Escaping Patriarchal Institutionalization

Introduction

Perto do coração selvagem belongs to a class of “introspective novel” that pushes the boundaries of the narrative genre.² It plays with the conventional archetypes of gender, questioning the androcentric social, cultural, and ideological structures of the patriarchal novel. Ellen Douglass’s reading of the story as a feminist quest narrative—a transgressive journey undertaken by Joana to overcome social conformities—elucidates Clarice Lispector’s fixation with gender roles associated with femininity, identity, and autonomy of the self. In other words, Lispector’s philosophic narrative presents a definitive and aggressive rejection of cultural roles expected to be fulfilled by women. My starting point, then, will be the following two questions: First, how does patriarchal ideology shape the feminine subject in the novel? And second, how does Lispector’s protagonist, realizing she is intimately intertwined with the social and the political, break free from this social space?

Written by Lispector in her early twenties, Perto do coração selvagem has become, for many, the first point of contact with the writer’s varied, challenging narratives that have recognized, questioned, and ultimately rejected the social roles presented for a woman. Historically, the novel posits a defining shift in terms of Brazilian literary work produced before and after its publication in 1943.³ In the words of Judith Payne and Earl A. Fitz, this novel represents a turning point in Latin American literature, marking a truly new achievement in terms of its inventive exploration of gender, identity, and liberation through its “poetic and philosophic language that challenges the assumptions of master discourse” (1993, 94). For Lícia Manzo, the characteristic traits that Lispector weaves for Joana, the protagonist of the novel, document a profound change that permanently switches from what had been absolute in Brazilian literature: “abstrata, cheia de matizes e mistérios [Joana] era, portanto, um personagem inconcebível” (1997, 5–6). As Douglass points out, “Lispector’s representation of a female protagonist on quest is, in itself, a feminist act” (1988, 16); but how does Lispector, in Perto do coração selvagem, produce a feminist narrative that defies the patriarchal social law? How does she re-envision the newly born woman, not limited by her duties toward her gender, but manifesting a remarkable change that transcends her from the mythic role of a gendered body to that of the herói? How does Lispector revise the traditionalist perspective of the masculinist novel and alter it to delineate a narrative that engages with the Bildungsroman process of the making of a female artist?

These questions raise the possibility of interpreting the novel as a counter-ideological narrative that exacts a shift away from what had been the typical masculine novel and towards “discovering new ways to rewrite the feminine” (Rosenberg 1989, 75). If human subjectivity and agency are embodied inextricably and intertwined with the material environment, our endeavor must be to seek Joana’s identity in terms of a rebellious figure who will not conform to the prevailing socially established laws of the material world (Prieto 2011, 18). Joana’s journey, much like that of James Joyce’s Dedalus, involves breaking free of the phallic authority that dictates the individual. This struggle is more on the ideological level, where one must undergo the metamorphic process of becoming; the novel must be read as a search for one’s authentic self within the labyrinthine constructs of a hegemonic social system. Or, as Hélène Cixous points out, “the different attitudes that men and women show with regard to becoming an artist” may be considered a good place to begin our understanding of what Joana faces, and what she must overcome to establish herself as an ideal to her vocation (1987, 1).

I refer to the challenges the protagonist faces within the text as institutions of patriarchal power. From a socialist-feminist perspective, the use of ‘patriarchal institutionalization’ demonstrates how repressive laws restrain the formation of female subjectivity and conform her to follow heteronormative codes of behavior. Further in this discussion, I propose to show how femininity, seen through the eyes of the protagonist and within the social context, is a patriarchal definition of womanhood. The article will also explore Joana’s manifestation of a form of deviance that helps her transcend the regulatory mechanisms of control and discipline for a self-guided road to freedom, which would ultimately aid in releasing her from her social entanglements. Several authors have written extensively on the issues of patriarchal domination in the works of Lispector, focusing on the novel’s social and cultural setting, or ways in which the protagonist rejects the conventional social roles (Peixoto, Cixous, Fitz, Douglass). But fewer critical works exist on the inquiry into the novel’s diegetic tension that seemingly arises from the friction created by the coming together of opposing tenets of survival and how that relates invariably to the universal struggle between a female subject and patriarchal institutions. Therefore, I intend to use this essay to demonstrate the role of patriarchal ideology in the formation of subjective identity, the function of power guised in the form of norms and conventions, and how Lispector cleverly devises a way to resolve conflicts through defiance of the established social order.

Patriarchal Institutions

The novel’s main concern, as Marta Peixoto affirms, is Joana’s artistic development. If we are to read the novel as a Künstlerroman—a plot that involves the making of a young woman as an artist by undergoing varied social and subjective crises—it must be read in terms of a narrative framework that is based on the patriarchal. Joana is a woman in a man’s world, and she must (if she is to pursue her vocation) assert and engender a counter-narrative within this overwhelmingly coercive domestic structure. Joana’s counter-narrative will involve, as we will see, a struggle to defy asphyxiating gender norms and social roles in order for the protagonist’s independent subjectivity and literary ambition to emerge. To survive the androcentric social setting, Joana must, in the words of Susan Kingsley Kent, deviate from the traditional roles of wife and mother to become “unsexed” (2012, 18). This will, in the larger context of Lispector’s ideology, allow Joana to achieve an existence that is outside predefined expressions of heterosexuality and help her escape the forceful imposition of a conventional feminine identity. This particular novel, then, is a comprehensive exploration of the intimidating effects of patriarchal ideology on the female subject and an individual’s struggles to overcome this hegemonic structure.

We encounter recurring motif early on: “O que vai ser de Joana?” (Perto 8). This is not only the central concern of the novel but also a philosophical inquiry with which both the father and the aunt seem preoccupied. Responsible for the development of the young protagonist, these figures of authority force the individual into what Bella Jozef refers to as “formas cristalizadas de comportamiento” or a “rigidly patterned behavior” (2002, 708). Throughout Joana’s childhood, she is pushed into and shaped according to the established normative codes under which she is expected to spend her entire life. Teresa de Lauretis identifies this behavior as the male oedipal logic “where the little girl has no other prospect but to consent and be seduced into femininity” (1984, 152). In the glimpses of her childhood that we come across in the narrative, Joana is pressured into a feminine role through a network of patriarchal institutions of power. She is excluded from the role that she is determined to play—that of the herói—and is entrapped within the two-sex model of gender.⁴ The prevailing androcentric discourse casts Joana into a stable, sexed identity that reflects the patriarchal motive of a woman as a passive, household object “enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of others, namely, men” (Irigaray 1985, 134). The argument here is that, unlike a traditional Künstlerroman, Joana’s quest can be seen not only as one conflicting with the archetypes of gender but also as the author’s antagonistic revolt against the oedipal narrative mode. Perto do coração selvagem is a fine example in Lispector’s oeuvre where patrilineal social structures victimize women into playing the secondary role of the submissive wife or mother, barring their development into wholly realized individuals. Fitz’s analysis of Lispector’s feminist characterization, thus, draws on a key aspect of her work—her protagonists share a collective determination in an “attempt to realize their fullest potential, both in an individual, social sense, and also in an anonymous, cosmic sense” (1980, 55). Joana is the first of many similar female characters that Lispector’s escritura would develop over the years that tries to comprehend a woman’s long road to liberation.

Although upon publication, early critics pondered the incompleteness or the incoherence of a text that fails to demonstrate any adherence to temporal linearity, Perto do coração selvagem can be divided into three distinctive and defining stages that mark Joana’s transformation. These stages present Joana with obstacles that she must overcome if she is to further her path toward literary creativity and autonomy. Cixous’s radically idiosyncratic reading of Lispector’s novels, though often criticized, has long been a preface for feminist scholars involved with Claricean studies. As Cixous stresses, law (or the authoritative law of the Father) is perhaps the most inquisitive factor in Lispector’s body of work. The plot opens with the introduction of a young girl into a world that is inherently dominated by the law of the Father. It is a world that strictly follows the masculine protocol of the food chain, regulated by the laws that require feminine sacrifice: “Encostando a testa na vidraça brilhante e fria olhava para o quintal do vizinho, para o grande mundo das galinhas - que - não - sabiam - que - iam - morrer … bem sabia uma ou outra minhoca se espreguiçava antes de ser comida pela galinha que as pessoas iam comer” (Lispector 1990, 3).

The imagery in the opening scene offers a critical symbol—that of the hen the men will eventually eat. In some ways, it is similar to the chapter on the mother where “there is no mother in the mother chapter, only the naked yellow hen on the table—and the men are going to eat the hen” (Cixous 1987, 9). Even more noticeable is the introduction of the father through the sound of his typewriter which disrupts what is otherwise a silent environment. Does the father represent, in Bloomian terminology, the predecessor—the literary father whom Joana must destroy to succeed as an artist in her own right? Indeed, the opening sequence pits the father and the daughter against each other, both involved in their respective literary process; the sound of the father’s typewriter against the adolescent, imaginative creation of his daughter. Joana’s first formative stage presents her with her first obstacle—the father—who plays a small but very significant role in the making of the young artist. The repressive law makes itself present through him and his friend who, as in any conventional oedipal narrative structure, become agents of patriarchy. They persuade Joana to go against her vocation as an artist and do not permit her to enter the masculine social sphere. When the father reveals to his friend that Joana intends to be a hero when she grows up (a role reserved particularly for men in a patriarchal narrative), the father’s friend laughs at her because her ambitions cross the line that separates the masculine-feminine divide. Her wanting to be a hero is a transgression of the domestic space that she is bound to. Joana’s desire to play the aspiring part of the hero in the narrative transcends the established binary codes of patriarchal logic and comes off as an illogical joke. The father fails to acknowledge the protagonist’s unorthodox ambition to escape the socially inscribed roles of gender, denying Joana’s authentic and independent existence outside the regulatory domains of the phallic law.

After the death of the father, Joana’s aunt replaces his role as the figure of authority in the young girl’s life. As Joana’s overseer, the aunt coerces Joana into a patriarchal model of femininity that the aunt herself is a victim of. She serves as an adoptive mother and pulls Joana away from the demands of her ambition, referring to Joana as “uma víbora fria,” displaying no motherly affection. In itself an obstacle in Joana’s path, the aunt is a product of patriarchal ways of thinking and represents the domesticating nature of patriarchal institutions that try to ‘tame’ the individual. In this regard, patriarchal institutions constitute a structure whose main purpose is the political entrapment of the individual into a mesh of social praxis that cannot be overcome. Even if the aunt is associated with customary feminine roles: “brincava com uma casa, uma cozinheira, um marido, uma filha casada, visitas,” she has almost a masculine presence emblematic of the phallic law (Perto 66). The nameless aunt stands for a universalized model of the patriarchal feminine for whom Joana’s behavior entails a complicated form of otherness—a young girl’s failure to obey the conformities of her gender.

Joana’s defiance of the laws that try to govern her is challenged by the aunt’s threatening modes of punishment attempting to curb the girl’s artistic spirit and lawlessness. Following the incident where Joana steals a book from a bookstore, her aunt sends her off to a boarding school. The little girl’s very act defies the rigid social discipline that women are subjected to and instantly throws her away from the closed circle of lawfulness into the marginal territory of delinquent criminality. This shoplifting episode centers around the collapse of the idealization of womanhood; Joana transgresses the symbolic order when she steals a book without regret, remorse, or any sense of wrongdoing. Joana’s offense comes with its ramification through the aunt’s attempt to punish her as she hopes to reprimand Joana through the boarding school’s disciplinary force (which the aunt believes might be capable of overwhelming the young girl and coercing her to change). For the aunt, sending Joana away to the boarding school is a befitting penalty for an individual who has failed to affirm or uphold the cultural and domestic values demanded of a young girl.

