Mother, Blessed Be You among Cockroaches: Essentialism, Fecundity, and Death in Clarice Lispector Author(s): Tace Hedrick Source:

Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter, 1997), pp. 41-57 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3514150 Accessed: 23/07/2009 16:27
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Mother, Blessed Be You Among Cockroaches: Essentialism, Fecundity, and Death in Clarice Lispector
Tace Hedrick
A obra de Clarice Lispector 6 conhecida por sua preocupacao com linguagem e cor a posicao da mulherna sociedade. Apesardisso, a tese deste ensaio 6 que atrav6sde Lacos de familia (1960), A paixdo de G. H. (1964), A hora da estrela (1971), and Agua viva (1971), a sua obra prop6e-se e privilegia um corpo feminino que e, na sua fecundidade biol6gica, essencial e nao-lingiistico. Lispector vincula o "ser" da mulher com seu "destino"biol6gico de ter filhos; este corpo feminino 6 relacionado, mas tamb6m 6 uma critica, do corpo da mulher essencializado na filosofia ocidental.

Minha sobrevivencia futuraem filhos e que atualidade.... Nao ter seriaa minhaverdadeira tido filhos me deixava espasm6dica como diante de um vicio negado. Aquela barata tivera filhos e eu nao: a baratapodia morrer esmagada,mas eu estava condenadaa nunca morrer,pois se eu morresseuma s6 vez que fosse, eu morreria. A paixao segundo G. H. Over the years, many critics have commented on Brazilian writer Clarice Mathienotes in 1991 that"the Lispector'sconcernfor women in herwork;althoughBarbara natureof ClariceLispector'swriting is now being recognized"(121), critics feminocentric such as feminist Helene Cixous and Maria Luisa Nunes have been working on the "feminocentric" aspectsof Lispector'swritingsince the late 1970s and early 80s.' As these criticshave demonstrated, Lispector'sconcernfor women and her concerns about language and representation hand-in-hand.Cixous in fact makes the connection explicit in much go of her writings on Lispector, as when she discusses the question of representationin to Lispector's writing in her introduction the English edition of Lispector'sAgua viva: [t]here is an intense, incessant worry (souci) which is the moral of [Lispector's] writingandwhich consistsin giving backthe flowerto the flower by getting closer to the place of origin. Clarice tries to be as essentialistas possible, even if there is, of course, no essence. (1989a, xix) It is Cixous' "thereis, of course, no essence"which standsout for me in this quote,and over againsther"of course"I would like to examinethe possibility that for Lispectorthere is no "of course";rather,that her writing is in point of fact essentialist. That is, Lispector's capacity,her fecundity, as the immutableessence writingsprivilegewoman's reproductive of what it meansto be female. In her "ClariceLispector:Artistaandr6ginaou escritora?",

Lu.o-Brazilian Review, XXXIV II 0024-7413/97/041 $1.50 ? 1997 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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Maria Luisa Nunes raises "a questao da matriz" (1984, 282) in Lispector's writing; Lispector's"questionof the womb"is also, I maintain,the question of the source or origin, and it is finally in the womb whereLispectorlocates the originaryessence of being female. This means that I would like to work througha trajectoryin Lispector's work which will of come finally to inscribeMacabea,the "star" Lispector'sposthumouslypublishedA hora da estrela, in such a way as to connecta woman's being both to her biological "destino"as a fecund being and ultimatelyto a body which is always alreadygiven to death: "[s]e iria morrer[Macabea],na morte passavade virgem a mulher....Odestino de uma mulher e ser mulher"(1977, 101). DianaFuss's "keynote" herbook EssentiallySpeaking:Feminism,Nature and for Difference is this question: "'if this text is essentialist, what motivatesits deployment?"' (1989, xi). This is a question which rendersthe use of essentialism in any given text (merely) a strategicone: "Whatmight be at stake in deploying essentialism for strategic (1989, 55). However, ratherthan attemptingto "rescue"Lispectorfor an antipurposes?" essentialist feminism by maintainingthat her essentialism is merely and for the moment strategic or rhetorical,I will read Lispector's "deployment"of essentialism in the literal sense of the word as an unfolding, a spreadingout of a feminine space where "female"is neither a rhetoricalstrategy nor a social construct. As Fuss indicates, "[a]n essentialist definition of 'woman' implies that there will always remainsome partof 'woman' which resists...socialization"(61).2 Lispector's notion of an originarybeing-female also resists socialization as it resistslanguageand representation. Lispector'sspace of the feminine, just andwholly body-oriented, underthe sign of maternalfecundity;this is alinguistic operates that space and that sign which Lispector'swriting continuallysearchesout. It is my thesis that in orderto begin to understand Lispector's essentialism, we need to understandher (writerly) relationshipwith and critique of Western philosophy, existentialism. Writingabout Frenchpsychoanalystand feminist philosopher particularly DianaFuss has alreadypointedout thatpatriarchy's Luce Irigaray, essentializing of woman as a purelymaternal, sexual,materialbody can be tracedback to Aristotelianmetaphysics: "I would go so far as to say that the dominantline of patriarchal thought since Aristotle is...woman has an essence and it is matter"(71-72). Following, to a certainextent, Luce Irigaray's lead, in this essay I will try to show how Lispector's essentialism is an and "miming"of the scene of Westernphilosophy's own conflation of the appropriation essentialism feminine with an essentialist materialityand silence. This "performative" works to establish the female body not as a mere "prop"for the playing-out of being, or property,or that which props up another,but as itself consciously staging concerns about language, being, and the other.3 This essay will follow Lispector'sLacos defamilia (1960), A paixao segundo G. H. (1964), A hora da estrela (1977), and Agua viva (1977).4 Just as A hora da estrela is "acompanhadado principioao fim por uma levissima e constantedor de dentes, coisa de dentinaexposta"(1977, 30), my own exposed feminist"nerve"will be accompaniedby the darkand fecundbody of a dying cockroachcrushedin the middleby the doorof a wardrobe in A paixao segundo G. H.: "Eu s6 a pensaracomo femea, pois o que 6 esmagado pela cintura6 femea"([1964] 1988, 60). It is generally agreed that Lispector repeatedly attempts a move away from towardwhathas been calledby variouscritics negation, languageandfrom"humanization" loss, violence, lack.5 It is less obvious in Lispectorcriticismthat this movement away from of the "accretions" languageis also a move towardan alinguisticessence, an attemptto strip or "primary," the "root." experience down to what she variously calls the "irreducible," Debra Castillo, for example, will say in her essay "Negation: Clarice Lispector" that

