Clarice Lispector’s Women Characters Essay

I sat before my glass one day, And conjured up a vision bare, Unlike the aspects glad and gay, That erst were found reflected there- The vision of a woman, wild With more than womanly despair.[1] The Italian feminist writer Elsa Morante stated that: â€Å"One woman’s agony in her room is something so insignificant that it casts no shadow across the great universe†[2]. However true this might be, Clarice Lispector manages to give voice to her female character’s feelings in a such overwhelming way that the reader’s own universe cannot remain indifferent. Reading Lispector’s works, especially her short stories, is like plunging into an apparently innocuous moment of a woman’s life but rapidly and unavoidably be dragged into the unreachable depths and the darkest recesses of her psychology. It never turns out to be a merely pleasure trip. Influenced by existentialist authors, Lispector’s over-riding concern revolves around woman condition in its entirety[3]. It is a definitely complex and multi-faceted matter, which encompasses all the issues of the human condition exasperated by the womanhood’s burdens. Alongside with the unbearable awareness towards the absurdity of life and its revealed lack of meaning, the writer has to deal with the role of the women in a male oriented society, their existential sufferings and failures, the sense of relationships and isolation, their unfulfilled aspirations given up to conform to an imposed social scheme, the ideas of family and alienation, their forlorn hopes and submissiveness. The reader is prompted to ask himself: ‘to what extent is the woman allowed to be herself before becoming the objectification of somebody else’s aspirations?’ The concept of identity is therefore the pivot of all this speculation: Clarice explores the dynamics of self-discovery, the different and always traumatic ways in which her characters find or are forced to face their true authentic self and the conflict these achievements generate in their life. In this essay, I will pay close attention to the object of the mirror, a recurrent image in Lispector’s fiction, where it occupies a key role in the process of â€Å"autoconhecimento e expressà £o, contemplaà §Ãƒ £o e aà §Ãƒ £o, conhecimento das coisas e relaà §Ãƒ µes inter-subjetivas†[4]. In the consideration of this point, I will draw on the psychological theories that explained the phenomenon of visual self-identification, highlighting the correspondences in the behaviour of the woman characters. I will also refer to the literary criticism that handled with the Lispectorian â€Å"potà ªncia mà ¡gica do olhar†[5]. Then, I will focus on the range of feminine figures portrayed in Laà §os de famà ­lia, pointing out how they underwent the experience of self-awareness, what they have in common and where they are different. Finally, I will take into account Clarice’s short article â€Å"Espelho mà ¡gico†, which I found to be a particularly valu able contribution to this analysis and a sort of locking ring to this paper. Let’s start by considering the leitmotif of the mirror and the importance of sight. To try to unfold the copious polysemic connotations that the mirror bears, it is worth briefly considering it under a psychoanalytic point of view. Several are the currents that acknowledged the mirror to be one the most powerful tool in the process of the analysis and identification of the self. Jaques Lacan theorised the famous concept of the â€Å"mirror stage†: the child starts to identify with the reflection of itself, discerning the â€Å"I† in the mirror and the â€Å"I† outside the mirror. Along with OLTRE!!! The identification, however, comes the sense of alienation, due to the perception of the mirror image as an Other self. Experiencing this splitting, the subject keeps searching a constant confirmation of its identity from/by/in the confrontation with other people and objects. By the visual contacts, as a sort of multiplicity of mirrors, the sense of selfhood ca n be reinforced by returned gazes of recognition[6]. The idea that the people interacting with the subject act as mirrors for itself has also been substantiated by Charles Horton Cooley. He went further and advanced the social psychological concept of the looking-glass self, according to which ‘identity is created out of the tension between natural impulses that the individual must actively develop and the social structures that the individual must actively appropriate’[7]. He points out that there are three stages through which a person goes: she/he imagines how she must appear to others, she/he imagines the judgment of that appearance, she/he develops her/him self through the judgments of others[8]. But what happens when the social structures develop a diffused and subjugating system of judgements and bias that deeply interfere with the expression of the individual impulses? The result is deep manipulation of somebody’s own self, where self-denial tendencies usually prevail as a compromise between the two tensions. This is actually what happen to Clarice’s women characters. When they look in the mirror, they see (or glimpse) themselves how they truly are, but also how they are not allowed, or do not dare, to be. This social conditioning is clearly summarised by John Berger: ‘To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of woman has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself [†¦] because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life’[9] Bearing in mind these concepts, let’s now delve into the feminine universe of Laà §os de famà ­lia. The first aspects to remark is that Lispector’s characters are never stereotypical women. They cannot be enclosed in any womanly clichà ©, even if they share the same experiences and they sometimes seem to be facets of the same person. Clarice introduces the reader to different women, or again different stages in life of only one: daughter, adolescent, wife, mistress, mother, grandmother. Emotional detachment is one of the thing they have in common. They all show unsolvable inability to connect with others in a deep and meaningful way. Although being present and even physically close to their families, they are not emotionally present in the relationships. They dissociate, both experiencing emotional numbing, both restraining their own true feeling. Moreover, they do not find a reliable interlocutor in their partners or friends, because the image that the latter project on them is distorted and limited to the role they unconsciously or not impose on them. As previously illustrated, the achievement of self-identity requires an interchanging dialogical recognition between one I and one other that acknowledge that I as a whole[10]. Clarice’s women are left alone. Nevertheless, even when they seem to live the identity they have been given (therefore being self-denial), their true inner self, their real subjectivity suddenly bursts out. There is a kind of fil rouge that pools all the short stories: the narrative nucleus is represented by a moment of conflictive tension, an interior crisis, a rupture. At times, it is sufficient the most trifling event to trigger an epiphany, an instant of dramatic awareness. Everything that has been kept suppressed explode in a flood of thoughts, reminiscences and revelations. The body abruptly paralyses and time stands still: life is revealed, meaning is lost, the measure of identity and freedom are found. But understanding is a responsibility, and Clarice pushes her characters to their limits. They hang on the balance between stepping back or going beyond: utterly disoriented, they face the danger of living. Regarding this point, Professor Earl E. Fitz explains that: ‘they come to grips with themselves, with who and what they really are and, finally, react to this unexpectedly experienced flash of insight by either rejecting the â€Å"new self† that would emerge or by actually undertaking the creation of a new self, a new and authentic identity. [†¦] But the price of real freedom is always high and appears in Lispector’s fiction as the discomforting and solipsistic realisation that we are all alone, isolated in our solitude, and tormented by the need to communicate’[11]. Epiphanies, alienation and incommunicability show close affinities with the literary world depicted by Sartre and Camus. The encounter of the conscience with the reality, more specifically with the experience of the Absurd and the sense of meaningless of life, always generate unease in the protagonists. Even if Lispector has asserted that her naà ºsea is not the nausà ©e of Sartre[12], the epiphanic moments are associated with upsetting feelings: nausea and daze in Amor, anger in Feliz Aniversà ¡rio, hatred in O bà ºfalo, fear in Preciosidade, nausea and sadness in Devaneio e embriaguez duma rapariga ,nausea and derangement in Imitaà §Ãƒ £o da rosa. Moreover, Lispector’s characters experience these unconscious outburst via their sense of sight, similarly to Sartrian protagonists. In Amor, Ana’s reality suddenly falls apart with the simple view of a blind man chewing a chewing gum on the tram. The sudden braking of the tram is like a tug to her subconscious, the detonator of her repressed unhappiness and her existential in-satisfaction. The woman feels an emotional collapse, she is overwhelmed by nausea and compassion. A moment later, she feels emptied and alienated as she wanders through the Jardim Bà ´tanico. When she manages to get home, her husband takes her by the hand, â€Å"sem olhar para trà ¡s, afastando-a do perigo de viver†[13]. So she comes back to her previous existence, but she has now become aware that she loves her world with repugnance, loathing. She represents the women who are conscious of the fact that something essential is missing in their life, that what they are surrounded by is not what they really wanted, is not enough to fulfil them. At the end of the day she look at herself in the mirror, â€Å"por um instante sem nenhum mundo no coraà §Ãƒ £o. Antes de se deitar, como se apagasse uma vela, soprou a pequena flama do dia.