The boarding school itself functions as an institutional establishment intended to subvert Joana, to discipline her into a more conventional role. But social legality, the patricentric ‘logos’ doesn’t work for Lispector’s Joana. Her ability to ‘confess’ that stealing is harmful only when one is frightened, and that the act does not make her happy or sad, puts Joana outside the jurisdiction of the phallocentric discourse. As Cixous points out about the episode: “She does it, as we have seen, in the episode of theft by putting herself at the origin of what could be the law. She decides the value of such and such a gesture. She had the incredible strength to resist the ready-made in the world with its finished laws ordered by a system of moral values, hierarchized into good and bad” (1990, 25). Joana’s stealing of the book disrupts the social legal system which might be read as one of Lispector’s aggressive responses to the disciplines of patriarchal control in an attempt to invert the predetermined laws of gender. As Sara Ramshaw writes, the act “dehierarchizes, destabilizes and erases law” and is Joana’s attempt to bypass the oppressive nature of patriarchal repression (2003, 23). The boarding school presents the second obstacle in Joana’s path to literary autonomy. It is an institutionalized project under patriarchy that would administer Joana to make her submissive to the oedipal laws.

Stephen Dedalus faces a very similar kind of repression and transgresses it through the proclamation of “non serviam,” but in Lispector’s narrative, the female artist does not have the luxury of breaking free of the diabolical course of orthodox femininity into which she is impelled (Joyce 2004, 103). As a result, inside the walls of the boarding school, she must undergo another transformative stage (in the episode titled O banho) where she is cleansed of her identity. As critics suggest, in this episode, “Catholicism appears as a regulatory force used to suppress originality and invention” (Lindstrom 1999, 119) and is Joana’s “induction into patriarchal femininity” (Douglass 1988, 103). The institutionalization of the protagonist is a literal limiting force that would withhold the individual from further breaking the patriarchal law; put another way, Joana is sent to boarding school precisely to ‘feminize’ her. It is not surprising then that the imagery in this episode indicates a violent rebirth, a correctional return to the ideal version of patriarchal femininity and obedience brought about by a young girl’s entrapment within the social ideology of gender. In her article “Female Quest” (1990), Douglass’s analogy of the function of water in the bath scene and its symbolic connotation to the masculine libido directs us to the reality of the episode. The bath is both a symbolic rape and murder of the subject, reducing the young Joana to a victim as her body and her identity are seized and transformed into an interweaving framework where oedipal laws, social discipline, and patriarchal control will intimidate the young woman by restraining her approach to any forms of lawlessness or artistic innovation.

Interestingly, Joana’s marriage follows this episode of the bath, suggesting the individual’s reformation of her subjectivity as the sole reason for this new beginning in Joana’s life that is far removed from her previous attempts to cross the great sexual divide. The internalization of the patriarchal discourse after the bath encodes a literal conversion of the pre-gendered identity into a self, subjected to and supervised by the germination of a feminine consciousness that adheres to the standardized sex-gender system. In other words, this moment in the novel displays one of the most significant events—the adolescence and innocence of the pre-subjective, pre-patriarchal are lost after the traumatic experience of the bath. The aggressive images of the bath scene suggest a “symbol of water displaced from its conventional association with immanence and femininity, to become a symbol of dynamic masculinity” (Douglass 1990, 101). This sacrificial bath implies Joana’s defeat in her struggle to overcome the demands and doctrines of her gender.

By incorporating Joana’s quest with what is, perhaps, the most defining obstacle in her journey toward autonomy—her marriage to Otávio—Lispector revises the novel as a political and polemic verbalization of female oppression. This marriage curbs the artistic development of the individual to “assume the role of patriarchy’s passive, otherly, and above all, selfless woman” (Douglass 1990, 98). Like Joana’s father, Otávio is associated with, and shares a common passion for, the act of writing. Similar to the opening sequence of the novel where the father’s typewriter becomes symbolic of his artistic credibility, Otávio is associated with law and its making. He belongs to a privileged class (socially and sexually) that empowers him with institutionalized education. As is evident by Otávio’s engagement with writing a book on Civil Law, Lispector subtly implies the hegemonic involvement of men in writing legal discourse—in inventing, experimenting with, and implementing laws. Education and worldly wisdom, within the social space of the novel, are reserved for and associated with the masculine characters (the father, the teacher, and the husband Otávio). Barring Joana from breaching into that private masculine space, denying the coexistence of men and women in a similar plane with similar intellectual or literary prowess, suggests the dominating structure of man-made institutions and reflects the position of women under the reign of patriarchal supervision. One can even point out that Otávio fits into the role of the traditional patriarchal hero whose expansive growth requires the sacrificial feminine Other: “Temia os dias, um atrás do outro, sem surpresas, de puro devotamento a um homem. A um homem que disporia de todas as forças da mulher para sua própria fogueira, num sacrifício sereno e inconsciente de tudo o que não fosse sua própria personalidade” (Lispector 1990, 95–96).

In the interactions between Joana and Otávio, the presence of friction is made evident through two opposing forces—one seeking liberty, the other denying it. Joana’s marriage to Otávio becomes “a politically signifying act mandated by social convention, and not (necessarily) as a loving human relationship” (Fitz 2001, 96). In this marriage, Joana is reduced, in her passivity, to a being who solely performs as the marginalized household object/woman. She has to take up the role of the archetypal wife obligated in her marriage to assist her husband’s development, her role diminished to fetching books for him. Since Joana fiercely yearns to come out of this binding setup, the friction, then, takes shape in the form of a conflict between the male and the female to play the herói of the narrative. With Otávio’s omnipotent cultural right to act as the defining male and Joana’s struggle to dethrone him from his superior position, the hostility is resolved only when Joana decides to leave her husband. As Fitz highlights, Joana’s escape from this marriage articulates “her self-emancipation from all that Otávio represents” (2001, 101). Her marriage is crucially the most entrapping of all patriarchal confinements in the novel that restricts and negates her opportunities for autonomy and self-expression.

By taking a lover and initiating a relationship outside the social confines of her marriage, Joana liberates herself from all ideological, emotional, and gender ties, displacing fixed icons of femininity. In yet another transformation, this time she becomes what is a remarkably self-formed, self-defined portrayal of what Ann Heilmann refers to as the New Woman.⁵ It is in this relationship with the lover (simply described as the homem) that Joana can finally shape her subjective and literary identity and reverse the role of the passive woman. She can now take controlling, active participation in the verbal creativity expected of the artist. In a radical extension along the lines of sexual difference, she can finally cross over to the other side (which until then had been an exclusive domain inhabited by the father, the teacher, and Otávio). In this new relationship, Joana engages as the inventor of stories, as a teller rather than a listener, in a way reversing the patriarchal rule of the masculine narrator. But only the homem’s unopposed acceptance of his role as a passive listener can confirm Joana’s artistic foundation. Instead of trying to subdue her, the lover negates himself in this phantasmic episode. On a thematic level, the homem presents the opportunity for a relationship with no social or institutionalized ties and marks Joana’s entry into the symbolic order in a progressive exercise towards the realization of her full potential. As Douglass indicates, Joana’s act of telling stories to the lover is “suggestive of the maternal mode of femininity,” thereby producing a complex and paradoxical connection between the two lovers that verges close to a relationship of a mother and a son (1990, 105).

This peculiar alliance is the final license for Joana to take up the role of the herói; the quest culminates in her liberation from the oppressive clutches of gender and institutions funded by the patriarchal. The anarchical spirit within Joana exhibits a journey intricate with meanings—the voyage, as a literal journey, takes her away from the masculine domestic realm for an exploration of newer lands. The metaphoric interpretation of the journey is an internal voyage of self-realization and a possibility of existence without the marked permanence of gender. Joana’s self-reliance is exemplified when, at the end of the novel, she is compared with a young horse—a majestic analogy of freedom.⁶ This places Joana as a possessor of her own body and soul, responsible for her own journey (without a man by her side for the first time), as we see her determined to nurture herself in this new role. The ending, epitomized by the Odyssean nature of this journey, aims at a symbolic portrayal of women’s liberation from the claustrophobic social entrapment by traversing untraversed spaces and experimenting with the unexperimented.

Models of Patriarchal Femininity

The critic Lucia Helena suggests that men and women in the novels of Clarice Lispector are victims of the social codes of patriarchy: “acabam por aprisionar e reprimir a todos, não importando o sexo, a classe, a etnia ou a idade” (1992, 1167). Lispector is one of several Latin American women writers known for favoring alternative models of womanhood, for writing protagonists who resist following the path of archetypal ‘womanliness,’ and for portraying the radical feminine who question social and cultural stereotypes. In this section, I will seek to demonstrate the diverse models of femininity that Joana will come across in Perto do coração selvagem and how these models are based on each character’s victimization within the patriarchal tradition.

At issue, from the start, are the various stereotypes of femininity drawn from the cultural norms of the universal sex-gender system. This system employs a complex social interchange where individual roles are a result of interiorized phallic discourse. That is, women, have adopted the phallic social law function merely to fulfill their biological, political, and psychological routines, governed by the Other’s (man’s) commanding ideology. This sexual polarity is apparent in Perto do coração selvagem as the males hold social and intellectual power while women are extensively marginalized into roles of confinement as daughters, mothers, and housewives. How does Joana survive the gendered domestic space manifested in the context of this particular novel?

In Douglass’s words, the protagonist assumes her identity in the guise of “femininity as mask” in a diligent and tactical ruse that revises her role to help her stay inside the domestic space (albeit near the margins) and later escape the subversive laws of gender (1990, 101). In the entire course of the narrative, we find Joana in almost a continual, fluid paradigm of change which is why she can duplicate identities and transform herself according to her will.⁷ To continue the androcentric repression of her society, she can hide her heroic self to take on the role of an archetype that would grant her access to the conventional social space, one that is especially reserved for women. Joana adopts a model of femininity that Luce Irigaray refers to as the ‘feminine masquerade’:

But in fact that “femininity” is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity. The fact remains that this masquerade requires an effort on her part for which she is not compensated. Unless her pleasure comes from being chosen as an object of consumption or of desire by masculine “subjects.” (1985, 84)

According to the logic of this masquerade, Joana will satisfy her womanly roles, play the part of the Other, and willing choose to become the “object of consumption” in order to participate in and become a part of the diegesis, but only until she can reclaim her agency. Mary Ann Doane’s similar interpretation of the masquerade as a strategic fabrication of identity by women within the masculine system to survive the oppressive patrilineal social structure and fulfill their own desires allows us to read Joana’s disguise as a calculated façade. As Doane argues, “Womanliness is a mask that can be worn or removed” (1982, 81). A bold proclamation would be to consider Joana as a genderless figure who chooses to put on the mask of the feminine, who merely performs her womanly roles, disguising herself, masking her heroic identity until all the diegetic conflicts are resolved. The bath scene, which I suggested before as symbolic rape and murder of the subject that leads to Joana’s becoming a ‘feminized’ protagonist can be read as playacting put on by Joana. This evokes Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performativity where Butler elaborates on the social construction of gender identity as the execution of roles through bodily acts, desires, and gestures to fit into society.⁸ A close reading, thereby, might propose that Joana’s heroic self, which after the bath is replaced by a more conventional role, is merely a staging of the feminine presented by Joana. There are moments, though, where our protagonist is pushed into or contemplates fulfilling the role of marianismo.⁹ But she can quickly detach herself from the idea as every encounter with a female character possibly shows her the consequences of playing the stereotype.

