Mad Scripts: Crônicas and Representations of Madness in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro

Brazilian writers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced texts, known as crônicas that subscribed to the conventions of both literature and journalism.  From reporting the daily news stories to describing the ornate details of the new majestic buildings that dotted the skyline, writers not only wrote about the city but they narrated it into existence by evoking the sublime tapestry of urban life.  A recurring character in these texts is the madman/woman. As many chroniclers and visitors of the city attested, Rio de Janeiro was replete with “street types” (tipos de rua) with unusual mannerisms and habits that deviated from societal norms. Often dismissed by literary scholars as mere literary devices to serve humorous ends, the mad are rendered insignificant subjects of study.  Often real, often of color, these women and men   are made vulnerable due to the ways in which their madness is not only placed on display but becomes an object of literary consumption.  serves as a public script. In “Private Texts, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics” scholar Karla Holloway contends that brown/black bodies are made public, and calls for a new cultural ethics that holds sacrosanct individual privacy. This paper investigates the extent to which the crônica, as a public script, renders the mad and the bureaucracy entrusted to manage it as both subject and object of study.  In charting the location of the mad who dotted the pages of various crônicas, it becomes commonplace for them to inhabit centers of economic and cultural prestige.  In this manner, the crônica serves as a hypertext from which to understand urban socio-political and economic processes.