Term Paper on "Passion According to Gh"

Term Paper 10 pages (3343 words) Sources: 3 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Passion According to G.H.

Gender and Sexuality in Clarice Lispector's the Passion According to G.H.

Clarice Lispector novels and short story collections are intriguing literary pieces which usually focus on existential or even metaphysical issues. This fact has induced criticism on the part of those that expected a more social and realistic focus of the feminine writing. Nevertheless, it can be said that Lispector's novels are realistic in the sense that they offer a depiction of the alienated and frustrated modern human condition. But the strength of her work comes actually from the use of language itself, which offers a brilliant and often extremely intimate relation of the reader to the text. The Passion According to G.H. is probably not a popular work, but it is one that definitely has a great importance for feminine writing in general. Thus, the novel has but a sparse and isolated conflict, focusing almost exclusively on language and the interior discourse of a woman who, in the process of her monologue, comes to a new sense or realization of herself. The text can be said to prefigure the theories proposed by Luce Irigaray in the article the Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine and by Judith Butler in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution. These essay attempt a new theory of the discourse, in which gender is not a given category, but something which waits to be revealed in the performative act of discourse. Similarly, in Lispector's novel, G.H. reaches a profound transformation, a complete restructuring of her identity through discourse. It is this discourse that leads her away from the artificiality she had been living in and propels her genuine self to surface.

As already observed, we can hardly speak of a plot in the novel. If there is an event it is clearly G. H's Kafkaean encounter with a cockroach while she intended to clean the maid's room. This encounter is at best a metaphoric confrontation with the other and then with the self which naturally takes place inside the discourse. The self-questioning and the attempt at self-definition form the very substance of G. H.'s interior monologue. The main character in the novel is known only by the initials of her name as inscribed on her luggage. This deprivation of a full name is already significant as it marks the beginning of a shake off of social conventions. Lispector wants to face us with the raw core of her character, untainted by the traces of her social identity. Although the reader does not get a detailed insight into G. H's previous life and character, it seems that there is actually not much to tell in this respect. From the clues that G. H.'s monologue reveals, she is just a member of the leisure class who lives in a quite penthouse in Rio de Janeiro, thus presiding over the city in an elegant but artificial apartment. She is unmarried and childless, and her only occupation is her dilettante profession as a sculptor. All these details G.H. gives speak about the tiresome routine and artificiality of her life, two things that she does not even notice fully.

The event that manages to break out the routine and awaken her spirit to a new life is the encounter with a cockroach while she goes to her former maid's room to tidy it. The whole action of the book significantly takes place in that claustrophobic space: a domestic room which would otherwise seem unfit for revelation. Still, the fact that it all takes place in the maid's room is actually symbolic: first of all, G.H. enters another space, leaving behind the commodity and elegance of her lofty apartment. Her feelings and her intentions as she goes to what used to be the maid's room just a few days before are also very significant. She plans on dusting the room of the Janair, the maid she had dismissed just a few days before. Her expectancies as she determines to clean up the room are also very significant G.H. assumes she will find a messy and filthy room, thus inadvertently associating the space of the Other with her pre-established cultural stereotypes. Also unconsciously, she opposes in her speech the two different spaces, betraying her misconception of the maid as the other but also of herself. In the description she gives of the apartment, G.H. emphasizes the fact that the apartment reflects her own personality. Interestingly, the parallel she makes between herself and the apartment emphasizes the elegant routine of her own interior life. Just like the apartment, she claims to be made of 'moist lights and shadows', unbroken by anything sharp or unexpected: "The apartment reflects me. it's on the top floor, which is considered elegant. People in my circle try to live in the so-called penthouse. it's more than elegant. it's a real pleasure: you can command a city from up here. When that elegance becomes common, will I, without even thinking why, move to another kind of elegance? Maybe. Just like me, the apartment has moist lights and shadows, nothing here is sharp: one room precedes and anticipates the next." (Lispector, 22) Before going to the maid's room, she tries again to make assumptions, believing in all certainty that she will encounter a messy and filthy space which would be the perfect characterization of her maid, as seen through the blind of cultural stereotypes.

Unexpectedly, this breaking into the space of the Other is a potent revelation G.H. is frightened to see that the space looks entirely different from her conception of it. Also, notably, the sharp contrast between her own space and that of the maid is poignantly evidenced. Thus, it can be said that this encounter with the culturally different space is the first revelation that G.H. has in the novel. Instead of the subdued gentleness which was proper of her own room, she finds what she calls 'the portrait of an empty stomach', a metaphor for what she feels is a consuming and even violent space: "The room was so different from the rest of the apartment that going into it was like leaving my own home and entering another. The room was the opposite of what I had created in my home, the opposite of the gentle beauty that came from my talent for arrangement, from my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, my sweet, disinterested irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a reference to myself. The room was a portrait of an empty stomach."(Lispector, 23) This violent encounter with the Other is natural in the context of Lispector's previous artificial sense of identity. The fact that the maid's room betrays her expectations enrages her, making her aware of a violation of her artificiality, figured in the text by the metaphoric quotation marks. Her personality so far had only been a series of conventions quoted from the general opinion. Now, G.H. finds herself at a crossroads when she openly confronts and begins to understand the Other. Naturally, this encounter begins with a contradiction: she feels annihilated and opposed by the other. According to Luce Irigaray, in order to repossess one's gender identity, the feminine role has to be assumed deliberately, through mimicry: "There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one path, the one historically assigned for the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately, which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation and thus to begin to thwart it."(Rivkin and Ryan, 795) Thus, since gender identity is not something already given, it should be deliberately assumed or enacted so as to give it shape and meaning. Before this breaking into the space of the Other, G.H. has but a dim sense of identity, as she is unable to perform for herself and, instead, lives enclosed in her artificial and shadowy stereotypical world. Another interesting fact about the encounter with the Other is that G.H. goes to the maid's room to do a maid's work, that is, to clean up the room. The master-servant relationship is thus deftly reversed here. In addition, the isolated room in the penthouse apartment can be said to recall the secret and forbidden room which is sometimes a leitmotif of fairytales: the hero or the heroine are forbidden to enter it but they do it eventually, gaining a revelatory and altogether metamorphosing experience. The obvious parallel with Kafka's novella, the Metamorphosis, is also significant: the revelation here also takes place in a limited and claustrophobic space and even if G.H. does not actually transform into the cockroach, she obviously metamorphoses into herself through the encounter with the Other.

It is thus through the encounter with the Other that G.H. eventually attains a sense of identity. Moreover, the true epiphany occurs through another confrontation with otherness. Besides the encounter with the maid, G.H. also confronts otherness in the shape of a cockroach. Confessing to… READ MORE

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