Thus, the conventional models of femininity with their sharp adherence to the repressive ideology of the patriarchal system act as a premonition of the life that Joana might have to live if she interiorizes what is undoubtedly the phallic law and becomes a woman herself. In other words, each female character that Joana confronts in her journey represents something associated with traditional models of femaleness. These traditional models are produced by the dominant social order where power plays a key role in the formation of identity and the development of the subject. The operation of power in shaping the subjective experience of the individual is explained by Lucia Villares in terms of Butler’s vectors of power. Villares contends: “Vectors of power are normalizing social forces operating through discursive formations circulating in society. Through the process of subjection, these normalizing forces are internalized in one’s psyche, often unconsciously, as a constitutive part of one’s self and personal identity. They become an integral part of one’s subjectivity” (2011, 26).

As victims of the androcentric discourse, women’s subjective identities in the novel are shaped by the prevailing masculine conventionality. The aunt is the first woman that Joana comes across—a substitute mother who is described as a literal oppressive body, in whose body “podiam sepultar uma pessoa” (Lispector 1990, 37). She is a domesticated woman, and she further tries to domesticate Joana to obey the expected traditional submissiveness of a woman. Indeed, if Lispector’s nexus is to emphasize power’s subjection of women within the phallic household, the author’s concerns demonstrate a typified outlook on the various challenges of the feminine experience. The aunt, with her almost masculine presence, epitomizes a woman molded by society into acting as a dictatorial representative of the social space, one who is undoubtedly and dutifully executing the patriarchal punishment over Joana. Two models of femininity collide here—one pre-patriarchal, the other verging on the masculine (already patriarchalized). By upholding the social code of domination, the aunt prevails in this duel by compelling Joana’s pre-patriarchal identity into submitting to the conventions of femininity.

Very different from the aunt, the teacher’s wife exhibits a form of corporeity against which Joana is unwomanly and shapeless. In contrast to the distinct presence of the wife in the imagistic form of a socialized feminine body: “alta, quase bonita com aquele cabelo cobreado, curto e liso,” Joana fails to exhibit any sense of maturity or physicality (Lispector 1990, 59). This distances her from the teacher’s affection and leaves her envious of the teacher’s wife—a rivalry, even when evident, obscured by Joana’s lack of femininity. The teacher’s wife, on the other hand, is essentially shaped into an ideal housewife, talking about dinner, and fulfilling roles expected from a woman in charge of looking after the household and the husband. This episode is telling of a sudden change that occurs in Joana’s subjective perception of relationships as she tries to win over the teacher’s fondness, failing which, she promises her teacher to wait: “Até que eu fique bonita. Bonita como ‘ela’ ” (61). Joana ascribes to the teacher’s wife a sexual superiority that she herself fails to demonstrate physically with her skinny body.¹⁰ Conscious of her own lack of womanliness, Joana, for the first time in the narrative, aspires to be a lady that can win over a man’s desire. This moment in her childhood is where our protagonist faces one of the most defining challenges: she can either choose to feminize herself to meet the demands of the masculine social space or reinvent an authentic life based on her principles of independence.

Joana’s meeting with the ‘mulher da voz’ proves Lispector’s aberrant departure from portraying sexuality as a restrictive norm. Eroticism and desire enveloped in the dense abstractions of language penetrate the novel’s acute meditation on the essence of sexuality’s indefinable charge. This moment appears as an epiphany that draws the protagonist’s path to the newly realized course of a physical, psychological, and spiritual becoming. The episode, O casamento, is both astounding and liberating. It opens with Joana who is now married and realizing that she has been ‘feminized’—dependent on her man. Her own voice perplexes her, described as “A voz de uma mulher jovem junto de seu homem” (1990, 77). In this encounter, when Joana enquires about a house for rent, she finds herself both despising and envying this alienated woman and her unaffected solitary existence that stands in sharp contrast to the situation that Joana is in. When Joana asks: “Não é triste viver sem um homem na casa?” (79), the woman’s answer leaves a deep mark on her consciousness. The woman’s exiled life is, for Joana, the freedom that her marriage to Otávio has razed. The authority and liberty in the woman’s tone and her ahistoric reality drive Joana into inventing or fabricating a history for this woman. Her self-sufficiency, whether literal or invented, breaches the socially constructed norms centered around typifying a woman’s existence and conflicts with the attitudes and situations of life in which the other female characters find themselves. For Joana, this is a discovery, a revelation, of the possibility of surviving outside the confines of the traditional feminine role. It promises the prospect of living without being tied to the roles of a mother or a wife.

Perhaps the most compelling and decisive relationship that Joana has is exemplified by her attraction toward Lídia, Otávio’s pregnant mistress. In Fitz’s words, she is seen as “an erotic partner as well as a competitor” (2001, 75). For both Joana and the readers, Lídia presents another archetype whose passivity and fidelity to the sociocultural norms of womanhood make her repulsive to Joana. Her nonchalance at being only a mistress and her submissive acceptance of the phallogocentric social discourse epitomizes the feminine principle displayed in the novel. Payne and Fitz describe Lídia as: “intuitive, passive, carnal. Her body as presented to the reader seems made for maternity. In the opening and closing of the first scene in which Lídia appears, she is sewing and waiting for Otávio to arrive” (1993, 102).

Lídia suffers from Otávio’s arrogance while being happy at playing second fiddle. She willingly upholds the patriarchal principle as the dormant and passive woman. When Joana comes face to face with Lídia for the first time, she offers Otávio to Lídia on the condition that they share him sexually until Joana is pregnant. At this point in the novel, we come across a version of the protagonist who is self-divided, and above all, one who desires to fulfill the role of motherhood but is dispassionate about the idea of being together with Otávio in a restrictively lawful marriage. Lídia’s self-fulfillment comes from participating in the tradition of motherhood and endorsing the patriarchal values of society. She passionately waits for Otávio, hoping that he will walk out of his marriage to be with her someday. But Lispector chooses here to go further into her critique of femininity and sexual difference by contrasting Joana and Lídia’s bodies—Lídia is maternal, glowing with life inside her, while Joana is pale and skinny; perhaps articulating a difference between a woman and an individual masking herself under the guise of femininity. In a long interior monologue, Joana’s sexual deficiency and her lack of femininity make Lídia the object of both Otávio and Joana’s desire:

Sou um bicho de plumas. Lídia de pelos, Otávio se perde entre nós, indefeso. Como escapar ao meu brilho e à minha promessa de fuga e como escapar à certeza dessa mulher? … Como sou pobre junto dela, tão segura. Ou me acendo e sou maravilhosa, fugazmente maravilhosa, ou senão obscura, envolvo-me em cortinas. Lídia, o que quer que seja, é imutável, sempre com a mesma base clara … Eu toda nado, flutuo, atravesso o que existe com os nervos, nada sou senão um desejo, a raiva, a vaguidão, impalpável como a energia. Energia? mas onde está minha força? na imprecisão, na imprecisão, na imprecisão … (Lispector 1990, 136)

Lídia’s burgeoning pregnancy is a reminder of motherhood as a socially engaged enterprise that projects and affirms the cultural ideal of the self-sacrificial woman. The glorifying idealization of maternity-as-identity is quickly dismantled when Joana refuses to participate in this charade, rejecting all that Lídia has come to represent. In a radical portrayal of feminine sexuality and female empowerment, Joana discovers an erotically charged impulse towards Lídia, a probing critique of the vagaries of sexuality and Joana’s command over her own. By discarding the gender-conforming role played by Lídia, Joana rejects the heterosexual binaries of the man-woman relationship, using Lídia as an escape from the seizing power of patriarchal control. Joana is immediately relieved of the duties prescribed by her gender when she lets Lídia fulfill the conventions of a wife to Otávio and a mother to the expected child. Her allegiance to this new self comes in the form of another epiphany: a revelation that the patriarchal conception of motherhood (as an institutionalized responsibility towards society) will stifle her nature and cut off her wings even before she learns to fly. The imaginary child, shaped by another of Joana’s fantasy tales, associates the reality of maternity and identity: “Mas depois, quando eu lhe der leite com estes seios frágeis e bonitos, meu filho crescerá de minha força e me esmagará com sua vida. Ele se distanciará de mim e eu serei a velha mãe inútil. Não me sentirei burlada. Mas vencida apenas e direi: eu nada sei, posso parir um filho e nada sei” (172).

The writer’s concern is the loss of agency due to the constraints that this imagined mother-son relationship will bring upon her hero. The evaluation here is not limited to the consequences of motherhood (generally ascribed as an oppressive model of institutionalization) in the literary-artistic development of a woman. Lispector also tries to assert that motherhood, with its restrictive ideology in the patrilineal social system, hinders potential and might obstruct the path of women in their search for self-sufficiency.

Although the novel’s structure, as Peixoto points out, follows the methodical configuration of triangular relationships, it is in the last part of the novel that this structure becomes significant. When Joana becomes involved with the homem, she enters into a relationship with the man and what is presumably his former lover. Peixoto rightly calls this woman the “most debased of all the women in the novel” (1994, 14). Described as a “prostituta sem glória” (Lispector 1990, 183) the mysterious and awkward relationship shared by the homem and the woman resists any concrete definition. Joana wonders, “ela é agora como sua mãe? não é mais sua amante?” (183). The woman symbolizes the passive, old lover/mother/housekeeper whose usefulness in the domestic sphere has been outlasted by the man. In this final triptych, Joana has the controlling force over both the man and the woman which allows her to overpower their individual and collective voices. Like Lídia, who represents an archetypal wife, the woman delineates an existence marked by sexual humiliation, servitude, and the naked truth of what might have happened to Joana had she continued her marriage with Otávio.

Social Deviance and Transgression

In his The Division of Labor in Society (1994), Durkheim says we “should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends that consciousness” (1994, 40). Reading the multifaceted character of Joana through the Durkheimian model of deviance allows us to better analyze the concept of transgression that Lispector tries to render through her novel. In a strictly moral society, Durkheim argued, deviant members are necessary since they allow the reaffirmation of socially established ideals through punishment. In other words, the dominant figure of power must punish the deviant creature to demonstrate the outcome of failing to abide by the laws, while also setting up an example for anyone who might try to go against this collective conscience. In the novel, the concrete and organized institutions of power will try to subdue Joana and make her an abiding subject, one who will obey the valued social and moral codes of society. When she fails to uphold the shared principles of her culture and position, her punishment is the patriarchally acknowledged feminine identity that is imposed upon her.

But how does Lispector’s Joana achieve true liberation? It is through Joana’s little acts of deviation that she escapes the political policing of her domestic, phallogocentric space. Each time she is commanded to follow the demands of her gender, Joana demonstrates what Durkheim referred to as anomie or normlessness. The broadly disruptive social conditions, particularly the patriarchal attempt to repress and control feminine identity give rise to Joana’s normless behavior. By comprehending this autocratic environment that she is surrounded by (and is a part of), the protagonist gets into a struggle to destabilize the masculinist structures through her acts of deviance. These little acts, in turn, prepare her for what is to come: the grand act of the narrative—which, interestingly, takes the shape of a physical and psychological journey—one that allows her to break free from all hegemonic and obligatory ties. Thus, Lispector’s Joana achieves freedom by deviating from all that she is supposed to represent as a daughter, a wife, and most importantly, a gendered subject.

