis of this point and
the appropriate documentation.
62 See Freyre, Tempo morto, 6-7; and Noblat, "Playboy," 29; I mean to argue that it is the evocation
of this lover that appears in Casa grande and Sobrados e mucambos, where he discusses the special
attractions of small-footed mulatas and the attractions and sexual relations between small boys and
mucamas. Morena is a racial euphemism for a person who is darker than white in complexion; it can
mean a person of African descent but does not have to. Mucama refers to a female domestic servant
of African descent, generally assigned to attend a specific person.
63 Noblat, "Playboy," 29, 30; compare Freyre, Tempo morto, 91, 92, where he notes the accessibility
of attractive blond boys, prostituting themselves in the wretched poverty of postwar Berlin, and
170-71, where he notes the homoerotic milieu at Oxford and Cambridge.
64 Noblat, "Playboy," 29.
65 See the references in nn. 60 and 63 above.
66 Freyre, Tempo morto, 142; compare 172, 207, 216, 231. The quotation refers to the women
available to him through a procuress.

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70 JeffreyD. Needell

Freyre
IN CASAGRANDEAND SOBRADOSE MUCAMBOS, ties sadism, sexuality, and racial
domination together both explicitly and implicitly, in a gendered account in
which the Brazilian white male creates Brazil through a dominating intercourse
atop women of color, an intercourse that Freyre writes of as natural and creative
but that might now be perceived as rape. These women are objectified into willing,
sensuous creatures made for sexual gratification. They are accessible by their
nature and by their natural position in the social hierarchy. Sadism comes in by
way of hierarchy-Freyre notes it in two explicitly related activities: sexual
relations and servile relations. The white male child learns to look to servants of
color for sensual gratification and sadistic pleasure. Power, penetration, and
punishment were naturally arranged from the top down. In a passage in which
Freyre sought to defend Africans from the traditional charge of introducing
sexual depravity into Brazilian society, Boas and sexual domination are both
brought to bear:

The ... African became a decided pathogenic agent in the midst of Brazilian society.
Because of "racial inferiority," shout the Aryanist sociologists. But against these shouts
arises the historical evidence-the cultural and principally the economic circumstances-
within which contact between white and black took place in Brazil. The Negro was
pathogenic but at the service of the white, as a nonresponsible part of a system articulated
by others.
In the social and economic conditions favorable to masochism and to sadism created by
Portuguese colonization ... and in the Brazilian slavocratic system of agrarian organiza-
tion, in the division of the society into all-powerful masters and into passive slaves is where
the principal causes must be sought for the abuse of Negroes by whites, through the
sadistic forms of love that are so accentuated among US.67

Freyre's (self) exploration led him to portray Brazilians, by which he implicitly

meant Brazilians who were white elite males, as driven by their libidos and the
sensual ambiance of the tropics to a predatory, unceasing search for penetration.
Initially, any orifice reminiscent (however vaguely) of a woman's vagina would do;
later, inevitably, they must perforce move on to Afro-Brazilian women themselves.
In this fashion, such women were reduced to being part of the passive, sensual,
accessible flora and fauna by which white males begat Brazil:

The children of the sons of the sugar planters slipped into ... vices, in which, partly
through the effect of the climate and more as a consequence of the life conditions created
by the slavocratic system, they alwaysanticipated their sexual activityby way of sadistic and
bestial practices. The first victims were the young black riff-raff [os muleques]and domestic
animals; later, the great bog of flesh came: the Negress or the mulatta. It was in there that
was lost, as in greedy sand, much insatiable adolescence.
Because of this, the Negress or mulatta is blamed for the too-early erotic life and for the
sexual dissolution of the Brazilian boy. With the same logic they could blame the domestic
animals; the banana tree; the watermelon; the fruit of the mandacarui,with its sticky and
67 Freyre, Tempo morto, 358-59. The attack on Aryanist sociologists
is doubtless meant for Francisco
Jose de Oliveira Viana (1883-1951), Brazil's most prominent social thinker in the 1920s. See n. 72
below. My summation here derives from a close reading of 80-81, 90, 303-04, 348-59, 378-82, 403,
425, 427, 437, 461, 467.