†[14] The process is alike in O bà ºfalo. The unnamed protagonist is destroyed by unreciprocated love. ‘Eu te odeio, disse a mulher, muito depressa, a um homem que nà £o a amava. Mas a mulher sà ³ sabia amar e perdoar, e ‘se aquela mulher perdoasse mais uma vez, uma sà ³ vez que fosse, sua vida estaria perdida’. In order to bear the pain, she tries to learn how to hate by the wild nature of the animals. Wandering in a zoo, she encounters a buffalo (something close to the male sexual symbology). â€Å"Ela nà £o olhou a cara. [†¦] Olhou os seus olhos. E os olhos do bà ºfalo, os olhos olharam seus olhos†. The climax is achieved by the visual contact between their eyes. She feels so jarred that she faints. The condition of woman victim of love finds its catharsis in this epiphany closed to sexual ecstasy. Visual contact and self-perception take on another nuance in Preciosidade. The protagonist is an adolescent girl, who tries to avoid having anyone look at her. She feels she must protect an ambiguous preciousness she owns. Either it is referred to her virginity or simply to her being a girl, by eschewing male’s gazes she knows she will keep from becoming an objectification of their desire. More complex are the eye contacts in the short story Laà §os de famà ­lia. The title includes the emblematic essence of family relationships. The semantic ambivalence of laà §os can either be seen in a positive way, â€Å"love bonds†, or in a negative one, like â€Å"binding chains†. The protagonist Catarina and her mother epitomise this ambivalence, in living their strained relationship as a mother and as an adult daughter. Sentiments are no longer expressed, love mixes with hate, visual contact is unbearable. Waiting for the train to leave, the mother looks at herself in pocket mirror to fill the emptiness left by the lack of communication with Catarina. Once home, Catarina take a walk with her son, tying him to her in another noxious kind of love binding. Very important is the figure of the husband, left out, excluded. He need her, but awkwardly tries to exercise his apparent power to show off his role. Another strongly symbolic story is Imitaà §Ãƒ £o da rosa. The protagonist is Laura, a woman who experienced a rupture, both physical with a nervous breakdown, both social, not being able to adhere again at the role of wife she used to perform before her illness. The character is therefore divided between two attitudes: the â€Å"impersonal† woman, who tries to be obedient to the established pattern of being a wife, and the â€Å"personal† woman, that breaks the contract and the social expectation codes. Roberto Corrà ªa dos Santos[15] analyses the duplicity of Laura’s nature and the reflection it has on the relationship with her husband. Corrà ªa dos Santos divides her feelings and her behaviours in two moments: the â€Å"Tempo de obedià ªncia† and the â€Å"Tempo de ruptura†. During the â€Å"Tempo de obedià ªncia†, the attitude of her husband towards Laura shows a man â€Å"esquecido de sua mulher, em paz, recostado com bandono† whereas Laura is â€Å"submissa, atende o marido de braà §o dado, fala sobre coisas de mulheres†. During the â€Å"tempo de ruptura†, the husband turns out to be â€Å"cansado e perplexo, mudo de preocupaà §Ãƒ £o, tà ­mido, com um hà ¡lito infeliz†, while she becomes â€Å"super-humana, tranqà ¼ila em seu isolamento brilhante, como un barco tranqà ¼ilo, de perfeià §Ãƒ £o acordata†[16]. Like the example of Carlota’s husband, Laura’s husband metaphorically shrinks the more and more his wife finds her dimension of self-confidence. Fitz, E. Earl sums up: â€Å"Consistent with Lispector’s view that each of us fight a battle for control of the chaos that envelops us, she shows poignantly how the woman in the story is growing in terms of consciousness and self-understanding (tangled as this itself is) while the man with whom she is living [†¦] is stupidly and dully trapped in his own uninteresting view of reality, [†¦] dominated by the spurious â€Å"clarity† of his conventional thought, his socially prescribed clichà ©s and unoriginal thinking†[17] In addition to these considerations, it is relevant to stress that the concept of the mirror as fundamental tool in the process of self-perception has also been taken up by Clarice outside her fictional work. Espelho mà ¡gico is short article she wrote when she contributed to Dià ¡rio da Noite. It was published in 1960, in a culumn entitled â€Å"Sà ³ para mulheres†, which suggests a hidden feminine complicity that strengthens the message the author wants to conveyed: Nà £o à © sà ³ o espelho da madrasta de Branca de Neve que à © mà ¡gico. A verdade à © que todo espelho tem a mesma magia. [†¦] Vocà ª nà £o hà ¡ de perguntar: â€Å"Quem à © mais bela do que eu†. O melhor à © perguntar ao espelho: â€Å"Como posso ficar mais bela do que eu?† Eis os ingredientes para um espelho mà ¡gico: 1) um espelho propriamente dito, de preferà ªncia daqueles de corpo inteiro; 2) vocà ª mesma diante do espelho; 3) coragem. [†¦] Coragem para se ver, em vez de se imaginar. Sà ³ depois de se enxergar realmente, à © que vocà ª poderà ¡ comeà §ar a se imaginar. [†¦]Mas lembre-se: a imaginaà §Ãƒ £o sà ³ nos serve quando baseada na realidade. Seu â€Å"material de trabalho† à © a realidade a respeito de vocà ª mesma. Nà £o vou lhe dizer o que vocà ª deve fazer para melhorar de aparà ªncia. Nà £o tenho a pretensà £o de ensinar peixe a nadar. E sà ³ uma coisa à © que vocà ª nà £o sabe: que vocà ª sabe nadar. Quero dizer, se vocà ª tiver confianà §a em vocà ª mesma, descobrirà ¡ que sabe muito mais do que pensa. Mas, de qualquer modo, estarei aqui para ajudar a vocà ª a nà £o esquecer que sabe. Here, Clarice recurs to the archetype of the magic mirror in the fairy tale, positioning the question of identity in an apparently simple layer of