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"is Lispector's writing "reducesbeing to its narrowestlimit,"and furthermore a literature based on the absoluteessence of the thing,"but soon will retreat,along with Cixous, to the position that Lispectoris talking abouta "no-essence"(1992, 194). It undoubtedlyhas to do with an uneasinesson the partof feministcritics(as Diana Fuss puts it in her Essentially Speaking, the very word "essentialist"has gained rhetoricalpower "as an expression of disapprobation..." [1989, xi]) thatno realattempthas been made to work througha reading in of Lispector's"motivation" heressentialization violence andfecundity. In her opening of discussion of essentialism,Fuss notes that [i]n feminist theory, the idea that men and women, for example, are identified as such on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences has been unequivocally rejected by many anti-essentialist poststructuralistfeminists concerned with resisting any attempts to naturalizehumannature.(1989, xi) and However, Lispector is undeniably interestedin a "transhistorical" even immutable essence, as it is embodied for example both in the body of A paixao segundo G. H.'s cockroach(itself "aindaanteriorao humano"[1988, 56]) and in and throughthe character of G. H.'s own body as a fecund being: ....Ha trezentos e cinquenta [u]ma baratatao velha que era imemorial milh6es de anos elas se repetiamsem se transformarem....e sentia eu com susto e nojo que "eu ser" vinha de uma fonte muito anteriora humana....Ereconheciana baratao insosso da vez em que eu estivera gravida....(1988, 32-33, 38, 60) The "souci" or care of both A paixao segundo G. H. andA hora da estrela is the constant searchfor ways to expressthe generativenatureof being-female,a natureor essence which like the cockroach is beyond language: "-estou procurando,estou procurando. Estou tentando entender....Eproibido dizer o nome da vida" ([1964] 1988, 9, 12). As I noted the earlier,Lispectoris concernedwith how to represent femalein language;questionsabout the representation women will never be answeredby language because language itself of both veils over being and is inherentlypoverty-stricken:the adequacy of word to world to implied in any narrativewhich purports be mimetic is, for her, a false promise. In fact, paradoxically enough,it is the lived body, denudedof language,at which Lispector'swritingtries continuallyto arrive,paradoxicallyenough; as she writes in Agua viva, "se tenho aqui que usar-te palavras,elas t6m que fazer um sentido quase que s6 corp6reo..." (1978, 5). This experientialand materialspace of the body is inescapably, thoughnot reductively,tied to certainontological and phenomenologicalconcerns voiced by Western philosophers;Jean-PaulSartreis one of these. Critical work on Lispector in herself,particularly the 1960s and 70s, noticing certainconnections between her writing and Sartre's (especially in her use of nausea as a means of posing ontological questions about the self), sometimes worked to reduce her writings to a mere repetitionof Sartrean existentialism;by 1971, Naomi Lindstromis alreadycommentingon this tendency in her "ClariceLispector: Woman's Experience":"...one immediatelynotes that the Articulating chief critical accomplishmenthas been the study of [Lispector's] existential thematics" (1971, 43).6 More recently, the practice of reading Lispector through her ties with existentialismhas been viewed with some suspicion,since this is seen as reducingLispector to her "influences," positioningher as a poorfictionalcousin to the "great"male existential

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Clarice thinkers of Europe. As JudithRosenbergputs it in "TakingHer Measurements: Lispectorand 'The Smallest Womanin the World'," [m]ostcriticsoffer readingsthatlocateLispectorwithin the traditionof Heidegger, Kierkegaard,Camus, and Sartre....Lispector'swriting is such a radicaldeparture from literature precedesit that there exists that among readers, critics, and translators of her work an effort to normalizeLispector'stexts. (1989, 75) in However,Lispector'swritingis undeniably"philosophical" tone and content, as Ronald W. Sousa (amongothers)has pointedout in the prefaceto his English languagetranslation of A paixao (1988, viii). If we are to examine her own philosophical essentialism, of Lispector's appropriations Europeanphilosophicalthoughtcannot be ignored. In fact, links between Sartre's and Lispector's concerns with the material body deserve closer attention. In his L 'etre et le neant, Sartre'sbody, although it is literally fundamentalto de questionsof being ("...il d6coulen6cessairement la naturedu pour-soi qu'il soit corps..." the [1943, 357]) neverthelessrepresents ever-present,distinctly feminized foundationfrom This necessarybut transcendedbody which and out of which the for-itselfmusttranscend.7 for le is, therefore, Sartre "perpetuellement dipasse....le corps est le niglige, le 'passe sous silence"' (1943, 374, 378). Furthermore, this body's time has always already run out: le corps,etantle d6passe,est le Passe"(1956, 429). Sartre'sbody is both essential "[a]insi erasedfromphilosophical consciousnessandevidentonly through and in itself unknowable, (387). Using some of the same philosophical "[u]ne nausee discrete et insurmontable" (physicalnausea,the gaze), Lispectorcontinuallyre-stages her own imageryas does Sartre to philosophicalreturn this timeless,neglected,mutebody, Sartre'smost necessarybut most mute "prop" in his own philosophical "scene of representation."In contrast to the projectwhich, founding itself on philosophicallymasculineconsciousness of the Sartrean the terrain of the body, then desires to flee the ever-presentmateriality of embodied existence, Lispectorwill turnthis desire on its head with a look back to the immanenceof that thatflesh which Sartre "passesby," understanding this essentializedbody is also, as we will see, essentially feminized.8 Although JudithRosenberg'spoint-that Lispectoris too often placed within a Europeantraditionof"great writers"-is well taken, it seems clear enough that Lispector does continuallyre-stage,or in a sense "mime"(narrative)scenes taken from the tradition of European philosophical and fictional writing.9 Cixous calls this practice "reading alongside":"Clarice'stext could be placed side by side with Kafka's....Thesame can also be readin some of Dostoyevsky'snovels, in relationto protagonistswho are condemnedto death" (1990, 67). Benedito Nunes' O drama da linguagem has already noted, and extensively examined, the similaritiesbetween the gardenscene in Sartre'sLa nausee (in which the character Roquentinconfrontsthe materialworld with fear and nausea) and that of the garden experience of the characterAna in Lispector's "Amor,"a story from the collection Lacos defamilia: [a] revela,ao plena da nausea, iluminandoas coisas na nudez de sua existenciahostil e independente consciencia,ocorre,paraRoquentin da e Ana, numa mesma especie de lugar-um jardim piblico-e em circunstanciasanalogas.(1989, 120)

