Clarice Lispector, the sublime feminine and the influences of feminist criticism

Abstract

The Criticism of the work of Clarice Lispector is marked by the analysis of existentialist aspects present in several excerpts of her novels and short stories. However, a particular perspective of this author’s work, which is the writer’s relationship with the Feminist Criticism, has not been further explored. According to Nunes (2019), Lispector’s journalistic production from 1952 presents intertextuality with the work of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. While working for the newspaper Comício, Lispector published passages from books by these writers. In the same year, the book Alguns Contos was published, a work in which we can observe the intertextuality highlighted by Nunes (2019) more specifically in the short story “Amor”. We propose a reading of the short story based on feminist literary criticism which, analyzing the notion of the sublime (Longino, 2019; Kant, 2002), develops a reflection about the feminine sublime (Freeman, 1995; Kamita, 2016) to highlight critical positions towards oppression of the women. The text is written based on the tension between the routine experienced by the character Ana, a housewife, in the face of a set of possibilities available to those who did not have the obligations to dedicate themselves to house chores, the husband

and the children. The feeling of the sublime, which was sparked after seeing a blind man chewing gum on the street, makes the character aware of the rules that regulated her life. From this passage, the tension imposed by the limits to which women were subjected, notably white middle class women in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s, is described. In a scenario in which marriage seems to be the safest alternative for women, Ana ends up giving in to the routine, even though she desired other possibilities in life.