{"id":13863,"date":"2025-04-01T15:36:52","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T18:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.claricelispector.ims.com.br\/?p=13863"},"modified":"2025-04-23T14:19:42","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T17:19:42","slug":"clarice-patroa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.claricelispector.ims.com.br\/en\/2025\/04\/01\/clarice-patroa\/","title":{"rendered":"Clarice, Mistress"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The lunch was exquisite, a million miles from any idea of hours spent laboring in the kitchen: before the guests arrived all the scaffolding had been removed. (LISPECTOR, 2022)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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I<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In August 1967, Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) would accept a proposal from her journalist colleague Alberto Dines, who was aware of her precarious financial situation (\u201cClarice jornalista,\u201d p. 8), to write chronicles on varied subjects for a weekly column in the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>.1<\/a><\/sup> Journalism had already served as an opportune way (sometimes the only one) to promote and publish part of her fictional work for almost two decades. Furthermore, according to her biographers, her journalistic activity guaranteed some financial support, above all in the years following her definitive return to Brazil, after fifteen years in exile married to a diplomat. Nonetheless, her \u201cparallel career\u201d as a chronicler and her participation in the lucrative business of columns written by celebrities represented a source of moral stress for the author \u2013 who was at the same time concerned about her intellectual reputation and about her form or \u201cstyle\u201d of writing fiction, which, in her view, the exercise of chronicling could corrupt. In one of her first chronicles for the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>, \u201cUndying Love\u201d (September 9, 1967), one observes, above all, the author\u2019s discomfort in \u201cwriting as a way of earning money\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), which would compromise her dilettante view of literature and, above all, the myth of the non-professional woman writer, which many intellectuals of her generation, for one reason or another, ended up reinforcing. Such factors, therefore, would reinforce a kind of \u201crhetoric of self-disqualification\u201d as a chronicler in several of her contributions throughout her six years at that newspaper (1967-73), in addition to the need to separate her \u201ctrue\u201d literary vocation from the \u201cnew\u201d role of chronicler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this text about Lispector\u2019s former domestic servants who were regularly part of the \u201clittle conversations\u201d or \u201clight impressions\u201d in her written column (her terms), Lispector\u2019s conflicts as a chronicler would gain a thematic nuance that is especially revealing of her positionality as a white, middle-class woman, who was at the same time aware of the role of her employer class in preserving the culture of domestic servitude that has persistently and profoundly shaped the modus operandi <\/em>of paid domestic service in Brazil. As sociologists Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum (2009) argue: \u201cThose living in a particular culture of servitude accept it as the given order of things, the way of the world and of the home [\u2026] servitude is normalized so that it is virtually impossible to imagine life without it, and practices, and thoughts and feelings about practices, are patterned on it\u201d (Cultures of Servitude<\/em>, p. 4). Lispector takes a critical stance towards the culture of servitude that structures the family life of the Brazilian middle class; at the same time, she makes use of these personal narratives about her intersubjective relationships with former domestic servants as a means of revealing her uncomfortable social position due to enjoying privileges that are morally incompatible with the position of a politically committed intellectual with which she and many writers of her generation identified. In some of these chronicles, as we will see, Lispector tries to compensate for such conflicts by associating herself with an ethics of care as a way of relating to her maids. Nonetheless, this affective gesture never materializes into concrete actions aimed at improving the degrading conditions of her maids, thus revealing a truth expressed in other chronicles of hers about domestic servants: conflicts can be mitigated, but never resolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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II<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Latin American chroniclers have been studied in their mediating role in the processes of formation, problematization, and consolidation of social practices and identities in urban spaces, especially based on their interest in \u201ccommenting on the way that we live, the customs and moral values in the social contract of big cities\u201d (\u201cLispector, cronista,\u201d p. 98).2<\/a><\/sup> The chronicle in Brazil having established itself as a \u201cwriter\u2019s genre,\u201d but without losing the epistemological authority of journalism, chroniclers are equally recognized for \u201cstanding out in their recording of the everyday in all of its urgency, in their sensitivity to the fascinating diversity of life, in their construction of complete scenes instead of dryly reporting the news\u201d (\u201cLispector, cronista,\u201d p. 98). In the particular case of Lispector\u2019s chronicles, I am particularly interested in the \u201cconstruction of complete scenes\u201d of everyday intersocial\/racial relations in urban and bourgeois domestic spaces. The set of her chronicles republished in the collection Discovering the World<\/em> (1984) reveals that, among her experiences of sociocultural diversity in the urban context of Rio de Janeiro, those that were most often recorded in her weekly column were her relationships with distinct former domestic servants (at least ten chronicles in the aforementioned collection are dedicated to the topic).