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When readalongside"Amor,"it becomes clear that Lispectoris not merely parallelingthe at points in La nausee concerningRoquentin'sarrival and experiencesin the publicgardens, but is in fact miming the same narrativeoutlines, using them as the (reworked)scene for Thatis, as with this brief example of a "readingalongside"of scenes from other "Amor."'0 philosophicaltexts, Lispectorwill do something similarto Frenchfeminist Luce Irigaray's Whitfordpoints out in her philosophicalproject. This is a projectwhich itself, as Margaret Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, has to do with examining the "scene of representation": only partlyto do with who portrays [t]he scene of representation...is of whator whom, and in whatmedium(for example the representation women by male artists.) It is also, and perhapsmore centrally,to do with the economy of truth, that is, the conditions under which a representation, or re-presentationis said to be a true (or false) of since representation....particularly the problematization languageas a medium of representation become a majorcritical issue. (1991, has 104)" of When Irigaray points out that underlyingthe "hierarchy values"of Westernphilosophy is "thedesirefor the same...[which]dominatesthe representational economy" (1985a, 26), of she meansfor us to see thatup untilthis point at least,representation "sexual difference" has actually been no difference at all, merely the enactment of a negative movement stemming from an equationof the same: "A man minus the possibility of (re)presenting oneself as a man = a normalwoman"(1985a, 27). WhatIrigaraywill attemptis in Judith Butler's words an "overreadingwhich mimes and exposes the speculative excess" in an of "scenes"of Westernphilosophy (1993, interventional re-performance certainimportant 36). Since, for Irigaray,philosophy is founded-indeed, grounded-on the female to the exclusionof the female andto the privilegingof homo-sexualrelations,to readthroughthe female in (underneath) philosophyis to show up Westernphilosophy's inherent"blind spot of an ancient dreamof symmetry": arguesthat,whateverthe avatarsof the history of 'truth,'...the Irigaray scene of representation allows only the 'same' and the 'other of the same' to take the stage. Plato and his critics have that much in common. For thatreason,women do not simply oppose a female truth to a male truth. First, it is necessary to tackle the scene of itself to look at its props,its 'scenery', and its backcloth. representation (Whitford1991, 105) and On both Irigaray's Lispector'spartthis mimesis succeeds in "exposing precisely what is excluded from [philosophy]..."(Butler 1993, 45). For Lispector's part, however, her appropriationof certain scenes is not so much an attemptto "[redefine] the terrainof philosophy"(Whitford1991, 7) as it is an attemptto approachthat which has been up until now only background"scenery": the mother's place, the terrainof the female/maternal body.'2 Attemptinga "shift"of the symbolic order,Irigaray"plays with mimesis"(Butler 1985b, 76) in order to reveal that woman's body has been exiled (even, as she says, murdered) that symbolic order. Lispector,also seeing the symbolic orderas repressive by (even erasive) of women in the poverty and negativity of the language with which it tries to speak their originary(bodily) experience ("dois minutos depois de nascer eu ja havia

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perdido as minhas origens" [(1964) 1988, 20]), explores what it means to stay within that passed-overplace to which the female body has been consigned: to stay within "o material das coisas" ([1964] 1988, 101). To returnfor a momentto La nausee and "Amor,"what Nunes does not note in his comparisonof the two stories is that it is the fecund/maternal body which provides a kind of background screen(in the theatrical sense) for Roquentin'sexperiencein the garden. Sartre'sinsistentevocationof the gardenas a backdropof overwhelmingoverripenessand softness (everything, even the roots of the chesnut tree, appearto Roquentinas "masses e monstrueuses molles")leadsunavoidably Roquentinto a little scene, a little dream,of for maternalbreasts: ...l'existence s'etait soudain devoilee....des masses monstrueuses et molles, en desordre....Je voyais les epauleset la gorge de la femme. De l'existence nue....et la femme continuaita sentir sa gorge exister dans son corsage, a penser: "mes nenes, mes beaux fruits," a sourire de attentivea l'epanouissement ses seins...Est-ce que mysterieusement, je l'ai revee...? Je criai... (1943, 182, 190-91) "Je criai": with this cry, Roquentin"wakes"himself and banishes those fecund breasts, which were afterall only a (bad) dream(of existentialism). It is at the moment of this cry of nausea at all that is both feminine and materialthat Lispector engages in a project to that approach dreamof"what philosophyuntilnow has been unableto allow in" (Whitford 1991, 7). I do not thinkit is too strongto say here that at these and otherpoints both in La nausee andL 'etreet le neant, nausea is for Sartrea literalphysical manifestationof horror at the feminine.13 Even as late in her writing careeras Agua viva, Lispectorreturnsto and ironicallymimes this scene of horror,foregroundingthe serpent-likeroots of Roquentin's chestnuttree as the (dangerous)female bodies they are to him. Then Lispectorgoes on to re-stage the dangerous scene of the female body as the dangerous scene of (a woman) writing, or representing,the female body: [c]omo se arrancassedas profundezasda terra as nodosas raizes de arvore descomunal, e assim que te escrevo, e essas raizes como se fossem poderosos tentaculos como volumosos corpos nus de fortes mulheresenvolvidasem serpentese em carnaisdesejos de realizaqao.... (1978, 20) In making Ana of the story "Amor"a woman and a mother,one who feels her own flesh "more solid than ever," Lispector deliberately keeps our gaze toward the nausea and "maldadezita quem tem um corpo"(1965, 9). Ana herself finds that de a vida era periclitante. Ela amava o mundo, amava o que fora criado-amava com nojo. Do mesmo modo como sempre fora fascinada pelas ostras, com aquele vago sentimento de asco que a aproximacaoda verdadeIhe provocava,avisando-a.(1965, 28-9) Miming and at the same time going beyond Sartre'sexpress feminizationof the material, Lispector evokes the maternalin the midst of the softness of things like oysters, echoed again laterin her posthumouslypublishedAgua viva, "umarespira.ao do mundo.... mole e 6 ostrae 6 placenta" (1978, 28). Oystersandplacentasaresoft, slimy feminine things; for