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 71

almost fleshy astringency. For all were objects in which was exercised-and still are
exercised-the sexual precocity of the Brazilian boy.68

Sexual activity with white females is mentioned much more briefly in Casa grande.
Freyre did not treat that subject in a general way until 1936, with the sequel,
Sobrados e mucambos. In both books, he addresses white women's sexuality as
centered on an act of shame and terror, a wretched coupling in which cloistered
doll-girls are deflowered and passive matriarchs repeatedly impregnated, a
frightening tragedy whose last acts are women's premature aging, obesity, and
death in childbirth. 69
For Freyre, sexual activity and racial domination are metaphors for one
another, and they form the matrix for Brazilian society. By generalizing a
dominant sexual role associated with mulatas as the essential act of national
creation, Freyre was affirming his own ambiguous heterosexuality and legitimizing
his enduring taste for a relationship he first experienced as an adolescent, a union
between a privileged white male and an accessible woman of color. Freyre's
obsession with reconstructing a seigneurial past might have Freyre's sexual
identity as an integral part of its intensely personal drive. In short, Freyre was
affirming his nationality, his family status, and his heterosexuality all at once in his
sexual relations with mulatas. Here, Winthrop Jordan's phrase, white over black,70
is rendered both sexual and gendered. Freyre, too, constructed the image of his
slave society as white over black-but in the explicitly coital sense and, thus, as a
society that legitimizes miscegenous rape as its initial and ongoing basis.

IF FREYRE RESOLVED THE CHALLENGE OF MISCEGENATION and his own sexual

identity in Casa grande, he also grappled with that of modernity vis-a-vis traditional
patriarchy. Here, he took up the struggle he had initiated in regionalismo. Casa
grande articulates miscegenation into the central definition of the Brazilian society
that Freyre had been putting together in the 1920s. This construction, the reader
may recall, was initiated by Freyre's master's thesis and continued in conferences
and essays of the period. It was a static and benign apologia for the provincial
planter elite projected onto the mid-nineteenth century. Yet it had another aspect,
an anti-liberal authoritarianism attached to an idealization of benevolent, auto-
cratic hierarchy.
In his letters, essays, and conferences, a seemingly incidental element is
repeated too frequently to neglect. Oftentimes, Freyre, like many intellectuals of
Brazil's first Old Republic generation, dismissed the representative, democratic,
liberal ideology of the regime as inappropriate to Brazil, an exotic and false
system, bankrupt abroad and failing at home. Freyre counterposed to it the idea
of a state reflecting "organic" realities, even embracing monarchy and a pater-
nalist syndicalism as natural to Brazil's patriarchal hierarchy. In at least one place,
he also anticipated a crucial theme of Casa grande and Sobrados e mucambos: that
68 Freyre, Tempo morto, 427. Compare 104, where Freyre recalls his own pastoral pleasures.
69 See Freyre, Casa grande, chap. 4; and Sobrados e mucambos (Rio deJaneiro, 1936), chap. 4, passim.
70 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1968).