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The frequent allusion to domestic servants in the urban environment of her chronicles demonstrates what is a reality for many middle-class families in the country: incorporated into the intimate environment of the home in the condition of a \u201cdomesticated outsider\u201d (CLIFFORD, 1988), the domestic servant constitutes the most lasting and personal relationship that a member of the middle class allows themselves to establish with poverty. The fact that Lispector made use of the space of her Saturday column to produce her public image as a Brazilian intellectual in the face of unresolved social tensions and traumas certainly had an impact on the repertoire of the domestic characters selected for these chronicles. In a sense, her written column served to negotiate and justify her fame as an introspective and formally experimental writer, in a period of cultural history when writers felt compelled to produce texts with explicit political themes \u2013 a result, as we know, of the authoritarian military regime that was established in the country for 21 years. On the other hand, as I seek to demonstrate, the author faced the challenge avoided by other writers of her generation and social class: that of exemplifying, through her personal chronicles about former domestic servants, the contradictions inherent in her self-promotion as a socially responsible intellectual in the face of her position of authority and socio-racial privileges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a chronicle from her collection The Foreign Legion<\/em> (1962), \u201cLiterature and Justice\u201d \u2013 a response to the accusations received in those years for the lack of social and political commitment in her literature \u2013, Lispector argues that the fact that she did not know how to approach \u201c\u2018the social thing\u2019 in a \u2018literary\u2019 way\u201d did not reflect, in her case, a lack of feelings of \u201cjustice,\u201d obligation, and social responsibility. \u201cFor as long as I\u2019ve known myself,\u201d writes the author, \u201csocial issues have been more important to me than anything else: in Recife, the shantytowns were my first truth\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). The argument is not new that Lispector, contrary to her own self-defense, actually knew how to approach the social problem \u201cin a \u2018literary\u2019 way,\u201d although this theme was more frequent and relevant in her literary work in the 1970s. In another chronicle published in the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>, \u201cWhat I Would Like to Have Been\u201d (November 2, 1968), Lispector would once again associate the impact of the social drama of the poor with her childhood forays into the outskirts of Recife, as she would also dissociate her literature from her inner feeling of social justice. In this second chronicle, however, she introduces the mediating figure of a domestic servant, without whom her trips to the shanty towns would not have taken place: \u201cIn Recife, on Sundays, I would go and visit our maid in her house in the slums. And what I saw made me promise myself that I would not allow that to continue. I wanted to act\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). As both chronicles reveal, the ethical awareness acquired in childhood (which earned her the nickname \u201cthe protector of animals\u201d in her family, p. 217) would keep compelling her to \u201csocial action\u201d as an adult \u2013 a compulsion transformed into a sense of responsibility (and, as we will see, a maternal obligation) that her activity as a writer, according to her, did not allow her to alleviate: \u201cAnd yet what did I end up being, and from very early on too?\u00a0 I ended up being a person who seeks out her deepest feelings and finds words to express those feelings. That is very little, very little indeed\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving between two socially opposed worlds, the domestic servant emerges in many historical and subjective circumstances as a threat to the family and social order of the employer class.4<\/a><\/sup> In Lispector\u2019s chronicles, the domestic servant acts as a double-edged sword: she is the intermediary figure \u2013 the \u201cdomesticated outsider\u201d \u2013 who leads the author to a traumatic, yet edifying, social revelation (a role that Lispector knew how to explore so well in the figure of the maid Janair, in the novel The Passion According to G. H.<\/em>). On the other hand, although she herself is a woman of social and cultural origins distinct from the author, the domestic servant is also the one who injects the drama of social exploitation into the \u201cprotected\u201d domestic world. Furthermore, as Lucia Villares argues, the figure of the domestic servant likewise forces the author to confront herself with the problem of racial difference and hierarchy; that is, to place herself in \u201ca position where her whiteness becomes visible\u201d (\u201cWelcoming,\u201d p. 80).