As has been illustrated in this article, the adopted mask of femininity serves as a falsified identity for Joana to survive patriarchy’s inscription of a phallogocentric discourse on the consciousness of the individual. But this ‘feminine masquerade’ is not enough for our hero to transgress the social and legal laws of her domestic space. One must remember that Joana’s ultimate goal is to be free (whether her voyage to the unknown lands at the end of the novel guarantees her liberty is another question). Her transforming subjectivity, which ultimately resolves with “a potent blend of the masculine and the feminine,” presents readers with psychological agency that rejects any codification (Payne and Fitz 1993, 105). Thus, the narrative as a critique of the individual’s behavior within the androcentric order is worthy of more detailed attention as it challenges the rigidity of the social structures in the development of the female artist. The rebellious subject and her relation to her surroundings, especially the conflicts with the master discourse, can be read in terms of Rosi Braidotti’s ‘nomadic experience’ where “the nomadism in question refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior” (1994, 5). As a nomadic subject, Joana is aware of gender policing and her every action is to escape it—the individuals, the institutions, and the unwritten codes of femininity. In Joana, we witness a form of deviance that can be best described as nonacceptance of the regulations imposed on her by the external forces of a society disciplined by masculine principles. Deviance, particularly in Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem, takes the form of delinquency (or acts that transgress disadvantaged social positions), refusing to conform to the prevailing social and sexual codes. Joana exhibits defiance from the roles she is forced to play and the femininity that she is supposed to internalize. As Ngaire Naffin suggests: “Rather than construing criminality as the outcome of a successful conditioning—a deviant expression of femininity—it may well be more appropriate to view it as a sign that a girl has not succumbed to her training for womanhood” (1985, 380).

The shoplifting incident in her adolescence is Joana’s first act of social deviance that violates the protocol of feminine behavior. Ironically, it happens under the aunt’s pseudo-parental watch, indicating the failure of social structures to discipline someone who actively rejects traditional female roles ascribed to her. Sending the adolescent Joana to the boarding school acts as the ‘punishment’ that is reserved for this delinquent within the social order according to Durkheim. Blocked from all legitimate opportunities, Joana, participating in something as audacious as stealing a book without regret, is a feminist categorization of a masculine act that inverts the passive model of femininity to fashion a counter-model based on criminality. If we are to consider stealing (or any other form of criminal behavior, generally and readily associated with truant boys or men), Joana’s theft is not only aberrant from the ideal model of marianismo, it is also an attempt to discard the notion of the ideal feminine and enter into the masculine sphere of the picaresque. In a novel where literacy, knowledge, and worldly wisdom are reserved for men, the stealing of the book takes on a symbolic significance—theft, in its rebelliousness, is the possession of something that Joana isn’t allowed to have legally. Joana’s delinquent behavior proposes an alternative to the social patriarchal framework that, to echo Naffin, has failed to ‘train’ Joana in the womanly ways expected of her. This perseverance to survive outside the law would ultimately allow her to evolve into the herói capable of transgressing the imposed limitations of gender and rigid barriers of the prevailing authoritarian discourse.

In another incident, an old man’s request for Joana’s sympathy over a small bruise is met with a book thrown at his head. This further documents Joana’s unsentimental, uncompassionate nature and her revulsion at giving in to the social pressure of identifying with the fostering, parental figure. Her resiliency becomes an act of pure hostility and indifference, the apparent opposite of what is expected from the cultural notion of a nurturing, motherly woman. Peixoto suggests here that Joana weaponizes the narrative through this retelling to destroy any similar expectations that Otávio might have in regard to mothering his own children (1994, 10). Her refusal to play the nourishing role of the mother figure is an indication of her strong disgust against the vulnerabilities of motherhood as an institutional experience.

Motherhood as a tradition and cultural practice serves to highlight the dominant ideology directed toward oppressing potential, which, for Joana, would be a killing blow to her artistic ambitions. Both as an institution or experience, conventional motherhood with its servile nature can only disempower the individual. Joana’s mother is absent from the novel and her presence in the narrative occurs through the father’s reminiscence. The significantly untraditional image of femininity asserted in the mother’s character is perhaps the reason for her absence from the plot. In a patrilineal world, this model of femininity cannot survive within the social boundaries prescribed by male laws for the submissive role of a mother and wife, which is made more apparent by Joana’s venture to leave this world of men in search of what might perhaps be an ideal. The impossibility of shaping the young girl’s childhood by attempting to deviate from the norms makes the mother’s presence unwarranted. In this context, the mother represents a shift away from orthodox femininity, one that is highly condemned in the domestic space:

— chamava-se Elza. Me lembro que até lhe disse: Elza é um nome como um saco vazio. Era fina, enviesada — sabe como, não é? —, cheia de poder. Tão rápida e áspera nas conclusões, tão independente e amarga que da primeira vez em que falamos chamei-a de bruta! (Lispector 1990, 25, emphasis added)

Imagine então a impressão causada na minha pobre e escassa família … foi como se eu tivesse trazido o micróbio da varíola, um herege, nem sei o quê … Felizmente tenho a impressão de que Joana vai seguir seu próprio caminho … (26–27)

Described with “metaphors of contagious illness and heterodox worship,” the mother manifests reproachable attitudes that, according to the father, Joana must never learn to reflect (Peixoto 1994, 6). Here, we see a certain degree of matrophobia in reverse order: it is rather the father who exhibits the fear of his daughter turning out like the mother. The one who might have been an ideal model to follow is ‘pathologized’ by Joana’s father to interrupt the young girl from following the mother’s aberrant footsteps. The adolescent Joana is further demonized when her attitude is compared to a cold-blooded viper by the aunt. Maria Bernadette Velloso Porto links this concept of being evil with the privilege to initiate an alternate space that empowers Joana with expansive experimentation with her authenticity and possibilities of being (1995, 279).

It is remarkable how significant the function of evil is in the formation of Joana’s identity and her individual subjectivity. An unspoken, unmentioned struggle to transgress the circumscribed domestic space of the cultural woman runs throughout the novel. Joana can only transgress these imposed boundaries by being evil—this trait is of her choosing, one that is not forced upon her. By treading the path of evil, by making it an innate aspect of her character, Joana can challenge the typically accepted feminine roles associated with marianismo. This is fundamental in the narrative since the entire plot is an exercise to outline an alternative model of femininity that can rise to the challenge and destroy the governing ideologies of the master discourse. The acceptance of evil as part of Joana’s identity takes her further away from the idealized social being and indicates a fidelity toward existing outside the marked spaces of inhabitance and the mandated codes of social behavior. Thus, Cristina Ferreira-Pinto’s reading of the novel suggests that as the story unfolds, Joana’s growing awareness of herself has only two possible outcomes: to remain with Otávio and play the wife or exile herself from the community where patriarchs like Otávio exist (1990, 107). The early realization that “A certeza de que dou para o mal” allows Joana to meditate on the limits that her social circumstances have to offer (Lispector 1990, 15). She thus chooses to isolate herself from society and its gendered demarcations by willingly practicing evil as an authentic, transgressional force of creation. Evilness becomes a privilege that entitles Joana to enjoy what is forbidden, to initiate a dialogue with patriarchal restrictions, and a way to develop herself as the sole hero of the text. Perhaps this becomes the reason she can steal a book, initiate a love affair outside her marriage, or take the voyage all by herself. Thus, only by deviating from cultural norms can she transgress her historically rigid social, political, and sexual condition.

Since the social space is dominated by men of privilege, Joana’s literary ambition is itself a transgression. From constructing poems in her childhood to writing on a sheet of paper and inserting it into a book by Spinoza as an adult, her actions are telling of the place she wants to conquer. It is her desire to reside within the same boundaries as men and receive the same entitlements that the men in the novel are privy to. When Joana scribbles some lines on a sheet of paper and consequently Otávio finds out about it, his embarrassment at having been caught unawares becomes a challenge to his masculine authority—as a male writer and lawmaker. The nature of the sentence that Joana writes (distinguished by its metaphysical and speculative interpretation) contrasts with Otávio’s worldview which is dominated by Order. In comparing Spinoza’s phrase with the feeling of listening to Bach, Joana’s poetic interpretation is transgressive since she treads a path where imagination takes precedence over rationality. The very act of writing it down on a piece of paper and securing it inside the book transcends all social boundaries for Otávio since this act traverses the very line of difference that the characters are desperate to uphold and preach onto the feminine subject. Her involvement in the realm of intellectual curiosity or her literary prowess trespasses the divide that separates a woman from a man, and Otávio’s reaction further asserts the fact that he sees Joana as a challenge, a challenge that needs to be mutilated. The only logical end to the narrative and its competing perspectives can be brought about by the “dream logic of the plot” where complexities that try to impede or arrest the artist’s literary ambition magically untangle at every stage of the novel, as if Lispector herself lends a helping hand towards rescuing Joana (Peixoto 14). The father’s death, the teacher’s old age, the encounter with Lídia, and the men’s departures break the chains that tie the social being within the domestic space, empowering the artist to liberate herself from her confines.

Conclusion

The design of the plot, while erasing linearity, is strictly laid out and assembled in episodes that are logically bound together through inventive use of juxtapositions. The systematic ploy depends on the structure rather than on a traditional storytelling methodology. The triptychs devised by Lispector as obstacles to the hero’s quest narrative are institutions that exert and exercise power over the individual; however, Joana manages to neutralize these modes of power (or these complexities neutralize themselves through accident) for her pursuit. The models of femininity highlighted throughout the novel try to assess the social and cultural aspects of gender and identity, emphasizing the function of the patriarchal system that engenders the cultural formation of the feminine subject. Perto do coração selvagem explores, in Lispectorian fashion, Joana’s subjectivity against political, sexual, and maternal ideology in a system where power oppresses women and changes them to reflect the beliefs of the patriarchal logic.

The entire novel negotiates an alternate space for the hero’s existence where her transgressions will not be criminal and in need of reprimand. In other words, Lispector devises to create a space where Joana, or women like her, are not considered delinquents requiring the actions of external social forces to make a gendered woman out of a social subject. Evidently this is not possible within an oppressive social environment, whether in Brazil or in any culture. The lone voyage to an unspecified destination, which seemingly is the only possible conclusion for our hero marks a journey in search of a domain where existence is not governed by gender but by Joana’s desire to merge with her androgynous self, to inhabit outside the boundaries of society, to be resilient against the oppressive systems of patriarchy, and to recognize and embrace her role as the Other.

Being a woman in a man’s world puts her in a disadvantageous position, entailing a coerced loss of agency and a lifelong struggle. In this sense, Lispector perhaps chooses to dislocate Joana from where she has belonged to a place which is the unknown. The end, thus, inverts the traditional binaries of gender as Joana, much like a picaresque character, is set up for a journey where the geographical displacement might bring with it a utopian terrain without impositions. It sets the protagonist free—literally and symbolically—acknowledging her solitary journey as the onset of a new period of life that is determined by independence rather than domestic interdependence.