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Sartrethe slimy ("le visqueux") itself is "baveuseet feminine d'aspiration....Levisqueux, c'est la revanchede l'En-soi. Revanchedouceatre f6minine...douceur et indelebile..." (1943, 671). Philosophicallyspeaking,this "moistand feminine sucking"is an invitationto come in, to come near,to approachthe in-itself; relatedto holes, to the hole of the feminine sex, the vengeful suctionof the feminineis indeedan "appel,"as Sartrewill say, "d'etre"(676). and Lispectortakes herown revengeby appropriating makingthis moment of approach,of seduction, her own essential founding moment of being. What "Amor"and Agua viva expose when read alongside L'tre et le neant and La nausee is that both Sartre and Lispector see the facticity of the world in terms of a dangerous seduction scene: "[le (Sartre 1943, visqueux] m'attireen lui comme le fond d'un precipice pourraitm'attirer" 671). However,Lispectorwantsto stay with andexaminethis seduction,which invites one to opennessandvulnerability:G. H. will exclaimaboutthe crushedcockroachwhose shell is broken open and which she must confront with her own openness, "[a] barata6 pura sedu9ao"([1964] 1988, 40). The dangeritself of this moment is importantfor Lispector; as MartaPeixoto points out in her Passionate Fictions, the blood and nausea which are "obsessively frequent"in the laterA hora da estrela (and the nausea and violence which frequent her other texts as well) "signalthe opening up of the body and the ruptureof its self-enclosedsystem..."(1994, 94). This is not, however,opennessfor mereopenness' sake. If, as Cixous says, "'I understand you' makes sense only when we put the body on stage" (1991, 69), Lispectorre-readsthe classic philosophical scene of the danger of seduction thanthe Intelligible) and finds (seductionby women, by the material, the Sensiblerather by thatcontrary Sartre'scall to escapethe "appeal being"of the feminizedmaterialworld, to to thereis no understanding-that is no possibility of ser/etre, being or being-here-without an approachtowards (ratherthan an escape from) that materialbody which is open to seduction,and thus always inherentlyfemale: "whateveris crushedat the middle must be female." Ana discoversthatthe opened,slimy oysterbodies are more intimatelyconnected to her own maternalbody than are her own offspring;the impersonal,material"it"found in Agua viva is also "mole e tem o pensamentoque uma ostratem"(1978, 30). In spite of her nausea's"waring," becauseshe has the body of a woman Ana is going to have to stay (at least for a while) on the side of the oysters,for in the "femininesucking"of the oyster's Ana discoversthatas opposedto her usualsuperficial "maternal" approach compassion and domesticbusy-nessshe has always alreadyfallen in love, been sucked into love, with what Sartre would call the en-soi, being-in-itself:throughher gaze at the oysters she is in bodily communication with the oyster-bodyof the material world: "[e]stavadianteda ostra. E nao havia como nao olha-la" (1965, 45). Although Ana's husbandwill in the last lines of "Amor" draw her back into her restrictive but safe role as wife and mother Ana is a or to precursor, pre-mother, otherLispectorwomen who will throughtheir fecundity enter more fully into the materialworld. PequenaFlor, the protagonistof"A menormulherdo mundo"("The Smallest Woman in the World")moves closer towardthat moment. PequenaFlor-small, black,andpregnant-discovered in the depthsof thejungle by a male anthropologist,is accordingto Rosenberg the pureessence of femininity. Lispectorpresentsthe feminine not as weak and dilutedbut as an extract: refined,rare,valuable, and potent. She accomplishesthis throughthe body of Little Flower. (1989, 73) As Rosenbergasserts,PequenaFlor achieves a signifying "of the unsignifiable"(73), that is the woman's sex, by scratching underthe white male anthropologist's it disconcerted (and hastily averted)gaze: "o explorador,tao vivido, desviou os olhos" (1965, 66) from what

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Sartrecalls "l'obscenitedu sexe feminine[qui]est celle de tout chose beante;c'est un appel d'etre, comme d'ailleurs tous les trous..."(L 'etreet le neant, 676). Ana, being woman, cannotaverthergaze from the appeal-to-beingwith which she is intimatelyconnected;on the otherhand,the male anthropologist's gaze, on pain of losing itself scientific/philosophic cannotbe suckedinto the "appealto being,"the unfolding of that essential hole, that place which "phallocentricity defines as no place"(Rosenberg 1989, 73). For Lispector,the exposureof the femalebody demandswhat it neverhad before: a witness. This is why the scene itself is so important her writing. If for Freudthe scene for of the "discovery" the mother'scastration of that requires the littleboy look away in horror, Lispector's insistence on keeping the scene of feminine openness continually before us-"whatever is crushed in the middle must be female"-works to turn such fear on its "head": the gaze cannot be averted, the oyster exists to be eaten, and as Cixous notes, "somethingnot seen is given to be seen" (1991, 20). In parallelwith MartaPeixoto's contentionthat "in Lispectornarrativedemands a victim" (1991, 183), I maintainthat in Lispectorseductiondemandsa witness. Because of theirinsistenceon the full presenceof what is being written(Cixous notes, "Claricetells what is happeningnow" [1991, 162]), Lispector's"stories"always imply another'sgaze, eitherthatof the readerwhom G. H. addresses, camera-gaze storiessuch as "A quinta of the hist6ria" fromher collectionA legiao estrangeira,or the "witness"-narrator Rodrigo S. M. of A hora da estrela. The gaze of the reader A paixao segundo G. H. is directedtowardsan extended of seductionscene betweena dying cockroachandan upper-middle class woman who up until that(timeless)momenthas lived a privilegedlife, the kindof"finished"person who has her initials engraved on leather luggage, someone who "humanized" life. It is only through to kill the cockroachand then having to face its slow deaththat G. H. will only attempting for a moment experience "vivificadora morte" ([1964] 1988, 12), the death of her "humanizedself': [e]scuta,dianteda barataviva, a pior descobertafoi a de que o mundo nao 6 humano, e de que nao somos humanos. Nao, nao te assustes! certamente o que me havia salvo ate aquele momento da vida sentimentizada que eu vivia, e que o inumanoe o melhor nosso, 6 a de coisa, a partecoisa da gente. (45) The unaccustomedviolence which she experiences opens G. H. for the first time to a recognition of her self and the cockroachas beings which exist in the world, ratherthan being mere decor upon the world's surface;both are connectedto being-mother(here she mimics a prayerto the Christianvirgin and mother,Mary): "A barata6 de verdade,mae. Nao 6 mais uma ideia de barata.... mae, benditasois entre as baratas,agora e na hora desta tua minhamorte,barata ej6ia" (61).14 Whatis at stakehere is, again,the look of recognition and relatedness which, earlier, had only been one way: from Ana to oysters, or from Pequena Flor to the anthropologist. Now the gaze is returned: the look which passes betweenthe cockroachand G. H. is a look which is radically(rootedly, essentially) female and radicallyreciprocal.Whitford which is a hallmark pointsout thatin the ocularcentrism of Westernphilosophy"[t]he metaphoricity vision amountsto the refusalof the thinker of to admit embodimentand, more especially, the fact that embodimentmeans belonging to one sex or the other"(1991, 109). If a scene alwaysnecessitateslooking,A paixao segundo G. H. re-playsSartre'sgaze of the Other,thatwhich must dominatein ordernot to be fixed as an in-itself,(feminized) body: "[t]outd'abord,le regard de I 'autrui...estdestructionde

