34 pages • 1 hour read
Clarice LispectorThe Smallest Woman in the World
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Clarice Lispector
The author’s perspective in the story “The Smallest Woman in the World” is deeply influenced by her own experience as an outsider in society. Clarice Lispector was a Jewish Ukrainian who immigrated to Brazil with her family in 1922 when she was a child. Chaya Lispector was her birth name, which her family changed upon arrival in Brazil in order to blend into the new country.
Clarice Lispector was born in the shtetl (a Jewish village) of Chechelnyk in the Russian Empire (today’s western Ukraine) in a situation of extreme poverty and persecution. The Lispector family suffered tremendously in the wave of pogroms during the Russian Civil War (1917-1923). As Benjamin Moser writes in his biography of Clarice Lispector, “[W]hat befell the Jews of the Ukraine around the time of Clarice Lispector’s birth was a disaster on a scale never before imagined. Perhaps 250,000 were killed: excepting the Holocaust, the worst anti-Semitic episode in history” (Moser, Benjamin. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 11). Clarice’s mother, as Moser and Clarice herself attest, was the victim of sexual assault during one of the pogroms. She thereby contracted a venereal disease, which went untreated because there was no cure for it yet. She died a decade later, after the family established itself in Brazil.
This fact, although it went mostly unspoken during Clarice’s life, greatly marked the family and the writer’s focus in her work. Objectification, discrimination, persecution, effacement of identity, and a heavy atmosphere of menace are common themes in Lispector’s works. “The Smallest Woman in the World” describes the condition of a vulnerable human being who nevertheless manages to keep herself safe amid danger. Although constantly fighting physical dangers and the objectification of the other characters in the story, the main character is centered in her own humanity and defines herself as a standalone, self-sufficient human being.
In interviews, Clarice Lispector always insisted that she was a true Brazilian, as she did not want to bear the discrimination that her family experienced before reaching Brazil. However, she was mostly unable to blend in. Her persona, and especially her writings, are a testimony of ancestral trauma. Moser, citing one of Lispector’s friends, writes: “Clarice was a foreigner on earth, going through the world as if she’d arrived in the dead of night in an unknown city amidst a general transport strike” (Moser, Benjamin. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 2). This alienation, especially as a result of cultural differences, appears as a major thread in “The Smallest Woman in the World” as well as in Lispector’s other works.
Literary Context and Reception: Modernism and Feminist Literature
During her lifetime, Clarice Lispector was well known in Brazil as a modernist writer with a vivid, original style of writing. She was often compared to other experimental 20th-century writers such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. She is considered one of the greatest modern writers in the Portuguese language. Lispector’s writing style often employs a technique called “stream of consciousness,” which was practiced by modernist writers such as James Joyce in Ulysses or Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time.
In addition, her style relies on literary experimentation and the distortion of sensations, which attest to Lispector’s surrealist influences. The surrealists used distortion to bring out the essence of an object or emotion, such as in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which the elongated clock depicts the subjective experience of time’s passing. Little Flower’s size is an example of this distortion, which creates distance between the vulnerable small woman and the other characters in the story. Lispector used automatic writing, a surrealist practice in which writing is done continuously and without a plan, relying on the author’s unconscious connections and instincts. Many of Lispector’s short stories were written in short bursts of inspiration, employing a raw, unpolished style. Lispector’s writing generally uses a lyrical tone. Although she does not focus on plot, her characters are vividly developed.
Despite explicitly not aligning herself with any literary or philosophical current, Lispector is considered an early feminist writer by several scholars. Hélène Cixous, a French feminist philosopher, wrote an influential book about Clarice Lispector’s work, titled Reading with Clarice Lispector. Cixous describes Lispector’s writing as écriture féminine (feminine writing) for her explorations of female subjectivity and the rich description of her female characters’ inner worlds, focused on their thoughts, emotions, desires, and struggles. Beyond the feminist angle, Cixous also saw Lispector’s work as challenging the conventional social order through her literature: “What can be decanted from listening to the work of Clarice Lispector over a span of twenty or thirty years is that the whole tissue of logical discourse has become useless” (Cixous, Hélène, Reading with Clarice Lispector. University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 30-31). This means that through her writing, Lispector defies logical discourse, which maintains the traditional and patriarchal order of the world. Beyond issues of identity and discrimination, Lispector explores the possibility of describing unimaginable facts, often by amplifying the characteristics and situations included in her stories. Lispector also addresses other philosophical themes, such as consciousness, aesthetics, and the symbolic power of language.
