The Emphasis on Existentialisim in Lispector’s Work Due to The Traditional Roles of Women

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The Emphasis on Existentialisim in Lispector’s Work Due to The Traditional Roles of Women

The human mind often creates traumatized, twisted beliefs about the world after cataclysmic events have occurred. Picture 1920- the world has just been ravaged by bullets, bombs, and baleful butchers with malicious intent. The aftermath of World War II leaves the country of Ukraine encompassed in terror, anguish, and famine. Imagine being ravenous enough to consider devouring a decomposing relative, and then putting that consideration into action. Imagine a country where pogroms- violent attacks on ethnic groups, mainly Jews, that included the destruction of homes, businesses, and churches –are not only regular, but not surprising occurrences. Imagine suppression, repression, oppression, all the “-ions”…Now insert a nine-year old girl struggling to live in this madness, add the rape and death of that girl’s mother, and there is the childhood of the renowned Brazilian author, Clarice Lispector. These experiences, which would alter anyone’s views on life, influenced and helped to develop Lispector’s existentialist ways of thinking. In these past occurrences, gender inequalities were very much prominent, which explains why Lispector focuses on the fate of women in

her writing. Due to the oppressive government, women were confined to their traditional roles and in showing the lack of freedom, both mentally and physically, that this imposes on them, Clarice Lispector justifies her existentialist viewpoints through her writings; life is pain, misery, and inevitably death. These viewpoints are imminent when discussing the overall lack of freedom in Lispector’s stories “The Chicken”, “The Smallest Woman in the World”, and “Preciousness”.

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...for giving birth, her obedient stay after being caught, and her sudden yet unsurprising death describes, in Lispector’s viewpoints, the natural course of an average female’s life. Although Lispector wrote these stories in the 1940’s, reflecting on the then current gender inequalities and

hardships of life during the aftermath of WWII, these themes are evident in all time periods, for as Lispector has shown, the innate traditional roles of women along with the pre-conceived notion of men being more significant than women are evident even in our time. These limits reflect Lispector’s existentialist viewpoints in showing that the life of a woman is restrained; women’s lives are filled with pressure, sadness, and ultimately death.

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