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72 JeffreyD. Needell

patriarchal hierarchy was the essential basis of Brazilian society, a society whose
decline could be induced by the hierarchy's destruction through natural causes
(the Great Drought of 1877, which eroded the Northeast's hinterland society) or
socio-political forces (urban, liberal professionals, bachareis, alienated from the
national reality).71 In these 1920s positions, Freyre approached the analysis of
Oliveira Viana, with whose work Freyre was very familiar. However, both in the
1920s and 1930s, Freyre did not take the next step that Viana and other
authoritarians did: corporatism. Rather than pose a "modern" solution, one
claiming a scientific assessment of the nation's history and racial and social
pathologies (Viana's path), Freyre lodged a protest, based on a historical
reconstruction and evocation of colonial patriarchy. His brief mention of a kind
of monarchical syndicalism never went further than suggestions; he neither
sustained nor developed his prescriptions for the present or the future in this
regard. Against the trauma of "modernization" so palpable in the 1920s and
1930s, Freyre offered only a profoundly reactionary mythology of the past.72
In Casa grande and its sequel, Freyre argued that the natural origin and classical
expression of Brazilian civilization was the colonial patriarchal racial hierarchy. In
this civilization, the fortuitous libido and acculturative disposition of the Portu-
guese made it possible to create a society out of distinct racial elements in the
tropics. The society was organic in that it evolved naturally, over time, in a
congenial, familial harmonizing of tropical agriculture, two tropical races, and
one dominating but adaptable race. The result took its ideal form in the
seventeenth-century slave plantation and its offspring, the mulatto.73
On this plantation, a cruel paternal figure begat heirs by his pedigreed
child-bride and sired the Brazilian masses on his women of color. Men of color
71 In Freyre's writings, the distaste for liberalism emerges often, if without much development; the
ideas concerning a syndicalist authoritarianism or monarchy are much less frequent. See Gilberto
Freyre to Meu caro amigo [Oliveira Lima], Lisbon, January 26, 1923, Cartas, 206-07; Freyre, Tempo
morto, 83-84, 85, 86-87, 149; Tempo de aprendiz, 1: 237, 277-78; Regido, 50, 64-65, 68, 69, 75-76 [note
in the latter mention ofOliveiraViana, etal.], 173, 174-75; Perfil, 11,93, 106-07, 132-33, 134, 135-38,
140-41, 142, 143, 185. The paternalist syndicalism seems to derive from a reading of Georges Sorel
and the influence of French rightist circles (for example, Charles Maurras); see Tempo morto's Paris
entries in the 1922 period, esp. 84-85, 86-87. Compare Meneses, Gilberto Freyre, 108-11. On
patriarchy and its decline, see Regido, 113, 166-68, 174, 188-94. The term bacharel (plural, bachareis)
derived from the degree given someone completing law school or a university, was a title of great
prestige and pretension. A bacharelwas customarily addressed as doutor (doctor), and the designation
was used, by extension, for the class of people who had achieved a higher education.
72 See the references in n. 39, above, particularly the Lamounier citation, for the intellectual
reaction against the Old Republic. The most recent work on Oliveira Viana includes Elide Rugai
Bastos, Joao Quartim de Moraes, orgs., 0 pensamento de Oliveira Vianna (Campinas, 1993); and
Jeffrey D. Needell, "History, Race, and the State in the Thought of Oliveira Viana," HAHR, 75
(February 1995), forthcoming.
73 These major themes are most clear, however dispersed, through the preface and the first and last

two chapters of Casa grande; in Sobrados e mucambos, compare the first chapter to the last, which
suggests the ideal by way of analysis of its decline. Note Freyre's sensitivity to comparative possibilities
with the United States and the Caribbean in Casa grande, x, xi, 435-36. Freyre had identified the
mid-nineteenth century as the culmination of the plantation ideal in the 1920s (see Regido, 154);
perhaps it was the continued research into the colonial period (and a desire for legimitization
through a long tradition) that pushed his mythologizing back. The centrality of adaptation,
acculturation, and balance between distinct, antagonistic elements, a theme central to Freyre, has
been ably treated by Elide Rugai Bastos, "Gilberto Freyre e a Questao Nacional," in Reginaldo
Moraes, Ricardo Antunes, and Vera B. Ferrante, orgs., Intelige^nciabrasileira (Sao Paulo, 1986), esp.
48-57, 73-74.

