Clarice Lispector's girls and the translation of childhood in her works

Abstract

The article aims to present the female characters present in Clarice Lispector's texts to understand the childhood of girls in the 1920s - 1980s from the literary and historical perspective of Brazil in that period. The methodology used for the research was a review of literary texts where the protagonists are girls between eight and ten years old, located in Recife, the city where the writer lived during her childhood. For a deeper understanding of Lispector's literary construction, some theorists are considered as Alberto Manguel (2016), Maurice Blanchot (1969), Giorgio Agamben (2005, 2007, 2017). Georges Bataille (2016) and Judith Butler (2017) contribute to a philosophical understanding of self-writing and the importance of recovering memory, while Philippe Ariès (1973) makes some historical observations about the context of the time. The article results in an overview of how the girls, mainly Clarice Lispector herself, wanted their life as autonomous, independent individuals, but with the remorse of the social responsibility that imposed on girls and women a pattern of behavior that had distressed them since the end of childhood and early puberty, subjecting them to the imposed patriarchal and conservative system.