“AULINHAS DE SEDUÇÃO” [SMALL LESSONS IN SEDUCTION]

Abstract

This article examines Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s contributions to the women’s pages of the newspapers Correio da Manhã and Diário da Noite between 1959 and 1961. While Lispector’s fictional output has spawned a steady flow of scholarly and academic studies from a wide array of disciplines and fields of study, her journalistic production, in particular the women’s pages she crafted under a pseudonym, has hardly received any critical attention. The “women’s page” is a fixed section in magazines and newspapers entirely dedicated to women, addressed specifically to a female readership, and generally authored by a woman or a female persona. The purpose of this article is to redress this critical oversight and complement the only study so far of this corpus – Aparecida Maria Nunes’s Clarice Lispector Jornalista – by arguing that, in Lispector’s hands, these pages become spaces of potential cultural and political intervention. Through their nuanced parody of other comparable discursive spaces and their overemphasis on what is culturally constructed as feminine, Lispector’s pages perform a transvestite gesture that unsettles normative models of femininity and dislodges a heteronormative temporality predicated upon birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.

Keywords:

• Clarice Lispector
• women’s pages
• performance
• transvestism
• commodification of gender

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Among these more recent, innovative approaches to Lispector's work, it is worth mentioning Vilma Arêas's Clarice Lispector com A Ponta dos Dedos (2005), in which she describes these “marginal” texts of Lispector's as written “with the tips of the fingers,” as the title indicates, rushed, as it were, and, in Arêas's opinion, simultaneously avant-garde and under-developed. A Doméstica Imaginária, published by Sônia Roncador in 2008, also offers an original interpretation of Lispector's work as it devotes an entire chapter to an analysis of the figure of the maid in part of the writer's literary and journalistic production.

2 In an interview with Editora Rocco, the publishing house responsible for bringing out the two collections Correio Feminino and Só para Mulheres mentioned above, Aparecida Maria Nunes explains Lispector's consistent use of pseudonyms as a columnist with these words:

[Clarice] was afraid of compromising her literary production with the less elaborate texts for the newspapers. According to her family, Clarice even wanted to keep her activity as a writer parallel to or separate from her activity as a journalist, even fearing she would confuse her readers. Because of that, she would sign her journalistic texts with a pseudonym. (“Entrevista com Aparecida Nunes, organizadora de Só para mulheres,” Editora Rocco Online (accessed 1 Apr. 2012))

All translations from Portuguese into English are my own.

3 In this respect, it is important to remember that it was not until 1943 that Brazilian legislation granted women permission to work outside the home without the husband's express authorization (Scott 23).

4 See Minhas Queridas, a collection of 120 letters exchanged between Clarice Lispector and her sisters Tania Kaufmann and Elisa Lispector between 1940 and 1957, edited by Teresa Montero.

5 This article was originally published in number 45 of Poétique, Ed. du Seuil. The translation quoted here is by Pilar Hernández Cobos from the book De la ironía a lo grotesco.