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 73

performed the gang labor in the fields, singing all the while. African women
brought this culture its exotic music and food, Amerindian women its wise
folkways about the enveloping rain forest and rivers. Class and racial conflict did
not exist, nor did contact with foreign ways, save for the occasional infusion of
European blood by a new, adaptable Portuguese. Everything this society required,
it made for itself, adapting the best aspects of an aristocratic Portugal to Brazilian
realities-making manuelino furniture from tropical hardwoods, mingling the
spiritual riches of Africa and America with a rich Portuguese Catholicism. Sugar
was traded for only a few luxuries, and these came from mother Portugal. It was
a complete society, devoid of conflict-creative, aristocratic, authoritarian, in
organic, natural harmony with a special, exuberant nature.
Against this, the origin and essence of Brazil, Freyre arrayed the forces of
"'modernization." The onus of patriarchal decline he assigned to urban life and
commerce and associated with the Jew, their agent, all of which create and
represent "modernity." For the nineteenth century, Freyre substituted bacharel
liberals, especially urban mulatto "upstarts," forJews as the "modernizing" agents
of decline.
This attack on "modernity" requires some extended discussion, given its
occasionally veiled nature and relative scholarly neglect.74 It first appears in Casa
grande's passages on medieval Portuguese civilization, in which Freyre asserts a
model for the Brazilian plantation in a static construction of a rural, Portuguese
feudalism. This ideal, he avers, was perverted and forced into decline byJews and
the international, urban-based commerce over which they supposedly presided.75
Later, Freyre argues that it was Jewish heredity and tradition that imparted
prestige to urban professions and urban learning, the historical context for the
rise of the liberal professionals and bachareisof the modern era. In the nineteenth
century, such urban professionals were often mulattoes, who found in such roles
their means of social ascent. In doing so, they undercut the authority of the
ignorant rural patriarchs and provided the social base for an exotic and unnatural
liberalism.76 Thus the association in Freyre's mind is clear-"modernization"
(cities, class conflict, bourgeois values) undercut patriarchy (countryside, class

74Although Freyre's embrace of tradition and his antagonism to "modernity" are generally
recognized, they are rarely analyzed. I know of no careful attention to his use of Jews or the city or
the mulatto liberal in this regard. Most analysis focuses on his use of miscegenation and champion-
ship of patriarchy (and thus his legitimization of the old agrarian elite). Among the most important
recent critiques are Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire; Mota, Ideologia da cultura brasileira; and Bastos,
"Gilberto Freyre." Skidmore's contextualization of Freyre's racial analysis turns on different
concerns, as does Levine's (although he draws our attention to regionalismo's reactionary relationship
to modernization). In a seeming irony, Mota shows how Freyre's work facilitated modernization by
the elites through legitimizing them and providing the hegemonic possibility of the myth of racial
democracy, with its obfuscation of historical conflict, a critique owing much to Viotti da Costa.
Andrews's focus, like Skidmore's, turns on Freyre's importance in regard to race. Borges's concerns
are with Freyre's miscegenating patriarchal mythology and its impact on the historiography
associated with the Brazilian family. Skidmore, Black into White, 190-92, 274-75; Levine, Pernambuco,
68-69; Mota, Ideologia, 53-74; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, chap. 6, passim; Andrews, Blacks and
Whites, 7-10, 152-54; Borges, Family in Bahia, 4-6.
75 Freyre, Casa grande, 250-51, 256, 258-59, 265-66.
76 Freyre, Casa grande, 252-54; in Sobrados e mucambos, chap. 7, Freyre, as a central part of the book,
ties the bacharel's ascension to that of the mulatto (this, among the most celebrated of his analyses,
was broached in "Aspectos," in 1925).

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74 JeffreyD. Needell

harmony, paternalist and aristocratic values) in a perversion of the natural order

inflicted on Portuguese and Brazilian landed patriarchs by mobile, parasitic, alien
Jews and their modern-day counterparts.
Freyre's egregious anti-Semitism, which goes generally unremarked,77 though
buttressed by 1920s Portuguese historians, has other obvious sources. Beyond the
traditional European hatred, clear in the image of the Jew as a deracinated,
parasitical moneylender, there is the variety associated with "modernity." One
finds it commonly enough, of course, in many of the societies in which reaction
to "modernization" was associated with rapid, traumatic change, strong rural
traditions, and aristocratic values. Although Freyre's response to Jews in New York
was ambivalent, he may have found the anti-Semitism common in the rightist
intellectual circles of Paris persuasive.78
An intriguing aspect of Freyre's anti-Semitism is its linkage to his own intel-
lectual identity. Freyre was himself an urban intellectual and the son and nephew
of "modernizing" urban intellectuals. His great intellectual debt was to Boas, who
was ajew, and Freyre had been a cosmopolitan, deracinated student of "modern"
artistic and literary movements abroad. In his diary are admiring references to
Isaac Goldberg, a pioneering scholar of Brazilian literature; a marked fascination