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toute objectivitd pour moi..." (1943, 316). Also playing off Gregor Samsa's bodily in cockroach-transformation Kafka's"TheMetamorphosis," Lispectorradicallyobject-ifies the female body by purposefully metamorphizingocularcentrisminto an essentialist "[a] corporeal-centrism: baratanao me via com os olhos mas com o corpo"([1964] 1988, the 50). She appropriates primacyof the gaze and forces the admission,the entranceonto the stage, of female embodiment: the female cockroach, looking, "exists" G. H. with a with its body is dying, crushedin the body-gaze. The fact thatthis cockroach-which-looks middle by the door of the wardrobe,again only emphasizes its open, female, and fecund nature; "whateveris crushed at the middle must be female."Thus death, the female, and linkedthroughthe opennessandvulnerability they all imply: fecunditybecome inextricably the dying cockroach's eyes eramvivos como dois ovarios. Ela me olhavacom a fertilidade cega de seu olhar. Ela fertilizava minhafertilidade a morta....(noseus olhos) eu reconheciameus dois an6nimosovarios neutros.(50, 59) Lispectortends to departfrom the kind of lengthy and detailed"miming"or rewe performanceof the philosophical scene of representation see in Irigarayto her own scenic repetitionof images, such as her close examinationsof eggs, hens, and cockroaches. For Olga de Sa, Lispectorwritesin "[uma]maneiratao obsessiva e reiterante" (1984, 277). As de Sa continues,"[n]onivel do discurso,o que paraela mais se aproximadesse silencio 6 a repeticao, como corrosao do proprio significante" (277). This kind of obsessive repetition, meant to achieve a silent, meditative view ratherthan an active narration,is illustrated by such pieces as Lispector's "A quinta hist6ria," which begins with three of the possible titles for itself (foreshadowing proliferation titles in A hora da estrela). This and piece promisesto tell at leastthree"stories"," in fact tells five, each repeatingthe same of scene: the "murder" cockroaches, each scene of murder expandingalmost imperceptibly in its examination of the woman-who-murders' motives and the cockroaches' petrified to bodies, expandingfinally to a (moral)choice for the murderer: go on killing or not. The fifth and final scene recapitulates beginningof all five, with a differenttitle. The entire the "story" is not, in fact, a story in the narrativesense, but ratheran examinationof a scene which slowly broadensits perspective,as a camerawill move back to include more of a scene in its focus, producinga static textual sense. This is the same immobility as will be invoked in A paixao segundo G. H.: "...abria-seen mim a largavida do silencio, a mesma ([1964] 1988, 39). que estava no sol parada,a mesma que estava na barataimmobilizada" The necessary "nowness"of this immobilizedwriting rejects any notion of past or even future, as G. H. says: "nao estou falando do futuro, estou falando de uma atualidade permanente"([1964] 1988, 94). Lispector works to erase deferral;in the scene of the also itself from Sartre's"passed/Past":the "now,"the body of the being-mother transforms is "fifteenmillion daughters" literally timeless and unchanginglineageof G. H./cockroach's fully present,continuouswith itself. "Para o ovo atravesseos temposa galinhaexiste. Mae 6 paraisso" (Lispector que 1989b, 59). In Agua viva, Lispectortells us she hears"o grito ancestraldentro de mim: parece que nao sei quem 6 mais a criatura,se eu ou o bicho" (1978, 50). From characters like Ana and Pequena Flor through to G. H., her maid, and hens and cockroaches, Lispector's writing works more and more towardsblurringthe difference between animal and human,finally locating both within the maternalbody: "mae 6 paraisso." In the most radical of incorporations,the inhuman(for Lispector,both egg and fetus are in- or prehuman)also nests within the female body: her constantevocation of fecundity works as a

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that reminder the essence of being (female) means an incorporatedand thereforecorporeal of other: "...eu sentia com susto e nojo que 'eu ser' vinha de "understanding" the inhuman uma fonte muitoanterior humana..." a ([1964] 1988, 38). The nauseaevidencedin A paixao G. H. is the "morningsickness"of being, about which Simone de Beauvoir's The segundo Second Sex has this to say: ...if this reaction,unknown in other mammals,is an importantone in woman,the cause of it is psychic;it expressesthe sharpnessthat at this time marksthe conflict, in the humanfemale, between the species and the individual.(1974, 556) For Lispector,the sharpness this conflict is foundnot only psychically but ontologically, of and furtherbodily; if morningsickness is a coming-togetherin the female of species and individual,this literallyconstitutesthe nature, or essence, of what it means to be female. Up through A paixao segundo G. H., Lispector's charactersare still merely nauseated,in the firststages of becomingthatpregnant cockroach,and can still escape back into the humanworld. At the end of this novel, G. H., in spite of the painful and terrifying is loss of her"humanization," still living, still wants(still is able) to put on a prettydressand go out dancing. We can (cautiously)work on the side of Cixous in saying that Lispector's of inscriptions loss "maybe consideredas positive"(1990, 81 my emphasis). In A hora da estrela, however, Lispectorwill literalizeher essentialist scene of loss; the darkbodies of PequenaFlor, G. H.'s maid, and the dying cockroachnow become the starvingMacabeabody will be brought body: much closer to the animal, Macabda'sexposed and ruptured violently to the now-scene, the "hora"of its own fertile origins. A hora da estrela's Macabdais, finally, essentially (and almost automatically) alive througha process which the text explicitly imagines as parthenogenic: [e]squecei de dizer que era realmentede se espantarque para corpo quase murcho de Macabdatao vasto fosse o seu sopro de vida quase ilimitadoe tao rico como o de umadonzelagravida,engravidadapor si mesma, por partenog6nese....(1977, 72) However, life seems always to be underwritten death in this novel. Both Cixous and by in of Irigaray, their differentways, link representations deathwith male fears of castration (Whitford 1991, 114; Cixous 1991, 10). Cixous' psychoanalyticreadingssuggest that in Lispector the male fear of castrationis replaced by a feminine loss (1990, 81); Irigaray in arguesthatthe littlegirl cannoteven participate the fear of (symbolic) castrationbecause of she always alreadyhas "nothingto lose....no representation what she might fear to lose" The problem is, however, that even if, as Cixous maintains,the (masculine) (1985a, 86). fear of castration/deathis not underwritingLispector's texts, A hora da estrela is still operatingundera death sentence: there is a woman's corpse at the end of this book. In A hora da estrela Rodrigo S. M. tells us that Death is his favorite character. Though this might be readmerely as an ironic remark,G. H. has alreadytold us that "...no sofrimento se ria" ([1964] 1988, 85); so we might take Rodrigo S. M.'s comment as both ironic and (deadly) serious, for Lispector looks for an agent of death in almost all her writing.15 Castillo maintains that in Lispector "[e]ssential knowledge is the intolerable risk....To exhaustan objector a life by revealingits essentialnudity is a death sentence"(1992, 119); I would maintain, however,thatLispectorwillingly takesthis risk againand again. Death's character,being ambivalent,is a useful one for Lispector: on the one hand it can be an