Introduction

Perto do coração selvagem belongs to a class of “introspective novel” that pushes the boundaries of the narrative genre.² It plays with the conventional archetypes of gender, questioning the androcentric social, cultural, and ideological structures of the patriarchal novel. Ellen Douglass’s reading of the story as a feminist quest narrative—a transgressive journey undertaken by Joana to overcome social conformities—elucidates Clarice Lispector’s fixation with gender roles associated with femininity, identity, and autonomy of the self. In other words, Lispector’s philosophic narrative presents a definitive and aggressive rejection of cultural roles expected to be fulfilled by women. My starting point, then, will be the following two questions: First, how does patriarchal ideology shape the feminine subject in the novel? And second, how does Lispector’s protagonist, realizing she is intimately intertwined with the social and the political, break free from this social space?

Written by Lispector in her early twenties, Perto do coração selvagem has become, for many, the first point of contact with the writer’s varied, challenging narratives that have recognized, questioned, and ultimately rejected the social roles presented for a woman. Historically, the novel posits a defining shift in terms of Brazilian literary work produced before and after its publication in 1943.³ In the words of Judith Payne and Earl A. Fitz, this novel represents a turning point in Latin American literature, marking a truly new achievement in terms of its inventive exploration of gender, identity, and liberation through its “poetic and philosophic language that challenges the assumptions of master discourse” (1993, 94). For Lícia Manzo, the characteristic traits that Lispector weaves for Joana, the protagonist of the novel, document a profound change that permanently switches from what had been absolute in Brazilian literature: “abstrata, cheia de matizes e mistérios [Joana] era, portanto, um personagem inconcebível” (1997, 5–6). As Douglass points out, “Lispector’s representation of a female protagonist on quest is, in itself, a feminist act” (1988, 16); but how does Lispector, in Perto do coração selvagem, produce a feminist narrative that defies the patriarchal social law? How does she re-envision the newly born woman, not limited by her duties toward her gender, but manifesting a remarkable change that transcends her from the mythic role of a gendered body to that of the herói? How does Lispector revise the traditionalist perspective of the masculinist novel and alter it to delineate a narrative that engages with the Bildungsroman process of the making of a female artist?

These questions raise the possibility of interpreting the novel as a counter-ideological narrative that exacts a shift away from what had been the typical masculine novel and towards “discovering new ways to rewrite the feminine” (Rosenberg 1989, 75). If human subjectivity and agency are embodied inextricably and intertwined with the material environment, our endeavor must be to seek Joana’s identity in terms of a rebellious figure who will not conform to the prevailing socially established laws of the material world (Prieto 2011, 18). Joana’s journey, much like that of James Joyce’s Dedalus, involves breaking free of the phallic authority that dictates the individual. This struggle is more on the ideological level, where one must undergo the metamorphic process of becoming; the novel must be read as a search for one’s authentic self within the labyrinthine constructs of a hegemonic social system. Or, as Hélène Cixous points out, “the different attitudes that men and women show with regard to becoming an artist” may be considered a good place to begin our understanding of what Joana faces, and what she must overcome to establish herself as an ideal to her vocation (1987, 1).

I refer to the challenges the protagonist faces within the text as institutions of patriarchal power. From a socialist-feminist perspective, the use of ‘patriarchal institutionalization’ demonstrates how repressive laws restrain the formation of female subjectivity and conform her to follow heteronormative codes of behavior. Further in this discussion, I propose to show how femininity, seen through the eyes of the protagonist and within the social context, is a patriarchal definition of womanhood. The article will also explore Joana’s manifestation of a form of deviance that helps her transcend the regulatory mechanisms of control and discipline for a self-guided road to freedom, which would ultimately aid in releasing her from her social entanglements. Several authors have written extensively on the issues of patriarchal domination in the works of Lispector, focusing on the novel’s social and cultural setting, or ways in which the protagonist rejects the conventional social roles (Peixoto, Cixous, Fitz, Douglass). But fewer critical works exist on the inquiry into the novel’s diegetic tension that seemingly arises from the friction created by the coming together of opposing tenets of survival and how that relates invariably to the universal struggle between a female subject and patriarchal institutions. Therefore, I intend to use this essay to demonstrate the role of patriarchal ideology in the formation of subjective identity, the function of power guised in the form of norms and conventions, and how Lispector cleverly devises a way to resolve conflicts through defiance of the established social order.

Patriarchal Institutions

The novel’s main concern, as Marta Peixoto affirms, is Joana’s artistic development. If we are to read the novel as a Künstlerroman—a plot that involves the making of a young woman as an artist by undergoing varied social and subjective crises—it must be read in terms of a narrative framework that is based on the patriarchal. Joana is a woman in a man’s world, and she must (if she is to pursue her vocation) assert and engender a counter-narrative within this overwhelmingly coercive domestic structure. Joana’s counter-narrative will involve, as we will see, a struggle to defy asphyxiating gender norms and social roles in order for the protagonist’s independent subjectivity and literary ambition to emerge. To survive the androcentric social setting, Joana must, in the words of Susan Kingsley Kent, deviate from the traditional roles of wife and mother to become “unsexed” (2012, 18). This will, in the larger context of Lispector’s ideology, allow Joana to achieve an existence that is outside predefined expressions of heterosexuality and help her escape the forceful imposition of a conventional feminine identity. This particular novel, then, is a comprehensive exploration of the intimidating effects of patriarchal ideology on the female subject and an individual’s struggles to overcome this hegemonic structure.

We encounter recurring motif early on: “O que vai ser de Joana?” (Perto 8). This is not only the central concern of the novel but also a philosophical inquiry with which both the father and the aunt seem preoccupied. Responsible for the development of the young protagonist, these figures of authority force the individual into what Bella Jozef refers to as “formas cristalizadas de comportamiento” or a “rigidly patterned behavior” (2002, 708). Throughout Joana’s childhood, she is pushed into and shaped according to the established normative codes under which she is expected to spend her entire life. Teresa de Lauretis identifies this behavior as the male oedipal logic “where the little girl has no other prospect but to consent and be seduced into femininity” (1984, 152). In the glimpses of her childhood that we come across in the narrative, Joana is pressured into a feminine role through a network of patriarchal institutions of power. She is excluded from the role that she is determined to play—that of the herói—and is entrapped within the two-sex model of gender.⁴ The prevailing androcentric discourse casts Joana into a stable, sexed identity that reflects the patriarchal motive of a woman as a passive, household object “enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of others, namely, men” (Irigaray 1985, 134). The argument here is that, unlike a traditional Künstlerroman, Joana’s quest can be seen not only as one conflicting with the archetypes of gender but also as the author’s antagonistic revolt against the oedipal narrative mode. Perto do coração selvagem is a fine example in Lispector’s oeuvre where patrilineal social structures victimize women into playing the secondary role of the submissive wife or mother, barring their development into wholly realized individuals. Fitz’s analysis of Lispector’s feminist characterization, thus, draws on a key aspect of her work—her protagonists share a collective determination in an “attempt to realize their fullest potential, both in an individual, social sense, and also in an anonymous, cosmic sense” (1980, 55). Joana is the first of many similar female characters that Lispector’s escritura would develop over the years that tries to comprehend a woman’s long road to liberation.

Although upon publication, early critics pondered the incompleteness or the incoherence of a text that fails to demonstrate any adherence to temporal linearity, Perto do coração selvagem can be divided into three distinctive and defining stages that mark Joana’s transformation. These stages present Joana with obstacles that she must overcome if she is to further her path toward literary creativity and autonomy. Cixous’s radically idiosyncratic reading of Lispector’s novels, though often criticized, has long been a preface for feminist scholars involved with Claricean studies. As Cixous stresses, law (or the authoritative law of the Father) is perhaps the most inquisitive factor in Lispector’s body of work. The plot opens with the introduction of a young girl into a world that is inherently dominated by the law of the Father. It is a world that strictly follows the masculine protocol of the food chain, regulated by the laws that require feminine sacrifice: “Encostando a testa na vidraça brilhante e fria olhava para o quintal do vizinho, para o grande mundo das galinhas - que - não - sabiam - que - iam - morrer … bem sabia uma ou outra minhoca se espreguiçava antes de ser comida pela galinha que as pessoas iam comer” (Lispector 1990, 3).

The imagery in the opening scene offers a critical symbol—that of the hen the men will eventually eat. In some ways, it is similar to the chapter on the mother where “there is no mother in the mother chapter, only the naked yellow hen on the table—and the men are going to eat the hen” (Cixous 1987, 9). Even more noticeable is the introduction of the father through the sound of his typewriter which disrupts what is otherwise a silent environment. Does the father represent, in Bloomian terminology, the predecessor—the literary father whom Joana must destroy to succeed as an artist in her own right? Indeed, the opening sequence pits the father and the daughter against each other, both involved in their respective literary process; the sound of the father’s typewriter against the adolescent, imaginative creation of his daughter. Joana’s first formative stage presents her with her first obstacle—the father—who plays a small but very significant role in the making of the young artist. The repressive law makes itself present through him and his friend who, as in any conventional oedipal narrative structure, become agents of patriarchy. They persuade Joana to go against her vocation as an artist and do not permit her to enter the masculine social sphere. When the father reveals to his friend that Joana intends to be a hero when she grows up (a role reserved particularly for men in a patriarchal narrative), the father’s friend laughs at her because her ambitions cross the line that separates the masculine-feminine divide. Her wanting to be a hero is a transgression of the domestic space that she is bound to. Joana’s desire to play the aspiring part of the hero in the narrative transcends the established binary codes of patriarchal logic and comes off as an illogical joke. The father fails to acknowledge the protagonist’s unorthodox ambition to escape the socially inscribed roles of gender, denying Joana’s authentic and independent existence outside the regulatory domains of the phallic law.

After the death of the father, Joana’s aunt replaces his role as the figure of authority in the young girl’s life. As Joana’s overseer, the aunt coerces Joana into a patriarchal model of femininity that the aunt herself is a victim of. She serves as an adoptive mother and pulls Joana away from the demands of her ambition, referring to Joana as “uma víbora fria,” displaying no motherly affection. In itself an obstacle in Joana’s path, the aunt is a product of patriarchal ways of thinking and represents the domesticating nature of patriarchal institutions that try to ‘tame’ the individual. In this regard, patriarchal institutions constitute a structure whose main purpose is the political entrapment of the individual into a mesh of social praxis that cannot be overcome. Even if the aunt is associated with customary feminine roles: “brincava com uma casa, uma cozinheira, um marido, uma filha casada, visitas,” she has almost a masculine presence emblematic of the phallic law (Perto 66). The nameless aunt stands for a universalized model of the patriarchal feminine for whom Joana’s behavior entails a complicated form of otherness—a young girl’s failure to obey the conformities of her gender.

Joana’s defiance of the laws that try to govern her is challenged by the aunt’s threatening modes of punishment attempting to curb the girl’s artistic spirit and lawlessness. Following the incident where Joana steals a book from a bookstore, her aunt sends her off to a boarding school. The little girl’s very act defies the rigid social discipline that women are subjected to and instantly throws her away from the closed circle of lawfulness into the marginal territory of delinquent criminality. This shoplifting episode centers around the collapse of the idealization of womanhood; Joana transgresses the symbolic order when she steals a book without regret, remorse, or any sense of wrongdoing. Joana’s offense comes with its ramification through the aunt’s attempt to punish her as she hopes to reprimand Joana through the boarding school’s disciplinary force (which the aunt believes might be capable of overwhelming the young girl and coercing her to change). For the aunt, sending Joana away to the boarding school is a befitting penalty for an individual who has failed to affirm or uphold the cultural and domestic values demanded of a young girl.