77 Among recent critics, I have seen Freyre's anti-Semitism noted only by Darcy Ribeiro, who
remarks, "The portrait ... of theJew is a caricature and implacable" ("Pr6logo," xxix), and then he
details briefly Freyre's defense of the Inquisition, condemnation of Jews' supposed parasitic financial
role, and their alleged influence on bacharelismo. Ribeiro quotes there the passage that was somehow
dropped from the English translation of 1946 (but that remains in all of the Portuguese editions):
"Technicians of usury, such the Jews became almost everywhere, through a process of specialization
almost biological that seems to have sharpened their profile into that of a bird of prey, [imparted]
their mimicry of constant gestures of acquisition and possession, [made] their hands into talons
incapable of sowing or creating. Capable only of penny pinching." Freyre, Casa grande, 249. Samuel
Putnam, translator of The Masters and the Slaves, does not mention this abridgement. What was left was
still apparently thought offensive enough (in 1946) that Putnam felt compelled to state (230 n. 105),
regarding Freyre's attitude, that "the reader should bear in mind that what he is striving for, here
as elsewhere throughout his work, is the rigorous objectivity of the social scientist ... Historical
circumstance happened to identify the Portuguese Jew with mercantilism and "plutocracy" in this era
... but to assume from this that the author regards such attributes as permanent racial ones is to
contradict the very method of historical determinism that he professes and so consistently endeavors
to practice." Putnam goes on to reassure the reader by a reference to Karl Marx's supposedly similar
censure ofJews. One reads with fascination the disclaimer Freyre wrote for the second English edition
(1956, xix), where he notes that "someJewish leaders ... went so far as to see 'anti-Semitism' in my
book." Robert M. Levine, The Vargas Regime: The Critical Years, 1934-1938 (New York, 1970), 21,
reports the rise of anti-Semitism in Brazil during the 1930s, a trend often identified with Gustavo
Barroso, the writer, historian, president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and noted Integralist
(see Levine, 28, 81; and Skidmore, Black into White, 205-07; compare Flynn, Brazil, 72). In Freyre's
case, the anti-Semitism went back at least to the 1920s in New York, where he may first have metJewish
intellectuals and seen large numbers ofJews; his response is clear in both private (Tempo morto,63-65)
and public writings (Tempo de aprendiz, 1: 93-94).
78 In support of his anti-Semitic rendering of Portuguese history, Freyre cites Mario Saa, A invasdo

dos judeus (1924); andJoao Luicio de Azevedo, Hist6ria dos cristdos novos portugueses (1922). On Saa, see
Levine, Vargas Regime, 21. On modern anti-Semitism, see Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern
Jewish History (New York, 1958), chap. 11; or George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of
European Racism (New York, 1978). On its appearance in Europe, ca. 1900, see Norman Stone, Europe
Transformed, 1878-1919 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 54-57, 180-82, 408-11; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age
of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York, 1987), 89, 158-59. On what Freyre might have picked up in French
rightist circles in the early 1920s, see Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 3d edn. (New York,
1981), 274-75, or Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3 vols. (New York, 1963-65), 3: 85-90.