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existential death which works to strip away falsely estheticized or sentimentalized on "humanity"; the other,to "die"to thatfalse humanityis to come alive, to be exposed, to the essentialcore, to the "thingpart."InA hora da estrela we are aboutto arriveat the final (love) scene with the other(Death),wherethe essential(nudity)of the feminine is revealed. This is not a scene of the fear of losing something essential, but ratherthe opposite: Macabeawill be strippeddown to, andgain, an "essential"nature: that of the female. The question of what to "do" critically (if anything) with Macabea's dead body has always botheredme, along with the fact that at the momentLispectorkills Macabdaoff, Macabea (ironically,of course)gains whatshe nevercould in life-womanhood. How arewe to read this final scene? MartaPeixoto, who in her Passionate Fictions readsthis text as an ironic on has metacommentary the violence inherentin narrative, delineatedone of the problems the ambivalentnatureof A hora da estrela's stance towardMacabea, social surrounding victim on one hand, saint-likecreatureon the other: [b]ut in one sense, and this is an aspect of the text some readersmay find offensive, Macabeais a privilegedsoul when set againstthe gallery of Lispector's seekers of truth and inner harmony....As the quintessentially vulnerable being, ideally open to existence, she possesses, like a holy fool, an unsought,unconscious wisdom. (1994, 95-96) In this last section, I would like to stay with some of the more"offensive"aspects of A hora da estrela, which include not just Maca's privileged status as a "holy fool," but her exclusively womanly privilege of having deathfor a lover. This novella is an extremely difficult text not only because of its ambivalently the ironictone and double-voicednarrator (Lispector"behind" mask of Rodrigo S. M.), but also because ratherthan make (appropriative) referenceto other texts Lispector's writing to herebegins to referellipticallyto its own corpus,particularly A paixao segundo G. H. and viva (which was being writtenconcurrentlywith A hora da estrela). The Sartrean Agua relatively clear in former works, are now deployed in a diffuse sense of appropriations, nausea. Appropriatelyenough, A hora da estrela's star first makes its appearancein A paixao segundoG. H., explicitly linkedto the cockroach: "o astroe a propriaexorbitancia of the do corpo da barata" ([1964] 1988, 79). The starhas represented "unreachability" her own hour of the "now"for G. H.; like the cockroach,the "horada estrela"is ex-orbitant, outsideof the orbitswhich markour humantime, and insteadthe hourof the now is the inert and immobile scene or instant: "...entrea atualidadee eu nao hB intervalo:6 agora, em mim....o que eu nunca havia experimentadoera o choque com o momento chamado 'ja"' and ([1964] 1988, 51). Throughstarvation poverty,Macabeaarrives,or is forced to arrive, at a literal collision, forced to enter the "hour"of A paixao segundo G. H.'s dying cockroach: at the momentof Macabea'sdeath (she has been run over by a car-this is, for with the "now"),"(ela)tomara-secom o tempoapenasmateriavivente em her,the "choque" sua forma primaria" (1977, 48). Publishedthe same year Lispectordied, A hora da estrela's Macabeais a young girl fromNortheastBrazilwho has come to Rio de Janeiro. When she thinks about herself, which is rarely,she can say no more thanthis: "sou datil6grafae virgem, e gosto de cocawho nauseated:as the character cola"(1977, 44). She is continuallyhungryandfrequently of and is both"writer" narrator the storylaconicallyputs it, "[e]squeceide dizerque as vezes a datil6grafatinha enj6o paracomer"(49). This nausea is the way in which, after Sartre, Lispectorbrings us constantlyback to the body:

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...cette saisie perpetuelle par mon pour-soi d'un goft fade et sans distancequi m'accompagnejusque dansmes effortspour m'en delivrer et qui es mon goit, c'est que nous avons decritailleurs sous le nom de Nausee. Une nausee discreteet insurmontable revele perpetuellement mon corps a ma conscience.... (Sartre1943, 387) A hora da estrela's insistence on describingMaca in terms of food-a cold cup of coffee, old breadand butter,a hair in the soup, a thin slice of watermelon,shriveled mushrooms, a sack of dry crumbs-while it keeps us in the realmof the body, and of the material,also reinforcesPeixoto's claim that"Macabea's hungeris botha productof materialdeprivation and a metaphor thattotallyvulnerable denudedexistence that Lispectorsets up as an of and ideal in manytexts"(1994, 97). This is an existencealreadydenudedof even the possibility of gaining whatLispectorcalls "humanization."In short,A hora da estrela's "a woman is "How can I say it? That we are women borna womanfromthe firstwail"echoes Irigaray's will from the start" (1985b, 212, my emphasis);for Lispector,"woman" need to be thought through "fromthe start,"from before her entry into the Symbolic of Westernpatriarchy. This meansfinally completingthe step of re-stagingthe (original) exile of the female from of what Irigaraycalls the "properties" Westernculture(1985b, 212). Thus unlike G. H., Macab6a will barely be a human"subject"in any sense of the word: "Desculpe mas nao acho que sou muitogente...Eque nao me habituei"(1977, 59). Coming out onto the street from a fortune-tellerwho has just informedher that she will soon meet the man of her as dreams, she is "impregnated" the Portuguesetext has it with the wrong future: the de fortuneteller says to her,"acabeide ter a franqueza dizerparaaquelamoca que saiu daqui (1977, 93); in the next moment, Macabeais run over by a large que ela ia ser atropelada" yellow Mercedes. The last few pages of A hora reluctantly,ironically, and painfully detail the process of her dying as she lies in the street. All throughoutthis death scene, in fact all throughoutthe text, there is an ironic insistence simultaneouslyon Macab6a'svirginity, on her "shriveledovaries,"and on her automatic, unthinking,"infelicidade": her sensuality, which promptsRodrigo S. M. to wonder "[c]omo 6 que num corpo cariadocomo o dela cabia tanta lascivia, sem que ela soubesse que tinha?"(1977, 73). Again, he thinks about Macabea'ssex: ...mifdo mas inesperadamente coberto de grossos e abundantespelos negros-seu sexo era a fnica marcaveemente de sua existencia. Ela nadapediamas seu sexo exigia, como um nascidogirassolnumtimulo. (84) Macab6a's sex is the mark, literally, of her being, her existence. This sensuality is connected explicitly to death: her dream is to be a movie star like the suicide Marilyn Monroe, with pink skin (65). Though Olimpico informsher disdainfullythat she doesn't have the face or body to be a movie star, we will discover that in fact like all women Macab6adoes in fact have the body to arriveat the hour of the (movie) star. ...ninguem Ihe ensinariaum dia a morrer:na certa morreriaum dia como se antes tivesse estudado de cor a representa9aodo papel de estrela. Pois na hora da morte a pessoa se torna brilhanteestrela de cinema.... (36)