The boarding school itself functions as an institutional establishment intended to subvert Joana, to discipline her into a more conventional role. But social legality, the patricentric ‘logos’ doesn’t work for Lispector’s Joana. Her ability to ‘confess’ that stealing is harmful only when one is frightened, and that the act does not make her happy or sad, puts Joana outside the jurisdiction of the phallocentric discourse. As Cixous points out about the episode: “She does it, as we have seen, in the episode of theft by putting herself at the origin of what could be the law. She decides the value of such and such a gesture. She had the incredible strength to resist the ready-made in the world with its finished laws ordered by a system of moral values, hierarchized into good and bad” (1990, 25). Joana’s stealing of the book disrupts the social legal system which might be read as one of Lispector’s aggressive responses to the disciplines of patriarchal control in an attempt to invert the predetermined laws of gender. As Sara Ramshaw writes, the act “dehierarchizes, destabilizes and erases law” and is Joana’s attempt to bypass the oppressive nature of patriarchal repression (2003, 23). The boarding school presents the second obstacle in Joana’s path to literary autonomy. It is an institutionalized project under patriarchy that would administer Joana to make her submissive to the oedipal laws.

Stephen Dedalus faces a very similar kind of repression and transgresses it through the proclamation of “non serviam,” but in Lispector’s narrative, the female artist does not have the luxury of breaking free of the diabolical course of orthodox femininity into which she is impelled (Joyce 2004, 103). As a result, inside the walls of the boarding school, she must undergo another transformative stage (in the episode titled O banho) where she is cleansed of her identity. As critics suggest, in this episode, “Catholicism appears as a regulatory force used to suppress originality and invention” (Lindstrom 1999, 119) and is Joana’s “induction into patriarchal femininity” (Douglass 1988, 103). The institutionalization of the protagonist is a literal limiting force that would withhold the individual from further breaking the patriarchal law; put another way, Joana is sent to boarding school precisely to ‘feminize’ her. It is not surprising then that the imagery in this episode indicates a violent rebirth, a correctional return to the ideal version of patriarchal femininity and obedience brought about by a young girl’s entrapment within the social ideology of gender. In her article “Female Quest” (1990), Douglass’s analogy of the function of water in the bath scene and its symbolic connotation to the masculine libido directs us to the reality of the episode. The bath is both a symbolic rape and murder of the subject, reducing the young Joana to a victim as her body and her identity are seized and transformed into an interweaving framework where oedipal laws, social discipline, and patriarchal control will intimidate the young woman by restraining her approach to any forms of lawlessness or artistic innovation.

Interestingly, Joana’s marriage follows this episode of the bath, suggesting the individual’s reformation of her subjectivity as the sole reason for this new beginning in Joana’s life that is far removed from her previous attempts to cross the great sexual divide. The internalization of the patriarchal discourse after the bath encodes a literal conversion of the pre-gendered identity into a self, subjected to and supervised by the germination of a feminine consciousness that adheres to the standardized sex-gender system. In other words, this moment in the novel displays one of the most significant events—the adolescence and innocence of the pre-subjective, pre-patriarchal are lost after the traumatic experience of the bath. The aggressive images of the bath scene suggest a “symbol of water displaced from its conventional association with immanence and femininity, to become a symbol of dynamic masculinity” (Douglass 1990, 101). This sacrificial bath implies Joana’s defeat in her struggle to overcome the demands and doctrines of her gender.

By incorporating Joana’s quest with what is, perhaps, the most defining obstacle in her journey toward autonomy—her marriage to Otávio—Lispector revises the novel as a political and polemic verbalization of female oppression. This marriage curbs the artistic development of the individual to “assume the role of patriarchy’s passive, otherly, and above all, selfless woman” (Douglass 1990, 98). Like Joana’s father, Otávio is associated with, and shares a common passion for, the act of writing. Similar to the opening sequence of the novel where the father’s typewriter becomes symbolic of his artistic credibility, Otávio is associated with law and its making. He belongs to a privileged class (socially and sexually) that empowers him with institutionalized education. As is evident by Otávio’s engagement with writing a book on Civil Law, Lispector subtly implies the hegemonic involvement of men in writing legal discourse—in inventing, experimenting with, and implementing laws. Education and worldly wisdom, within the social space of the novel, are reserved for and associated with the masculine characters (the father, the teacher, and the husband Otávio). Barring Joana from breaching into that private masculine space, denying the coexistence of men and women in a similar plane with similar intellectual or literary prowess, suggests the dominating structure of man-made institutions and reflects the position of women under the reign of patriarchal supervision. One can even point out that Otávio fits into the role of the traditional patriarchal hero whose expansive growth requires the sacrificial feminine Other: “Temia os dias, um atrás do outro, sem surpresas, de puro devotamento a um homem. A um homem que disporia de todas as forças da mulher para sua própria fogueira, num sacrifício sereno e inconsciente de tudo o que não fosse sua própria personalidade” (Lispector 1990, 95–96).

In the interactions between Joana and Otávio, the presence of friction is made evident through two opposing forces—one seeking liberty, the other denying it. Joana’s marriage to Otávio becomes “a politically signifying act mandated by social convention, and not (necessarily) as a loving human relationship” (Fitz 2001, 96). In this marriage, Joana is reduced, in her passivity, to a being who solely performs as the marginalized household object/woman. She has to take up the role of the archetypal wife obligated in her marriage to assist her husband’s development, her role diminished to fetching books for him. Since Joana fiercely yearns to come out of this binding setup, the friction, then, takes shape in the form of a conflict between the male and the female to play the herói of the narrative. With Otávio’s omnipotent cultural right to act as the defining male and Joana’s struggle to dethrone him from his superior position, the hostility is resolved only when Joana decides to leave her husband. As Fitz highlights, Joana’s escape from this marriage articulates “her self-emancipation from all that Otávio represents” (2001, 101). Her marriage is crucially the most entrapping of all patriarchal confinements in the novel that restricts and negates her opportunities for autonomy and self-expression.

By taking a lover and initiating a relationship outside the social confines of her marriage, Joana liberates herself from all ideological, emotional, and gender ties, displacing fixed icons of femininity. In yet another transformation, this time she becomes what is a remarkably self-formed, self-defined portrayal of what Ann Heilmann refers to as the New Woman.⁵ It is in this relationship with the lover (simply described as the homem) that Joana can finally shape her subjective and literary identity and reverse the role of the passive woman. She can now take controlling, active participation in the verbal creativity expected of the artist. In a radical extension along the lines of sexual difference, she can finally cross over to the other side (which until then had been an exclusive domain inhabited by the father, the teacher, and Otávio). In this new relationship, Joana engages as the inventor of stories, as a teller rather than a listener, in a way reversing the patriarchal rule of the masculine narrator. But only the homem’s unopposed acceptance of his role as a passive listener can confirm Joana’s artistic foundation. Instead of trying to subdue her, the lover negates himself in this phantasmic episode. On a thematic level, the homem presents the opportunity for a relationship with no social or institutionalized ties and marks Joana’s entry into the symbolic order in a progressive exercise towards the realization of her full potential. As Douglass indicates, Joana’s act of telling stories to the lover is “suggestive of the maternal mode of femininity,” thereby producing a complex and paradoxical connection between the two lovers that verges close to a relationship of a mother and a son (1990, 105).

This peculiar alliance is the final license for Joana to take up the role of the herói; the quest culminates in her liberation from the oppressive clutches of gender and institutions funded by the patriarchal. The anarchical spirit within Joana exhibits a journey intricate with meanings—the voyage, as a literal journey, takes her away from the masculine domestic realm for an exploration of newer lands. The metaphoric interpretation of the journey is an internal voyage of self-realization and a possibility of existence without the marked permanence of gender. Joana’s self-reliance is exemplified when, at the end of the novel, she is compared with a young horse—a majestic analogy of freedom.⁶ This places Joana as a possessor of her own body and soul, responsible for her own journey (without a man by her side for the first time), as we see her determined to nurture herself in this new role. The ending, epitomized by the Odyssean nature of this journey, aims at a symbolic portrayal of women’s liberation from the claustrophobic social entrapment by traversing untraversed spaces and experimenting with the unexperimented.

Models of Patriarchal Femininity

The critic Lucia Helena suggests that men and women in the novels of Clarice Lispector are victims of the social codes of patriarchy: “acabam por aprisionar e reprimir a todos, não importando o sexo, a classe, a etnia ou a idade” (1992, 1167). Lispector is one of several Latin American women writers known for favoring alternative models of womanhood, for writing protagonists who resist following the path of archetypal ‘womanliness,’ and for portraying the radical feminine who question social and cultural stereotypes. In this section, I will seek to demonstrate the diverse models of femininity that Joana will come across in Perto do coração selvagem and how these models are based on each character’s victimization within the patriarchal tradition.

At issue, from the start, are the various stereotypes of femininity drawn from the cultural norms of the universal sex-gender system. This system employs a complex social interchange where individual roles are a result of interiorized phallic discourse. That is, women, have adopted the phallic social law function merely to fulfill their biological, political, and psychological routines, governed by the Other’s (man’s) commanding ideology. This sexual polarity is apparent in Perto do coração selvagem as the males hold social and intellectual power while women are extensively marginalized into roles of confinement as daughters, mothers, and housewives. How does Joana survive the gendered domestic space manifested in the context of this particular novel?

In Douglass’s words, the protagonist assumes her identity in the guise of “femininity as mask” in a diligent and tactical ruse that revises her role to help her stay inside the domestic space (albeit near the margins) and later escape the subversive laws of gender (1990, 101). In the entire course of the narrative, we find Joana in almost a continual, fluid paradigm of change which is why she can duplicate identities and transform herself according to her will.⁷ To continue the androcentric repression of her society, she can hide her heroic self to take on the role of an archetype that would grant her access to the conventional social space, one that is especially reserved for women. Joana adopts a model of femininity that Luce Irigaray refers to as the ‘feminine masquerade’:

But in fact that “femininity” is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity. The fact remains that this masquerade requires an effort on her part for which she is not compensated. Unless her pleasure comes from being chosen as an object of consumption or of desire by masculine “subjects.” (1985, 84)

According to the logic of this masquerade, Joana will satisfy her womanly roles, play the part of the Other, and willing choose to become the “object of consumption” in order to participate in and become a part of the diegesis, but only until she can reclaim her agency. Mary Ann Doane’s similar interpretation of the masquerade as a strategic fabrication of identity by women within the masculine system to survive the oppressive patrilineal social structure and fulfill their own desires allows us to read Joana’s disguise as a calculated façade. As Doane argues, “Womanliness is a mask that can be worn or removed” (1982, 81). A bold proclamation would be to consider Joana as a genderless figure who chooses to put on the mask of the feminine, who merely performs her womanly roles, disguising herself, masking her heroic identity until all the diegetic conflicts are resolved. The bath scene, which I suggested before as symbolic rape and murder of the subject that leads to Joana’s becoming a ‘feminized’ protagonist can be read as playacting put on by Joana. This evokes Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performativity where Butler elaborates on the social construction of gender identity as the execution of roles through bodily acts, desires, and gestures to fit into society.⁸ A close reading, thereby, might propose that Joana’s heroic self, which after the bath is replaced by a more conventional role, is merely a staging of the feminine presented by Joana. There are moments, though, where our protagonist is pushed into or contemplates fulfilling the role of marianismo.⁹ But she can quickly detach herself from the idea as every encounter with a female character possibly shows her the consequences of playing the stereotype.

