Skeleton/Rough Draft: The Smallest Woman in the World

SQ: Traditional stories affirm our beliefs and predispositions. They take us on a pleasurable journey in which we sympathize and often empathize with the characters; in which we connect with the situation; in which we are given a clear-cut lesson and message that comes hand in hand with the character’s big self-realization. Stories don’t question our cultural context. They aren’t even about us, but about the lives of the characters themselves.

(where does this go?) In Clarice Lispector’s “The Smallest Woman in the World,” she seems to write about a very traditionally explored situation–the encounter and relationship between the white society and the black society.

T: Yet, her version is confusing. It’s disturbing, and strange. Lispector doesn’t fulfill our predispositions about racial matters. Instead, she takes our status quo assumptions on what the average story about racial profile entails and toys with it, distorts it. The characters, plotline, setting, and conflicts of the story are unusual and exaggerated and turned upside down; there’s also no clear moral or message. However, despite the fact that Lispector defamiliarizes the(our?) familiar and makes our experience as readers quite bizarre, we aren’t turned off like we should be. We don’t walk away and give up, because the story still somehow manages to intrigue us. As readers, we can sense that there’s something deeper that the story manages to do, and although it’s not clear at first glance, we’re still curious and want to dig deeper. So we wonder how Lispector manages to keep us so fascinated despite her strange twist on traditional literature that would initially seem to irritate us. And furthermore, why would she bother to go out of her way as an author and write so strangely about such a common topic? What’s her goal; what’s the point?

C: Lispector has to make her story unusual and strange to make sure we don’t skim over it and dismiss it as a traditional story that deals with racial views and controversies. Because that’s not what it is at all. In fact, it’s less about a racial encounter than it is a story that explores ideas of how perspective and narrative control and influence our views on these matters. The point of the story is to show how distant we all are from the truth,  aand to question what the truth really is and whether or not it even exists.

C: This is a story by a female author who is highly aware that narrative constructs and defines a subject; that the story itself is completely influenced by the way (or how) it’s constructed, which in turn effects the reader’s experience.

(Don’t know if I need this, or where this even goes: Additionally, the strangeness of the story is to simply show and bring a light to the strangeness of the encounter between people of very different cultures, whether there black, white, Chinese, alien, etc; that’s not the point.)

Body paragraphs (no order):

1. In the beginning, us readers are only learning about Little Flower through the eyes of Marcel Pretre.

2. Lispector shows how material objects can be perspectives, too. She uses the newspaper to show how media greatly influences everybody, but yet it has so many flaws. All different kinds of media often provide information from a single perspective, and can even be classified as biased because it filters out certain facts and/or opinions.

3. Marcel Pretre is created to be an explorer to show the Westerner’s constant need to “classify” everything; to show how we always want an explanation and a definition and thus we label everything we come across. However, this often leads to being over generalizing and stereotyping, and by doing so we miss a huge part of the truth.

4. The truth is relative to the story teller. So when reading a story, it’s important to learn more about the author him/herself and see how their own personal beliefs and points of view influences the ideas of their story.

5. One of the great things about stories is that as readers, we often know things that the characters themselves do not. Lispector acknowledges that and uses it in her story–she takes this relationship that is usually depicted between the reader and a character, but makes it between the character and another character instead. But since we as readers have the benefit of knowing everything both characters think, ...?