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.
Character Analysis
Little Flower
Little Flower is the dynamic protagonist of the story. Her name is given to her by Marcel Pretre, a French explorer and the story’s antagonist. The name Little Flower evokes notions of fragility, innocence, and beauty. It also hints at the potential for growth and blossoming, as well as carrying the seed of reproduction—we learn at the beginning of the story that she is pregnant. The name also reflects a view of femininity as associated with the small and vulnerable. By the end of the story, the strength of her character becomes prevalent over the initial defenselessness in which she is enveloped by the French explorer.
Little Flower’s most striking characteristic is her extraordinary smallness. Being merely 18 inches tall, she defies the expectations of conventional human proportions. The author, mimicking the French explorer’s voice, vividly describes Little Flower as a product of “the need Nature sometimes has to outdo herself” (165). Her miniature stature evokes a mix of fascination, objectification, and the desire to possess and devour from those who encounter her. Although physically small, Little Flower possesses a great sense of resilience and survival instinct. She has endured the harsh realities of the jungle, avoiding being eaten by the members of the Bantu tribe or by predatory wild beasts. Like other members of her pygmy tribe, she lives in tall trees in the jungle, only sometimes descending to cook.
Throughout the story, Little Flower remains mostly silent. This silence maintains an enigmatic aura about her, allowing others to project their assumptions, desires, and fears onto her. Her silence also serves as a stark reminder of her otherness, as she is unable to articulate her experiences or assert her agency. A parallel can be drawn here between the sense of danger, vulnerability, and lack of agency that characterize Little Flower when seen through the eyes of the Western explorer and the struggle for safety that the author of the story, Clarice Lispector, knew so well from her migrant Jewish family, which fled persecution.
Little Flower becomes the subject of fascination and objectification for the characters who encounter her. Her life-sized photograph is published in a Sunday newspaper article, reducing her to a mere curiosity. The public’s reaction is mostly dehumanizing, as they perceive Little Flower as an oddity rather than a living being with thoughts and emotions. Despite being treated as an object of fascination, her humanity shines through. In the last part of the story, she is described as a human being, laughing and loving. Laughter is a humanizing gesture, which the French explorer cannot use as part of his research about the pygmies: “And so she was laughing. It was a laugh that only one who doesn’t speak, laughs. That laugh, the embarrassed explorer couldn’t manage to classify” (171). Besides laughter, love also humanizes the character in the eyes of the explorer. Little Flower is shown as loving all things equally, from the explorer’s ring and boots to the explorer himself. The fact that she does not participate in the materialist Western scale of values allows Little Flower to love profoundly, in a way unfamiliar to the Western explorer: “[N]ot in the slightest would her profound love for the explorer be devalued by the fact that she also loved his boots” (171).
Little Flower's character is a lens through which the story explores the themes of otherness, vulnerability, and the power dynamics inherent in human relationships. Her physical smallness amplifies the power imbalances between herself and the world around her. She is a symbol of marginalized individuals who are objectified, misunderstood, and often stripped of their agency due to societal perceptions and stereotypes. At the end of the story, she is shown to be just as able to develop feelings of possessiveness, as she expresses how glad she is to have a tree of her own. She says one word only to Marcel Pretre: “[Y]es” (172). This last fact completes her full character arc from being objectified and characterized only by her size to being seen as an equal, challenging the entrenched beliefs of the French explorer.
Marcel Pretre
Marcel Pretre is the antagonist in “The Smallest Woman in the World.” He is a French explorer who searches for and discovers, in the Central Congo, the Likouala tribe—the smallest pygmy people in the world. Among them is Little Flower. The way Pretre’s relationship with the woman is described throughout the story reveals layers of colonial inquisitiveness, objectifying insensitivity, reticent modesty, and unexplored cultural prejudices. It is unknown if Pretre is truly moved or changed by the end of the story. The narrator allows the reader to consider the possibility that the explorer’s biases concerning his object of study change for the better. However, the range of emotions that Pretre experiences, although complex, does not include a self-critical stance. As a result, it is safe to assume that Marcel Pretre is a static character.