Thus, the conventional models of femininity with their sharp adherence to the repressive ideology of the patriarchal system act as a premonition of the life that Joana might have to live if she interiorizes what is undoubtedly the phallic law and becomes a woman herself. In other words, each female character that Joana confronts in her journey represents something associated with traditional models of femaleness. These traditional models are produced by the dominant social order where power plays a key role in the formation of identity and the development of the subject. The operation of power in shaping the subjective experience of the individual is explained by Lucia Villares in terms of Butler’s vectors of power. Villares contends: “Vectors of power are normalizing social forces operating through discursive formations circulating in society. Through the process of subjection, these normalizing forces are internalized in one’s psyche, often unconsciously, as a constitutive part of one’s self and personal identity. They become an integral part of one’s subjectivity” (2011, 26).

As victims of the androcentric discourse, women’s subjective identities in the novel are shaped by the prevailing masculine conventionality. The aunt is the first woman that Joana comes across—a substitute mother who is described as a literal oppressive body, in whose body “podiam sepultar uma pessoa” (Lispector 1990, 37). She is a domesticated woman, and she further tries to domesticate Joana to obey the expected traditional submissiveness of a woman. Indeed, if Lispector’s nexus is to emphasize power’s subjection of women within the phallic household, the author’s concerns demonstrate a typified outlook on the various challenges of the feminine experience. The aunt, with her almost masculine presence, epitomizes a woman molded by society into acting as a dictatorial representative of the social space, one who is undoubtedly and dutifully executing the patriarchal punishment over Joana. Two models of femininity collide here—one pre-patriarchal, the other verging on the masculine (already patriarchalized). By upholding the social code of domination, the aunt prevails in this duel by compelling Joana’s pre-patriarchal identity into submitting to the conventions of femininity.

Very different from the aunt, the teacher’s wife exhibits a form of corporeity against which Joana is unwomanly and shapeless. In contrast to the distinct presence of the wife in the imagistic form of a socialized feminine body: “alta, quase bonita com aquele cabelo cobreado, curto e liso,” Joana fails to exhibit any sense of maturity or physicality (Lispector 1990, 59). This distances her from the teacher’s affection and leaves her envious of the teacher’s wife—a rivalry, even when evident, obscured by Joana’s lack of femininity. The teacher’s wife, on the other hand, is essentially shaped into an ideal housewife, talking about dinner, and fulfilling roles expected from a woman in charge of looking after the household and the husband. This episode is telling of a sudden change that occurs in Joana’s subjective perception of relationships as she tries to win over the teacher’s fondness, failing which, she promises her teacher to wait: “Até que eu fique bonita. Bonita como ‘ela’ ” (61). Joana ascribes to the teacher’s wife a sexual superiority that she herself fails to demonstrate physically with her skinny body.¹⁰ Conscious of her own lack of womanliness, Joana, for the first time in the narrative, aspires to be a lady that can win over a man’s desire. This moment in her childhood is where our protagonist faces one of the most defining challenges: she can either choose to feminize herself to meet the demands of the masculine social space or reinvent an authentic life based on her principles of independence.

Joana’s meeting with the ‘mulher da voz’ proves Lispector’s aberrant departure from portraying sexuality as a restrictive norm. Eroticism and desire enveloped in the dense abstractions of language penetrate the novel’s acute meditation on the essence of sexuality’s indefinable charge. This moment appears as an epiphany that draws the protagonist’s path to the newly realized course of a physical, psychological, and spiritual becoming. The episode, O casamento, is both astounding and liberating. It opens with Joana who is now married and realizing that she has been ‘feminized’—dependent on her man. Her own voice perplexes her, described as “A voz de uma mulher jovem junto de seu homem” (1990, 77). In this encounter, when Joana enquires about a house for rent, she finds herself both despising and envying this alienated woman and her unaffected solitary existence that stands in sharp contrast to the situation that Joana is in. When Joana asks: “Não é triste viver sem um homem na casa?” (79), the woman’s answer leaves a deep mark on her consciousness. The woman’s exiled life is, for Joana, the freedom that her marriage to Otávio has razed. The authority and liberty in the woman’s tone and her ahistoric reality drive Joana into inventing or fabricating a history for this woman. Her self-sufficiency, whether literal or invented, breaches the socially constructed norms centered around typifying a woman’s existence and conflicts with the attitudes and situations of life in which the other female characters find themselves. For Joana, this is a discovery, a revelation, of the possibility of surviving outside the confines of the traditional feminine role. It promises the prospect of living without being tied to the roles of a mother or a wife.

Perhaps the most compelling and decisive relationship that Joana has is exemplified by her attraction toward Lídia, Otávio’s pregnant mistress. In Fitz’s words, she is seen as “an erotic partner as well as a competitor” (2001, 75). For both Joana and the readers, Lídia presents another archetype whose passivity and fidelity to the sociocultural norms of womanhood make her repulsive to Joana. Her nonchalance at being only a mistress and her submissive acceptance of the phallogocentric social discourse epitomizes the feminine principle displayed in the novel. Payne and Fitz describe Lídia as: “intuitive, passive, carnal. Her body as presented to the reader seems made for maternity. In the opening and closing of the first scene in which Lídia appears, she is sewing and waiting for Otávio to arrive” (1993, 102).

Lídia suffers from Otávio’s arrogance while being happy at playing second fiddle. She willingly upholds the patriarchal principle as the dormant and passive woman. When Joana comes face to face with Lídia for the first time, she offers Otávio to Lídia on the condition that they share him sexually until Joana is pregnant. At this point in the novel, we come across a version of the protagonist who is self-divided, and above all, one who desires to fulfill the role of motherhood but is dispassionate about the idea of being together with Otávio in a restrictively lawful marriage. Lídia’s self-fulfillment comes from participating in the tradition of motherhood and endorsing the patriarchal values of society. She passionately waits for Otávio, hoping that he will walk out of his marriage to be with her someday. But Lispector chooses here to go further into her critique of femininity and sexual difference by contrasting Joana and Lídia’s bodies—Lídia is maternal, glowing with life inside her, while Joana is pale and skinny; perhaps articulating a difference between a woman and an individual masking herself under the guise of femininity. In a long interior monologue, Joana’s sexual deficiency and her lack of femininity make Lídia the object of both Otávio and Joana’s desire:

Sou um bicho de plumas. Lídia de pelos, Otávio se perde entre nós, indefeso. Como escapar ao meu brilho e à minha promessa de fuga e como escapar à certeza dessa mulher? … Como sou pobre junto dela, tão segura. Ou me acendo e sou maravilhosa, fugazmente maravilhosa, ou senão obscura, envolvo-me em cortinas. Lídia, o que quer que seja, é imutável, sempre com a mesma base clara … Eu toda nado, flutuo, atravesso o que existe com os nervos, nada sou senão um desejo, a raiva, a vaguidão, impalpável como a energia. Energia? mas onde está minha força? na imprecisão, na imprecisão, na imprecisão … (Lispector 1990, 136)

Lídia’s burgeoning pregnancy is a reminder of motherhood as a socially engaged enterprise that projects and affirms the cultural ideal of the self-sacrificial woman. The glorifying idealization of maternity-as-identity is quickly dismantled when Joana refuses to participate in this charade, rejecting all that Lídia has come to represent. In a radical portrayal of feminine sexuality and female empowerment, Joana discovers an erotically charged impulse towards Lídia, a probing critique of the vagaries of sexuality and Joana’s command over her own. By discarding the gender-conforming role played by Lídia, Joana rejects the heterosexual binaries of the man-woman relationship, using Lídia as an escape from the seizing power of patriarchal control. Joana is immediately relieved of the duties prescribed by her gender when she lets Lídia fulfill the conventions of a wife to Otávio and a mother to the expected child. Her allegiance to this new self comes in the form of another epiphany: a revelation that the patriarchal conception of motherhood (as an institutionalized responsibility towards society) will stifle her nature and cut off her wings even before she learns to fly. The imaginary child, shaped by another of Joana’s fantasy tales, associates the reality of maternity and identity: “Mas depois, quando eu lhe der leite com estes seios frágeis e bonitos, meu filho crescerá de minha força e me esmagará com sua vida. Ele se distanciará de mim e eu serei a velha mãe inútil. Não me sentirei burlada. Mas vencida apenas e direi: eu nada sei, posso parir um filho e nada sei” (172).

The writer’s concern is the loss of agency due to the constraints that this imagined mother-son relationship will bring upon her hero. The evaluation here is not limited to the consequences of motherhood (generally ascribed as an oppressive model of institutionalization) in the literary-artistic development of a woman. Lispector also tries to assert that motherhood, with its restrictive ideology in the patrilineal social system, hinders potential and might obstruct the path of women in their search for self-sufficiency.

Although the novel’s structure, as Peixoto points out, follows the methodical configuration of triangular relationships, it is in the last part of the novel that this structure becomes significant. When Joana becomes involved with the homem, she enters into a relationship with the man and what is presumably his former lover. Peixoto rightly calls this woman the “most debased of all the women in the novel” (1994, 14). Described as a “prostituta sem glória” (Lispector 1990, 183) the mysterious and awkward relationship shared by the homem and the woman resists any concrete definition. Joana wonders, “ela é agora como sua mãe? não é mais sua amante?” (183). The woman symbolizes the passive, old lover/mother/housekeeper whose usefulness in the domestic sphere has been outlasted by the man. In this final triptych, Joana has the controlling force over both the man and the woman which allows her to overpower their individual and collective voices. Like Lídia, who represents an archetypal wife, the woman delineates an existence marked by sexual humiliation, servitude, and the naked truth of what might have happened to Joana had she continued her marriage with Otávio.

Social Deviance and Transgression

In his The Division of Labor in Society (1994), Durkheim says we “should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends that consciousness” (1994, 40). Reading the multifaceted character of Joana through the Durkheimian model of deviance allows us to better analyze the concept of transgression that Lispector tries to render through her novel. In a strictly moral society, Durkheim argued, deviant members are necessary since they allow the reaffirmation of socially established ideals through punishment. In other words, the dominant figure of power must punish the deviant creature to demonstrate the outcome of failing to abide by the laws, while also setting up an example for anyone who might try to go against this collective conscience. In the novel, the concrete and organized institutions of power will try to subdue Joana and make her an abiding subject, one who will obey the valued social and moral codes of society. When she fails to uphold the shared principles of her culture and position, her punishment is the patriarchally acknowledged feminine identity that is imposed upon her.

But how does Lispector’s Joana achieve true liberation? It is through Joana’s little acts of deviation that she escapes the political policing of her domestic, phallogocentric space. Each time she is commanded to follow the demands of her gender, Joana demonstrates what Durkheim referred to as anomie or normlessness. The broadly disruptive social conditions, particularly the patriarchal attempt to repress and control feminine identity give rise to Joana’s normless behavior. By comprehending this autocratic environment that she is surrounded by (and is a part of), the protagonist gets into a struggle to destabilize the masculinist structures through her acts of deviance. These little acts, in turn, prepare her for what is to come: the grand act of the narrative—which, interestingly, takes the shape of a physical and psychological journey—one that allows her to break free from all hegemonic and obligatory ties. Thus, Lispector’s Joana achieves freedom by deviating from all that she is supposed to represent as a daughter, a wife, and most importantly, a gendered subject.

