A pata da gazela ('The Foot of the Gazelle') is a novel written by the Brazilian writer José de Alencar.
Set in Rio de Janeiro, the novel recounts the rivalry of two young men, the wealthy and idle Horacio and the hard-working Leopoldo, for Amélia, a businessman's daughter.
[1] A pata da gazela is one of Alencar's contemporary or urban novels, in which he reflected the cosmopolitan society of late 19th-century Brazil by adapting European models, such as Balzac's "human comedy", while using Rio as his setting.
[5] Using an ironically literarily aware narrator, the novel also satirises the Romantic obsession with love and the description of passion; Alencar critiques both suitors' behaviour and shows both to be fantasising, and both to be fixated on Amélia's shape, while Amélia herself is aware of Horacio's obsession and arranges the misleading appearance of the deformed foot—which belongs to someone else—to test him.
The element of foot fetishism has led to some criticism of the novel, and the final scene makes the reader disturbingly complicit in voyeurism.