Marcel is portrayed as an inquisitive and adventurous explorer, driven by a thirst for discovery and a desire to unravel the mysteries of the world. However, his prejudices and colonial attitude determine most of his interactions with Little Flower. He describes the pygmy woman by likening her to an animal, reacts with perplexity and distress every time she shows agency, and uses her image to get published in the Sunday paper in his country, treating the African woman as a curiosity that is his to share. As a French explorer in the African jungle, he embodies the cultural and historical legacies of colonialism. His presence raises questions about power dynamics, representation, and how the Western gaze often objectifies and exoticizes non-Western cultures and individuals.
However, Marcel Pretre is shown to have the potential to transgress his own colonial mindset. He is affected by the interaction with Little Flower, often getting flustered. He learns some words in the tribe’s language and is able to communicate with Little Flower. His transformation arc, however, is not complete, as he does not show empathy toward the people he is studying.
The Mother
The mother in the fifth vignette is a secondary character whose reflection and perspective on Little Flower’s photograph in the Sunday newspaper connect the Western and African worlds. Although she is a secondary character, she is nevertheless a round character with complex emotions, playing an important role in the story. The mother is shown as reacting to her son’s “clever idea” to have Little Flower as a toy. During her reflection, she is curling her hair while looking in the mirror. This scene depicts her in the middle of an act that distances her from Little Flower’s world. Her thoughts are presented through the stream-of-consciousness literary device, which reproduces the thoughts of the character in a realistic way. The mother’s thoughts are fragmented and not always connected, as is the case with most people. At the same time, this device helps the readers connect deeply with the character as she explores her conflicting thoughts and emotions about the pygmy woman.
Instead of judging or approving of her son’s objectifying reaction to Little Flower’s photograph, the mother remembers the family cook’s story about a group of girls in an orphanage who hide the death of another girl to use her corpse as a doll. The mother connects her son’s objectifying impulse and the orphanage story through “the cruel necessity of loving” (168). She accepts a reality that associates love with cruelty, though she is uncomfortable with it. As a mother, she feels both “horror at her own soul that […] had engendered that being fit for life and happiness” and “careful attention and uncomfortable pride” (169). Although it is not expressed directly, the mother is an empathetic person who realizes how harmful the objectification of Little Flower is and can relate to that attitude. To fit into her society, the mother needs to perform gestures that distance her and her family from the African world; however, she cannot fully discard her inherent empathy and the closeness that she feels toward Little Flower.
Other Characters in Vignettes
The readers of the Sunday newspaper are presented in vignettes. They express the range of reactions that Westerners have to Little Flower’s photograph. With a couple of exceptions, the reactions are an extension of the objectifying attitude that Marcel Pretre adopts toward Little Flower. The readers are secondary characters who help complete the full spectrum of Western society’s attitude toward an African reality unknown to them. Most readers express the same desire to possess Little Flower. Compassion, mostly in the form of pity, is expressed by only one character (the young bride in the fourth vignette), only to be quickly repressed by her mother, who likens Little Flower to an animal, dehumanizing her and saying she is unworthy of compassion.
Among the readers, the little girl in the third vignette does not objectify Little Flower but shows that she has been in the same position, as the objectified smallest being. She fears losing her place when she sees the picture of Little Flower, who is smaller than her. This shows her familiarity with the situation in which one is the vulnerable other. As a side effect, dehumanization and objectification mean that the object can be easily replaced by another, an insight that prompts the little girl to feel that “misfortune has no limits” (168). Overall, the readers, outside the mother in the fifth vignette, are one-dimensional, flat characters who do not evolve throughout the story. Their perspectives help create and maintain the distance between the Western and African worlds, revealing the difficulty of bridging this gap.