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The scene of Macabda's"accident"is a death/seductionscene which is also the (female) scene of reproduction,one which itself has been reproducedin various ways all through Lispector's writing. Dying, the "film-star"'sfertility is awakened; Macabda,born for na death'sembrace,finally has deathfor her lover, in a "profundo beijo...boca-a-boca agonia do prazer que 6 morte" (1977, 83). The collision with the "now" produced by the is automobiletirewhich hits and kills Macabda the same "now"we have seen privileged in A paixao and in Agua viva: "[o] presente6 o instanteem que a roda do autom6vel em alta velocidade toca minimamenteno chao" (1978, 16). We find that A hora da estrela's thematic of the "star,"the "hourof the star,"the "film star,"is a text-long play on words, an ironic and nauseated game playing all around the "hora de viver," a game which implicates the text itself in the most serious of risks: that of silence, and death. At the momentof Macabda's death,althoughshe wantsto vomit "o que nao 6 corpo, vomitaralgo luminoso. Estrelade mil pontas"(1977, 102), she will be constrainedfrom doing so, since her herselffromthe (hourof) the starwould separate fromthe ultimate"now"she separating is fast approaching. Instead,we hear her say, "quantoao futuro": at the same time, "o amago tocando no amago"(102). As for the future: the futureis right now for Macabea, the privileged state Lispector's writing has worked toward. When Macab6a's crushed, arrivesat its properhour,essence touchesessence, the futureis erased, and cockroach-body Macabdais fully presentas a female body. Here, as pointed out earlier,the analogy with writingfails; if, as Whitfordmaintains,Irigaraydoes not substitute performative Irigaray's a "female truth"for the male truthshe undermines,Lispector's texts imply that there is of indeed a female "truth":the originary,demanding"truth" fecundity, like a "sunflower in a tomb,"both life-giving and death-bound. Peixoto maintainsthat Macabealearns"nothingfrom her trials"(1994, 98); but learning, like knowing, is completely beside the point for Macab6a: she is Lispector's female originof being: "[a] closest approach to the unknowing,prelinguistic, unthought yet morte6 um encontroconsigo"(1977, 103). If Lispector"refusesto naturalize...oppression" (Peixoto 1994, 98), what she does naturalize,throughthe existential and physical crises suffered on the part of her female characters,is a connection between fertility and death which is both knowing and "guilt-ridden" (Peixoto 1994, 99). Refusing, unlike Sartre,to philosophically"pass by" the body "in silence," in A hora da estrela, Lispectortries to work throughthe implicationsof her own philosophical essentialism,the fact thatthe essence or natureof being-female,which for her is privileged as being fertile, is also dangerouslydeath-bound. Here it turnsout that the very ability to die privilegesthe one who dies, for it situatesthe body in a fertile space, in a fecund (love) scene in which the look of "utterlyreciprocal"recognition between inhumanand human keeps one in a constantnegotiationbetween the twin and equal possibilities of achieving one's own living, continuous essence and/or one's own murder. The cockroach can die crushed,becauseit is fertile,and its fertility ensures its continuanceas a species: "a barata esmagada,mas eu estavacondenadaa nuncamorrer,pois se eu morresseuma podia morrer s6 vez que fosse, eu morreria...." A hora da estrela plays on the edge, all around the margins, of certain final implications for Lispector's alinguistic essentialism: if silence means an escape from the falsifying accretionsof language,this can also be the silence of death;if a woman's nature withinherthroughfertility,the presenceof a foreign "body"within is to cache the inhuman one oneself can be deadly. If one seeks the "death"of "humanization," risks the real death of the body. The riskof stagingthe (love) scene of the silent "now,"also the starringhour of death, evokes a deep unease in Lispector's texts, the same kind of unease as faced by as philosophy itself: that of the proximityor incorporation, within the female body itself,

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et of the inhuman,or the other: "[l]e fait d'autruiest incontestable m'atteinten plein coeur. en Je le realiseparle malaise;parluije suis perpetuellement danger dans un monde que est ce monde..." (Sartre 1943, 322). Lispector's female body is seduced-touched to the heart-by its own/theother'sinhuman,"existing"gaze. As each of Lispector'stexts faces this moment, its unease is manifested as the nausea which both characters and text display-the nausea of keeping everythingdown, staying with the luxury of the inhuman world in the purely present moment: "Mas teimosa (Macabea) nao vomitou para nao o desperdi;ar luxo do chocolate"(Lispector 1977, 80). A hora da estrela is a melancholic text which is not allowedto separatefrom "o luxo" of the materialworld both of plenitude and of death;its darkstarbecomes a stranded,always-circulating object which impartsby its gravity that sense of sadness which the text evokes. The pain with which this text confrontsits own conclusionsmeansthatits essentialism,while fully realized,is also always contested-is in fact a writing which is, as Cixous puts it, "not afraidto be afraid"(1990, 81).

NOTES For example, her 1979 VivreI'orange, an homage to Clarice Lispector. The collectionReading WithClariceLispectorused in this paperis takenfromCixous' seminars given between 1980 and 1985 (Cixous 1990, vii). I agree with Marta Peixoto in her Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector that Cixous practices what might itself be termed an appropriativeviolence towards Lispector: "[w]hereas on the surface Cixous offers Lispector praise, warmth, and a generous also silences Lispectorby mutingandreplacingher words"(43). However, receptivity...she Cixous is nonethelessa perceptivereaderof some aspects of Lispector's work, particularly thatof the femininebody; andbecauseCixous herself is obviously vexed over the question of essentialism in her own and in Lispector's works, I find that it is profitable to part of the economy of Cixous' critique without however accepting her "appropriate" conclusions. 2 Her simple but clear definition of essentialism may prove helpful here: "Essentialismis most commonly understoodas a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed propertieswhich define the 'whatness' of a given entity" (Fuss 1989, xi). 3 fromthe feministphilosopherLuce Irigaray'snotion am, of course,borrowing of of re-staging and psychoanalyzing the fundamental"scenes of representation" such in thinkersas Freud,Kant,and Plato,particularly her Speculumof the Other Woman. I am also indebtedfor my work on the "scene"in Lispector'swritingto Cixous' reading(by way scene"presentin Lispector,one which is also, punningon (s)cene, of Joyce) of a "primitive the scene of the meal: as othercriticshave also noted,eating, on all levels including that of a symbolics of incorporation,is of course an act of the utmost(philosophical) importance in Lispector's writings (Cixous 1984, 2). 4 For referencepurposes,when I referto Lispector's 1964 A paixdo segundo G. I will be using Benedito Nunes' 1988 critical,annotatededition. H., 5 See for example writings on Lispectorby Helene Cixous, Debra Castillo, and MartaPeixoto.