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 75

with Yiddish leftist intellectuals in New York; and an appreciation of the influence
of Jewish intellectuals such as Karl Marx.79
All in all, what emerges in Freyre's symbolic use of the Jew is a profoundly
ambivalent and reactionary attitude toward much that he himself had been or was.
Perhaps this was the price of his studied identification with rural patriarchy.
Freyre's returns home, in 1923 and 1932, emerge in this light as attempts to return
to a past of which he was a part by descent and by childhood but of which his
career (and, as argued earlier, his sexual identity) since adolescence was the
repudiation. The tension between what he was and what his family had been,
between what he found at home and what he had studied of home abroad, was
central to his life's work. Indeed, in this light, it seems understandable that Freyre
made the tension and adaptation between opposites his central motif. For he
himself had mastered contradictions in his own experience and identification, just
as his patriarchs had subjugated distinct races and women in their own house-
holds. And, just as self-mastery had apparently been a key to his creative process,
so, he argued, had patriarchy been the foundation for the creation of Brazil.
Thus, even though Freyre had creatively harnessed recent American social
science to a project of creating a vision of traditional society, there is no doubt
about his own prejudices. While profoundly "modern" in his training and his
experience of personal and social antitheses, he could not truly sustain a balance;
he hungered for the security of the past. "Modernity," liberalism, homosexuality,
and Jewry were discarded or disdained. Although his work is punctuated with
criticisms of patriarchy's sadism and cruelty to Africans, women, and children, his
identification with his forefathers is manifest. His critical distance is overpowered
in his work by his embrace of patriarchy.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, it is clear that Freyre felt Brazil's natural vocation
was for an authoritarian paternalism congenial with the historic, organic speci-
ficity of the nation. For example, his 1920s critique of Dom Pedro II, Brazil's
widely respected monarch for a half-century, turned on the emperor's allegedly
unnatural liberalism and bourgeois style. These Freyre characterized as a "detest-
able anomaly." Instead, Freyre posed an organic authoritarianism:

a certain Brazilian tradition-tradition of the Brazilian common man-a tradition friendly

to governments of powerful planters, of shrewd and tough bosses, of patriarchs hard and
simultaneously paternal in the exercise of dominion. A tradition in which there exists some
masochistic residual of our patriarchal formation, with the majority of the population
submissive to planters, to fathers, to grandfathers, to priests, to uncles, and to officers.
In the midst of books, Pedro II lost sight of Brazil: a Brazil that wanted not the
[bourgeois] top hat but the crown.80

Despite this dismissal of the emperor, Freyre's generally approving attitude

toward monarchy, authoritarian monarchy that is, runs through his works of the
1920s. He wrote then of a monarch presiding over a syndicalist harmony-a
tradition cum modern formula that again suggests Freyre's ambivalence, in which

79 Freyre, Tempo morto, 62-65.

80 Freyre, Perjil, 133.

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76 JeffreyD. Needell

the balance tilted toward the past.81 Although Freyre never took the trouble to
develop such ideas, they remained fundamental to his perception of Brazilian
political potential in the past and present. In Casa grande, Freyre argued
something hinted at in his critique of the emperor years before: Brazilians,
formed in the sado-masochistic context of patriarchal racial hierarchy, ultimately
desired its return in an authoritarian regime:

Our revolutionary, liberal, demagogic tradition is only apparent and limited to foci easily
preventable politically: intimately, what most of what one can call the "Brazilian people"
enjoy is the pressure over it of a masculine and courageously autocratic government. Even
in sincere individualist expressions . . . one senses the stain or the masochistic trace: less
the desire for reforming or correcting certain vices of the political or economic organ-
ization than the pure pleasure in suffering, in being the victim, or in self-sacrifice ...
Between [the] . . . two mystiques-that of Order and that of Liberty, that of Authority and
that of Democracy-one sees balancing among us political life, precociously emergent
from the regime of masters and slaves. In truth, the balance continues to be between the
traditional and profound realities; sadistic and masochistic, masters and slaves, graduates
and illiterates, individuals of predominantly European culture and others of principally
African and Amerindian culture.82

