The Smallest Woman in the World

Through the encounter between the French explorer Marcel Pretre and the pygmy woman known as Little Flower, Lispector explores the nature of human relationships, the power dynamics of perception, and the equally liberating and oppressing potential of love. The story employs vivid descriptions, symbolic imagery, and a reflective narrative voice that engages readers on multiple levels. The narrator’s tone varies between detached observation, intense emotional involvement, and irony. Lispector creates depth and complexity by building both the internal world of the characters and the external circumstances. In addition, the author does not pass judgment or criticism directly, providing all the information needed for the reader to make their own judgment. This is an important characteristic of all Lispector’s works: She does not impose her perspective on the reader but summons them for further reflection by keeping the narrative free of authorial inferences, predigested interpretations, and imposed moral deductions.

However, the narrator does have a distinctive voice throughout the short story, often evident in the ironic tone that she uses to portray the French explorer Marcel Pretre, who approaches the discovery of the pygmy tribe as a scientific endeavor but finds himself confronted with emotions that he did not anticipate. The description of Pretre is rooted in the accounts of European explorers and anthropologists, who greatly contributed to the colonization of Africa by using Anthropological Research as a Justification of Objectification. The idea that anthropologists are scientists who think they can detach themselves from the “objects” that they are studying and provide impersonal descriptions of deeply personal encounters is one of the central themes of the short story. Lispector uses irony to highlight Pretre’s internal contradictions, as he considers himself superior to the world of the African pygmies that he is studying yet discovers much about himself in the process. He fluctuates between scientific seriousness and emotional confusion or even anguish. For example, he feels “an immediate need for order” when studying Little Flower but “distress” when he hears her laugh (166). Lispector’s ironic observations underscore the limitations of Pretre’s scientific mindset and challenge the notion of objective knowledge and classification. The narrator brings back subjectivity as an important factor in the explorer’s experience.

In contrast to irony, the narrator’s voice also possesses a visceral quality that allows readers to experience the story on a more emotional level. The descriptions of the natural environment, the encounter between Little Flower and Pretre, the responses of the Sunday readers when viewing Little Flower’s photo in the newspaper, and moments of tenderness and vulnerability evoke a strong emotional response. This tone enables readers to empathize with the characters’ experiences and feel a deeper connection with the themes explored in the story. It encourages readers to engage both intellectually and emotionally, closing the gap between Little Flower’s world in the Central Congo and that of the European explorer.

Marcel Pretre’s fixation on the pygmy tribe and his intentions to capture and exhibit their members as newspaper curiosities highlight the dehumanizing effects of his endeavor. Pretre’s experience is also a lens for examining the reactions of the European newspaper readers, who continue the work of reducing the tribe’s members to objects, stripping them of their agency, dignity, and humanity. Monstrous Desire and Dehumanization are expressed through the narrator’s visceral descriptions, such as when she depicts the reactions of one family to Little Flower’s photo: “In each family member’s head arose, nostalgic, the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for himself, that thing spared from being eaten, that permanent source of charity” (169). Each reader considers Little Flower in terms of what she can add to their lives: validation, titillation, servitude, or, in the case of one young boy, sport or play. Pretre, driven by his monstrous desire, objectifies the smallest woman and her tribe, viewing them as commodities to be captured and exhibited. His actions reflect a colonial mentality that treats Indigenous peoples as objects of fascination. This colonial attitude is presented as another type of cannibalism—Little Flower’s pygmy tribe is equally hunted by the Bantu tribe and the cultural cannibalism of the Western man, with the latter no less perilous than the former.

The smallest woman of the pygmy tribe is reduced to a mere specimen by the newspaper photo, delivered without context and lacking even the subjective experience of the explorer who “found” the tribe. The perceived otherness culminates with the analogy that one of the characters draws between Little Flower’s perceived helplessness and that of the dead girl in the family cook’s story. This technique of remembrance emulates the style of the modernist writer Marcel Proust in his famous volume Swann’s Way, in which the narrator remembers moments from his childhood when tasting a madeleine cookie. One of the characters in Lispector’s story remembers the cook’s anecdote, which then continues into a whole reflection about the cruelty of love and the instinct of possession.

However, in the last part of the short story, Lispector juxtaposes the image of Little Flower as vulnerable and objectified with her resilience and candor. The character transcends language and cultural barriers, expressing her affection for Marcel through her laughter and gestures. Her love, unbound by Western societal norms, embraces not only the explorer but also his possessions, such as his boots and ring. Her unconventional expression of love challenges conventional notions of affection and invites readers to consider whether their reactions toward other human beings are learned or spontaneous.

The story also explores gender by considering the different portrayals of the feminine: the patriarchal, colonial portrayal and that of Little Flower herself, which shocks through its nonparticipation in the set of norms that determine femininity in the Western world. Little Flower, seen through the eyes of the French explorer, is reduced to her exoticism and smallness. Her pregnancy adds to her gendered exoticism: “In the tepid, wild mists, which swell the fruits early and make them taste almost intolerably sweet, she was pregnant” (165). However, as Little Flower moves, scratches, laughs, and returns the gaze toward the explorer and reader alike, she breaks out of the narrow understanding of the feminine in the Western world. Seen through the lens of the Intersectionality Between Gender and Racial Stereotyping, Little Flower’s transgression is shocking, and the explorer cannot sustain her gaze:

At that moment Little Flower scratched herself where a person doesn’t scratch. The explorer—as if receiving the highest prize for chastity to which a man, who had always been so idealistic, dared aspire—the explorer, seasoned as he was, averted his eyes (167).

There are several questions that the reader can ask. First, would the explorer’s reaction have been the same if, instead of studying a pygmy woman, he had studied a pygmy man? The standards that a pregnant woman is held to are different from those a man is supposed to follow. The second question addresses our perception of race: If a gesture such as scratching shocks the white explorer, then what about the existence of a world completely different from his own? Lispector’s evocative descriptions of otherness through well-placed symbols and reactions put under a magnifying glass the stereotypes and biases prevalent in Western societies.

While the characters in the short story hold on to “the insurmountable distance of millennia” that they perceive between themselves and Little Flower’s pygmy tribe, Lispector subtly but effectively connects the characters on a deeper level. Throughout the story, there is an underlying theme of Motherhood as Power and Vulnerability, which brings together Little Flower and the mother who interacts with her son’s desire to possess Little Flower as a toy while she is curling her hair in the mirror. The mirror is an important symbol in this story because the Western mother does not stare at Little Flower’s photo in the newspaper; rather, she looks in the mirror and sees both her connection with Little Flower and the distance between their two worlds. In the short story and Lispector’s work in general, motherhood is not equated with nurture and unconditional love but is rather depicted as a source of contradictory and challenging emotions. The encounter between the Western mother and Little Flower unfolds a story within a story, illustrating the powerful role of motherhood at the center of the bourgeois family, which, in turn, sustains the colonial and imperialist ambitions of nations. At the same time, motherhood brings about the connection with a deeper, raw existence that the Western mother longs for.