interpretation. The strength of this passage, though, resides in the shifting of the cultural pattern of the identification of the self: the answer is not any more given by the mirror, but acknowledged directly by the person who mirrors herself. Who is answering is indeed the same woman who asked, providing herself with the true measure of her renewed â€Å"I† descried alone, without the need of something (or somebody) else who sees her from the outside. This is the new espelho mà ¡gico Clarice hopes for, where the magic comes from the other side on the glass: the person. More than an article, it becomes a suggestion, an exhortation. It takes some efforts, some coragem para se ver, se enxergar, but this is necessary in order to build a new parameter for the individual existence, a new pattern of legitimisation of the self. It is the only way for women to ged rid of the old and tight social and cultural paradigms and to confront themselves with new references based on their quotidian choices and prerogatives. A new perspective is offered, where beauty stops being a primary attribute and leaves its place to self-confidence and fortitude. This new woman holds in her hands a â€Å"material de trabalho†, the realidade a respeito de si mesma. She could represent a new possible social feminine figure, who believes in her capability to promote a change and to be in charge of her own destiny. While in her stories she often left her characters helpless and powerless in front of their mirrors, in the real world Clarice let this mirror become a threshold towards a higher dimension, like an open portal in front of the woman. The article end is contract-like: women will try to operate this transformation and the author will watch over her, with her novels and stories. For the aforementioned reasons, there is no doubt that Lispector’s fictional universe is as wide and deep as the themes it deals with. To understand how her complex feminine characters perceive themselves, it is necessary to take into account the issue of the human condition in its entirety, applied to the point of view of women. Nonetheless, every story she wrote encompasses a multitude of smaller senses and significances, so that more than one reading is needed in order to disclose all of them. Every reader can easily agree with Hà ©là ¨ne Cixous, who stated that: â€Å"Clarice’s text, like Kafka’s, are not narratives. They contain a secret, a lesson. But this secret and this lesson are dispersed in the verbal space in such a way that the meaning cannot be apprehended at a first reading.†[18] Psychoanalytic perspective helps to explain her literary explorations of the question of identity, the importance of sight, and the self-perception her characters achieve in their reflection in the mirror or in someone else’s eyes. The in-depth analysis of the women in Laà §os de famà ­lia also provides a comprehensive picture of Clarice’s profound sensibility and complex psychology. The plot, the setting, the description of the characters and their relational dynamics epitomises Lispectorian imaginary. As far as the mirror is concerned, it undoubtedly hold an important position in Clarice’s symbolism and recurs also in her non-fictional works. The article Espelho mà ¡gico represents a significant contribution in the comprehension of her Weltanschauung, and creates a concrete link between her imaginative world and the tangible reality. ———————– [1] Mary Elizabeth Coleridge The Other Side of a Mirror, 1896 [2] Elsa Morante, Arturo’s Island, p. 187 [3] Lispector does not actually represent all women in her text, but she rather focuses on the ones she belongs to and presumably knows the most: the middle-class white urban women. With the expression â€Å"woman condition in its entirety† I mean the whole range of feminine experiences a given woman can go through during her life. [4] Nunes, Benedito, Clarice Lispector. Sà £o Paulo: Edià §Ãƒ µes Quà ­ron, 1973 p. 95 [5] Ibid, p. 95 [6] Lacan, Jaques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin. 1994 p 70-72 [7] Cooley, Charles H. On Self and Social Organization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 p 20 [8] Cooley, Charles H. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s, 1902. pp. 183-184 [9] Berger, John, Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972 [10] See also: Psychology of Self. Kohut, Heinz The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press, 1971 [11] Fitz, E. Earl Clarice Lispector. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985, p. 48 [12] Lowe, Elizabeth. The Passion According to C.L.: Elizabeth Lowe interviews Clarice Lispector. Review, 24: p 36 [13] Lispector, Clarice, Laà §os de Famà ­lia. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Josà © Olympio Editora S.A., 1976 p 24 [14] Ibid, p 26 [15] Corrà ªa dos Santos, Roberto Lendo Clarice Lispector. Sà £o Paulo: Atual Editora LTDA, 1986 p. 21 [16] Lispector, Clarice, Laà §os de Famà ­lia. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Josà © Olympio Editora S.A., 1976 p 36-40 [17] Fitz, E. Earl Clarice Lispector. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985, p. 44 [18] Cixous, Hà ©là ¨ne, Reading with Clarice Lispector. Trans. By Verena Andermatt Conley. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990 p 98