In this extended quotation, Freyre explicitly weaves together the threads of race
and the state. For him, the gendered understandings of miscegenation, patriar-
chy, hierarchy, and political authority were mutually reinforcing. The socio-racial
origins of the people in violent rape conditioned them to embrace authority.
History and nature compelled them to take their pleasure in being dominated by
a masculine and courageously authoritarian state.
Freyre plainly disliked the "modernization" of his country, and he portrayed
that process as the perversion of its essential nature. While Freyre believed that
Brazil's supposed solution to the "race problem," miscegenation, socio-cultural
mediation, and mulatto social mobility, was superior to that of Jim Crow, he also
regarded the dissolution of the old hierarchy (a dissolution of which the mulatto's
rise and new mediating role was an integral part) as a form of national deracina-
tion.83 Such dissolution, such "modernity," signified for Freyre the destruction of
Brazil's unique artifacts, customs, and social relations. It led inevitably to urban
social anomie and class and racial conflict, mitigated only by mulatto intervention.
Thus he once argued,

The system of big house-slave hut ... came to be-in some points at least-a near marvel
of accommodation: of the slave to the master, of the black to the white, of the son to the
father, of the wife to the husband. Also a near marvel of adaptation of man, by way of the
house, to the physical milieu.
When the social landscape began to change among us ... that accommodation was
broken and new relations of subordination, new social distances, began to develop

81 See Meneses, GilbertoFreyre, 108-11; compare Freyre, Tempo morto, 84-85, 86-87.
82 Freyre, Casa
grande, 80-81; see also 78-80.
83 See Freyre, Regido, 184-92; Casa grande, 81-82, 83-84, 493; this is the great motif of Sobrados e
mucambos; see the preface and the first and last chapters.

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 Identity, Race, Gender,and Modernity 77

between rich and poor, between white and people of color, between big house and little
house. Greater antagonisms between dominators and dominated.84
Against this wretched falling out, in the deepening dusk, the mulatto offered the
traditional succor of accommodation:
The patriarchal house lost, in the cities and the farms, many of its antique qualities: the
masters of the mansions and the freedmen or runaways of the shanties became antago-
nistic extremes; quite different, the relations between them, from those which had
developed between the masters of the big house and the blacks of the slave huts, under the
long rural patriciate. Between these hard antagonisms it is that there always acted in a
powerful way, in the sense of softening them, the socially most plastic element, and, in a
certain sense, most dynamic, of our formation: the mulatto.85
Because Freyre apparently thought the process of "modernization" irreversible,
his response seems to have been to attempt to brake it or slow it down. From the
1920s on, he fought for the preservation of whatever remnants of the past
survived. His life's work was an attempt to rehabilitate or, better, create and
celebrate the origins and nature of Brazil's unique national identity as the stable,
patriarchal childhood he had lost: "studying the domestic life of one's ancestors,
we feel that we are completing ourselves little by little: it is another way of
searching for "lost time."86

IN LATER YEARS, FREYRE USED THE INFLUENCE he accumulated to institutionalize

his intellectual preoccupations in the Institutojoaquim Nabuco, dedicated to the
social-scientific analysis of Brazil's tropical civilization.87 Yet this apparent adaptive
balance between "modernity" and the origins of the national reality suggests an
intellectual poise belied by Freyre's flight to patriarchy. Although Freyre sup-
ported the Instituto from its founding to his death, he himself lived and worked
at Appipucos, the nineteenth-century mansion he restored and fitted out as a
museum of patriarchy and a personal monument. His father's home had been
destroyed in the Revolution of 1930; his brother's country place, where he had
written most of his great book, had been torn down for reasons of development.
Freyre married and begat children in the patriarchal house in which he closeted
himself to write. There, in Appipucos, on the higher ground inland from the port
of Recife, he fashioned his own casa grande-like his oeuvre and seigneurial
persona, a refuge and a reproach against the erosive tide of "modernity" rising
from the city and the Atlantic down below. There, in Appipucos, the stranger was
at home.
84 Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos, 115-16.
85 Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos, 14-15.
86 Freyre, Casa grande, xx.
87 See Freston, "Um imperio na provincia." Joaquim Aurelio Barreto Nabuco de Arauijo (1849-

1910), born in Pernambuco, was a noted abolitionist, historian, diplomat, and man of the world. This
Europeanized litt&rateur,a favorite son of Recife, was a figure with whom Freyre seems to have
identified (interview, Magdalena Freyre).

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