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"Feminism,Languageor Existentialism:The Searchfor the Self in the Worksof ClariceLispector" namesBeneditoNunes, Olga de Sa, andEarlFitz as three of Lispector's best-knowncritics to have identified and discussed the existential threadin Lispector's writing (1991, 133). 7 That Sartre's material body is distinctly feminized has been noted by many critics.For example,see WilliamBarrett'sanalysis of the place of woman in his Irrational Man: A Study in ExistentialPhilosophy: "...Sartre'sphilosophicalanalysis...of the thick, sticky substancethat would entraphis liberty like the soft threatof the body of a woman. And the woman is a threat,for the woman is nature..." (258). 8 I agree with Castillo that Lispector's "things"do not "offer access into the Sartreannauseaof existence"(my emphasis),althoughI cannot agree with her contention that these things are "alreadyprotectedby a shell, fragile but impervious..."(1992, 195). I would say that it is, for example, through the crushing of the cockroach's shell that the nauseaof existence in orderto effect Lispectorinsteadmimes and re-performs (Sartrean) her own access to Western philosophy's nauseated rejection of an abject, feminine materiality. 9 Some brief its no examplesincludeherA marad oscuro which appropriates basic "plot"motivationfrom Dostoevsky's Crimeand Punishment A paixao segundo G. H.'s and existential examinationof an insect which "steals"its cockroach ("large vermin"in the and original German),its scenes of metamorphosis hunger,and its meditationson the law from Kafka's"TheMetamorphosis" (and in her "animal"stories-such as "A galinha"-it is almost impossible not to readresonanceswith such Kafkastories as "The Burrow"). 'o Among many othercritics, Earl Fitz has also noticed the parallelsin this story and others with Sartre'swriting(1985, 101). " MaraGalvez-Breton has alreadysuggested an Irigarayan readingin her "PostFeministDiscoursein ClariceLispector'sTheHour of the Star,"althoughher readingseems to suggest that she assumes a pre-Oedipalessentialism in Irigaraywith which, following Whitford'swork, I would not agree. My main objection is however to labeling Maragaret Lispector a feminist, "post"or not. Feminist critics can find Lispector's work of interest or without having to appropriate "rescue"her for feminism. 12 If I seem to when I slip too easily from "female"to "fecund"to "maternal" speak of the woman's body, it is because Lispector herself slides between these designations,in fact actually conflatingthem: for her, the natureof being-female, by very reason of its (for Lispector) inherentfecundity, is to be, even if only potentially (like Macabea),reproductive. Every female is, then, maternalin an (essentially) potentialway. 13For most critics,it is Lispector'suse of nauseawhichhas linkedher most clearly with Sartrean coefficient" of nausea is only one thought. Sartre'suse of the "metaphysical of the many pointswhere it quicklybecomesclear that, as William Barrettin his Irrational Man and Margery L. Collins and ChristinePierce in their "Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis"(1962, 254-258; 1976, 112-27) have already noticed, Sartre's images of the En-soi are distinctly feminized. 14 Nunes notes in this annotated versionof A paixao that"[a]baratatransforma-se numa esp6cie de mae ancestral,de terra-mae, acumulandoos semas de nojo e seducao..." 1988, 61). ([1964] 15 As Fitz notes, "[t]hough not widely recognized as an ironic writer, Clarice role in her work"(1985, Lispectorwas quite aware of how irony could play an important 95).

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Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. New York: Doubleday& Co., Inc., 1962 Beauvoir,Simone de. TheSecondSex. Trans.H. M. Parshley.New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. Castillo, Debra. Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism. Ithaca,New York: Cornell UniversityPress, 1992. Cixous, Helene. "Reachingthe Point of Wheat, or A Portraitof the Artist as a Maturing Woman." New LiteraryHistory 19 (1987): 1-21. Reading WithClariceLispector.Ed., trans.,and intro.VerenaAndermattConley. Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1990. Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. Ed., trans., and intro. Verena AndermattConley. Minneapolis: Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1991. Collins, Margery L., and Christine Pierce. "Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's and Psychoanalysis."Women Philosophy:Towarda Theoryof Liberation. Eds. CarolC. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky. New York: Capricorn,1976. 126 Processoscriativos."RevistaIberoamericana. (1984): de Sa, Olga. "ClariceLispector: 259-280. Fitz, Earl. Clarice Lispector. Boston: Twayne Publishers,1985. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989. Galvez-Breton,Mara. "Post-FeministDiscourse in Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star." SplinteringDarkness:LatinAmerican Womenin Search of Themselves. Ed. and intro. Lucia Guerra Cunningham. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Latin AmericanLiteraryReview Press, 1990. Luce. TheSpeculumof the OtherWoman.Trans.GillianGill. Ithaca,New York: Irigaray, Cornell University Press, 1985. ThisSex Which Not One. Trans.CatherinePorterwith CarolynBurke. Ithaca, Is New York: Cornell UniversityPress, 1985. Lindstrom,Naomi. "ClariceLispector:ArticulatingWomen's Experience." Chasqui 8 (1971): 43-52. Lispector,Clarice. A paixao segundo G. H. Ediiao Critica. Ed. Benedito Nunes. Colecao Arquivos 13. Florianopolis:UniversidadeFederalde Santa Catarina(UFSC)/ UNESCO, (1964) 1988. Lacos defamilia. Rio de Janeiro:Editorado Autor, 1965. A hora da estrela. Rio de Janeiro:LivrariaJose Olympio EditoraS.A., 1977. Agua viva. Rio de Janeiro:EditoraNova FronteiraS.A., 1978. Para nao esquecer. Sao Paulo: EditoraAtica S.A., 1979. The Passion According to G. H. Trans. Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988. TheStreamof Life. Trans.ElizabethLowe and EarlFitz. Intro.Helene Cixous. Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1989. A legido estrangeira. Sio Paulo: EditoraAtica S.A., 1989.

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Mathie, Barbara. "Feminism,Languageor Existentialism:The Searchfor the Self in the Worksof ClariceLispector." Subjectivityand Literature from the Romanticsto the Present Day. Eds. Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell. New York: Pinter Publishers, 1991. Nunes, Benedito. O drama da linguagem: Uma leitura de Clarice Lispector. Sao Paulo: EditoraAtica S.A., 1989. Nunes, Maria Luisa. "Clarice Lispector: Artista andr6gina ou escritora?" Revista Iberoamericana126 (1984): 281-289. Peixoto, Marta. "Rape and Textual Violence in Clarice Lispector." Rape and Representation. Eds. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1991. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1994. Rosenberg, Judith. "Taking Her Measurements:Clarice Lispector and 'The Smallest Woman in the World."' Critique30 (1989): 71-76. Sartre,Jean-Paul. La nausee. Paris:Gallimard,1938. L 'etreet le neant:Essai d'ontologie phenomenologique. Paris:Gallimard,1943. Whitford,Margaret.LuceIrigaray:Philosophyin the Feminine. London:Routledge, 1991.