As has been illustrated in this article, the adopted mask of femininity serves as a falsified identity for Joana to survive patriarchy’s inscription of a phallogocentric discourse on the consciousness of the individual. But this ‘feminine masquerade’ is not enough for our hero to transgress the social and legal laws of her domestic space. One must remember that Joana’s ultimate goal is to be free (whether her voyage to the unknown lands at the end of the novel guarantees her liberty is another question). Her transforming subjectivity, which ultimately resolves with “a potent blend of the masculine and the feminine,” presents readers with psychological agency that rejects any codification (Payne and Fitz 1993, 105). Thus, the narrative as a critique of the individual’s behavior within the androcentric order is worthy of more detailed attention as it challenges the rigidity of the social structures in the development of the female artist. The rebellious subject and her relation to her surroundings, especially the conflicts with the master discourse, can be read in terms of Rosi Braidotti’s ‘nomadic experience’ where “the nomadism in question refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior” (1994, 5). As a nomadic subject, Joana is aware of gender policing and her every action is to escape it—the individuals, the institutions, and the unwritten codes of femininity. In Joana, we witness a form of deviance that can be best described as nonacceptance of the regulations imposed on her by the external forces of a society disciplined by masculine principles. Deviance, particularly in Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem, takes the form of delinquency (or acts that transgress disadvantaged social positions), refusing to conform to the prevailing social and sexual codes. Joana exhibits defiance from the roles she is forced to play and the femininity that she is supposed to internalize. As Ngaire Naffin suggests: “Rather than construing criminality as the outcome of a successful conditioning—a deviant expression of femininity—it may well be more appropriate to view it as a sign that a girl has not succumbed to her training for womanhood” (1985, 380).

The shoplifting incident in her adolescence is Joana’s first act of social deviance that violates the protocol of feminine behavior. Ironically, it happens under the aunt’s pseudo-parental watch, indicating the failure of social structures to discipline someone who actively rejects traditional female roles ascribed to her. Sending the adolescent Joana to the boarding school acts as the ‘punishment’ that is reserved for this delinquent within the social order according to Durkheim. Blocked from all legitimate opportunities, Joana, participating in something as audacious as stealing a book without regret, is a feminist categorization of a masculine act that inverts the passive model of femininity to fashion a counter-model based on criminality. If we are to consider stealing (or any other form of criminal behavior, generally and readily associated with truant boys or men), Joana’s theft is not only aberrant from the ideal model of marianismo, it is also an attempt to discard the notion of the ideal feminine and enter into the masculine sphere of the picaresque. In a novel where literacy, knowledge, and worldly wisdom are reserved for men, the stealing of the book takes on a symbolic significance—theft, in its rebelliousness, is the possession of something that Joana isn’t allowed to have legally. Joana’s delinquent behavior proposes an alternative to the social patriarchal framework that, to echo Naffin, has failed to ‘train’ Joana in the womanly ways expected of her. This perseverance to survive outside the law would ultimately allow her to evolve into the herói capable of transgressing the imposed limitations of gender and rigid barriers of the prevailing authoritarian discourse.

In another incident, an old man’s request for Joana’s sympathy over a small bruise is met with a book thrown at his head. This further documents Joana’s unsentimental, uncompassionate nature and her revulsion at giving in to the social pressure of identifying with the fostering, parental figure. Her resiliency becomes an act of pure hostility and indifference, the apparent opposite of what is expected from the cultural notion of a nurturing, motherly woman. Peixoto suggests here that Joana weaponizes the narrative through this retelling to destroy any similar expectations that Otávio might have in regard to mothering his own children (1994, 10). Her refusal to play the nourishing role of the mother figure is an indication of her strong disgust against the vulnerabilities of motherhood as an institutional experience.

Motherhood as a tradition and cultural practice serves to highlight the dominant ideology directed toward oppressing potential, which, for Joana, would be a killing blow to her artistic ambitions. Both as an institution or experience, conventional motherhood with its servile nature can only disempower the individual. Joana’s mother is absent from the novel and her presence in the narrative occurs through the father’s reminiscence. The significantly untraditional image of femininity asserted in the mother’s character is perhaps the reason for her absence from the plot. In a patrilineal world, this model of femininity cannot survive within the social boundaries prescribed by male laws for the submissive role of a mother and wife, which is made more apparent by Joana’s venture to leave this world of men in search of what might perhaps be an ideal. The impossibility of shaping the young girl’s childhood by attempting to deviate from the norms makes the mother’s presence unwarranted. In this context, the mother represents a shift away from orthodox femininity, one that is highly condemned in the domestic space:

— chamava-se Elza. Me lembro que até lhe disse: Elza é um nome como um saco vazio. Era fina, enviesada — sabe como, não é? —, cheia de poder. Tão rápida e áspera nas conclusões, tão independente e amarga que da primeira vez em que falamos chamei-a de bruta! (Lispector 1990, 25, emphasis added)

Imagine então a impressão causada na minha pobre e escassa família … foi como se eu tivesse trazido o micróbio da varíola, um herege, nem sei o quê … Felizmente tenho a impressão de que Joana vai seguir seu próprio caminho … (26–27)

Described with “metaphors of contagious illness and heterodox worship,” the mother manifests reproachable attitudes that, according to the father, Joana must never learn to reflect (Peixoto 1994, 6). Here, we see a certain degree of matrophobia in reverse order: it is rather the father who exhibits the fear of his daughter turning out like the mother. The one who might have been an ideal model to follow is ‘pathologized’ by Joana’s father to interrupt the young girl from following the mother’s aberrant footsteps. The adolescent Joana is further demonized when her attitude is compared to a cold-blooded viper by the aunt. Maria Bernadette Velloso Porto links this concept of being evil with the privilege to initiate an alternate space that empowers Joana with expansive experimentation with her authenticity and possibilities of being (1995, 279).

It is remarkable how significant the function of evil is in the formation of Joana’s identity and her individual subjectivity. An unspoken, unmentioned struggle to transgress the circumscribed domestic space of the cultural woman runs throughout the novel. Joana can only transgress these imposed boundaries by being evil—this trait is of her choosing, one that is not forced upon her. By treading the path of evil, by making it an innate aspect of her character, Joana can challenge the typically accepted feminine roles associated with marianismo. This is fundamental in the narrative since the entire plot is an exercise to outline an alternative model of femininity that can rise to the challenge and destroy the governing ideologies of the master discourse. The acceptance of evil as part of Joana’s identity takes her further away from the idealized social being and indicates a fidelity toward existing outside the marked spaces of inhabitance and the mandated codes of social behavior. Thus, Cristina Ferreira-Pinto’s reading of the novel suggests that as the story unfolds, Joana’s growing awareness of herself has only two possible outcomes: to remain with Otávio and play the wife or exile herself from the community where patriarchs like Otávio exist (1990, 107). The early realization that “A certeza de que dou para o mal” allows Joana to meditate on the limits that her social circumstances have to offer (Lispector 1990, 15). She thus chooses to isolate herself from society and its gendered demarcations by willingly practicing evil as an authentic, transgressional force of creation. Evilness becomes a privilege that entitles Joana to enjoy what is forbidden, to initiate a dialogue with patriarchal restrictions, and a way to develop herself as the sole hero of the text. Perhaps this becomes the reason she can steal a book, initiate a love affair outside her marriage, or take the voyage all by herself. Thus, only by deviating from cultural norms can she transgress her historically rigid social, political, and sexual condition.

Since the social space is dominated by men of privilege, Joana’s literary ambition is itself a transgression. From constructing poems in her childhood to writing on a sheet of paper and inserting it into a book by Spinoza as an adult, her actions are telling of the place she wants to conquer. It is her desire to reside within the same boundaries as men and receive the same entitlements that the men in the novel are privy to. When Joana scribbles some lines on a sheet of paper and consequently Otávio finds out about it, his embarrassment at having been caught unawares becomes a challenge to his masculine authority—as a male writer and lawmaker. The nature of the sentence that Joana writes (distinguished by its metaphysical and speculative interpretation) contrasts with Otávio’s worldview which is dominated by Order. In comparing Spinoza’s phrase with the feeling of listening to Bach, Joana’s poetic interpretation is transgressive since she treads a path where imagination takes precedence over rationality. The very act of writing it down on a piece of paper and securing it inside the book transcends all social boundaries for Otávio since this act traverses the very line of difference that the characters are desperate to uphold and preach onto the feminine subject. Her involvement in the realm of intellectual curiosity or her literary prowess trespasses the divide that separates a woman from a man, and Otávio’s reaction further asserts the fact that he sees Joana as a challenge, a challenge that needs to be mutilated. The only logical end to the narrative and its competing perspectives can be brought about by the “dream logic of the plot” where complexities that try to impede or arrest the artist’s literary ambition magically untangle at every stage of the novel, as if Lispector herself lends a helping hand towards rescuing Joana (Peixoto 14). The father’s death, the teacher’s old age, the encounter with Lídia, and the men’s departures break the chains that tie the social being within the domestic space, empowering the artist to liberate herself from her confines.

Conclusion

The design of the plot, while erasing linearity, is strictly laid out and assembled in episodes that are logically bound together through inventive use of juxtapositions. The systematic ploy depends on the structure rather than on a traditional storytelling methodology. The triptychs devised by Lispector as obstacles to the hero’s quest narrative are institutions that exert and exercise power over the individual; however, Joana manages to neutralize these modes of power (or these complexities neutralize themselves through accident) for her pursuit. The models of femininity highlighted throughout the novel try to assess the social and cultural aspects of gender and identity, emphasizing the function of the patriarchal system that engenders the cultural formation of the feminine subject. Perto do coração selvagem explores, in Lispectorian fashion, Joana’s subjectivity against political, sexual, and maternal ideology in a system where power oppresses women and changes them to reflect the beliefs of the patriarchal logic.

The entire novel negotiates an alternate space for the hero’s existence where her transgressions will not be criminal and in need of reprimand. In other words, Lispector devises to create a space where Joana, or women like her, are not considered delinquents requiring the actions of external social forces to make a gendered woman out of a social subject. Evidently this is not possible within an oppressive social environment, whether in Brazil or in any culture. The lone voyage to an unspecified destination, which seemingly is the only possible conclusion for our hero marks a journey in search of a domain where existence is not governed by gender but by Joana’s desire to merge with her androgynous self, to inhabit outside the boundaries of society, to be resilient against the oppressive systems of patriarchy, and to recognize and embrace her role as the Other.

Being a woman in a man’s world puts her in a disadvantageous position, entailing a coerced loss of agency and a lifelong struggle. In this sense, Lispector perhaps chooses to dislocate Joana from where she has belonged to a place which is the unknown. The end, thus, inverts the traditional binaries of gender as Joana, much like a picaresque character, is set up for a journey where the geographical displacement might bring with it a utopian terrain without impositions. It sets the protagonist free—literally and symbolically—acknowledging her solitary journey as the onset of a new period of life that is determined by independence rather than domestic interdependence.