DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L31277
Authors: Israt Jahan
Abstract: The present paper aims at demonstrating Clarice Lispector’s call upon the attention that should be brought to bear on oneself and her alert to the reader for being conscious of the anxiety concerning all the disturbances of the body and the mind. Through the research it is shown how her different characters (Maria, Anna, Catherine, the Little Flower) respond to the cultivation of self- where the importance is attributed to self-respect, not just in so far as one’s status is concerned, but as concerns one’s rational nature- a self-respect that is exercised by depriving oneself of pleasure or by confining one’s indulgence to marriage or procreation. Lispector’s experiments with the female characters are not limited to reducing feminism to the conflict of male and female; rather it continues with the themes of human suffering and failure, the disconcerting implications of humanity, human being’s total awareness of inevitable alienation and the pressing need to overcome its danger and most forcefully of all, the terror upon realizing the ultimate nothingness, which find their abode in her collection of thirteen short stories entitled Lacos de Familia (Family Ties). The paper highlights the characters’ relation to the objects of the world, the sudden awake of consciousness in the characters, human being’s confrontation with the absolute freedom and solitariness; and illuminates the conflict between public and private self and the terror upon realizing the failure of language to communicate.
Keywords: anxiety, disturbances of body and mind, self-respect, rational nature, alienation, nothingness, self, freedom.
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