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of the many chronicles in which Lispector alludes to domestic servants, \u201cDies Irae\u201d (October 14, 1967), she writes: \u201cAnd having maids\u2014let\u2019s be honest here and call them servants\u2014is an offense against humanity\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). The tone of\u00a0 \u201crage\u201d in this passage reveals the difference between the treatment given to domestic servants in the \u201cwomen\u2019s\u201d columns that she wrote (1952\/1959-61) and that which was predominant a few years later in the weekly column of the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>.5<\/a><\/sup> In both contexts, the author focuses on the difficulties inherent in the mistress-maid relationship, or the domestic disencounters between women of two classes, who were generally of distinct races, although she presents opposite reasons for such conflicts: unlike her columns for women, in these later chronicles, Lispector associates the difficulty of the relationship not with the defects in the maid\u2019s personality and services, but precisely with her servile condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another chronicle in the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>, \u201cWhat Lies Behind Devotion\u201d (December 2, 1967), Lispector problematizes the idealized view of \u201cdevotion,\u201d or servility, as an expression of love, gratitude, and loyalty from the working class; one can, as she herself argues, be devout while feeling \u201chatred.\u201d In the chronicle in question, Lispector refers specifically to the domestic characters in Jean Genet\u2019s play The Maids<\/em>, which she had just seen. \u201cIt really upset me,\u201d the author emphasizes, thus revealing to her readers the trauma of this experience: \u201cI saw how maids feel inside, I saw how the devotion we often receive from them is filled with a mortal hatred\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). According to Lispector, \u201ctheir long enslavement to masters and mistresses is too ancient to be overcome,\u201d and therefore, \u201c[s]ometimes that hatred remains unexpressed, and takes the form of a very particular kind of devotion and humility.6<\/a><\/sup> Such a reflection makes her think, for example, of the \u201cunexpressed\u201d hatred of a former domestic servant, the previously mentioned Argentine Maria Del Carmen: \u201cShe pseudo-adored me. Precisely at those moments when a woman is looking her worst\u2014for example, getting out of the bath with a towel around her head\u2014she would say: \u2018Oh, you look lovely, Senhora.\u2019She overflattered me.\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, without diminishing the value of narratives of social hatred and the censored forms that this feeling may take (pseudo-adoration, excessive flattery), I agree with Marta Peixoto (2002) that the author \u201creserves for her fiction \u2013 especially A paix\u00e3o segundo G.H.<\/em> \u2013 a view of that relationship that is more critical and fraught with negative emotions\u201d (\u201cFatos,\u201d p. 111). Perhaps out of attention to the \u201cconventions\u201d of the chronicle genre (for her, \u201clight impressions,\u201d or entertainment narratives), and above all to free herself from possible embarrassments that the role of mistress reserved for her, Lispector elaborates in her weekly column distinct strategies to \u201cattenuate differences and bring out unexpected similarities\u201d with her (former) maids (\u201cFatos,\u201d p. 113). Accepting her sister Tania Kaufmann\u2019s humorous suggestion that \u201cwe all get the cook [or maid] we deserve\u201d (Lispector, Too Much of Life<\/em>), the author gifts her readers\u2019 Saturdays with some fun facts about her clairvoyant cook, the former maid who \u201cwas having psychoanalysis\u2014I mean it\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), or \u201c[a]nother maid, who went with me to the United States, stayed on when I left in order to marry an English engineer\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). Furthermore, according to Peixoto (2002), Lispector\u2019s \u201clyrical and gentle portraits\u201d of the domestic servant \u2013 who \u201caccepts differences of experience and values \u200b\u200band pardons discreet thefts\u201d (\u201cFatos,\u201d p. 115) \u2013 likewise reveal the predominant treatment of maids in her chronicles for the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>: the writer speaks of the \u201c[g]uilt, tensions and estrangement\u201d (\u201cFatos,\u201d p. 115) arising from her countless relationships with maids, although she tries to overcome them through humor or lyricism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To \u201cattenuate\u201d the social differences brought into her domestic world by a \u201cmaid,\u201d she tends to highlight certain eccentricities in her the personality of her maids that divert the focus from the exploitative relationship to less embarrassing areas of this daily intersocial\/racial interplay. However, if on the one hand she frees her maids from certain negative stereotypes (some of which are used in her columns for women), on the other, she ends up fixing them in a new taxonomy of personalities and quirks. Types such as the comic cook, maids with an artistic vocation and a keen sense of human psychology, or even \u201cunconscious\u201d ones (due to psychotic episodes or brief \u201cdistractions\u201d) end up integrating themselves more into the fictional universe of her characters than into the embarrassing domestic space of social differences. Lispector\u2019s attempts to \u201cattenuate\u201d such differences and \u201cbring out unexpected similarities,\u201d however, do not always seem to her like a project that is possible to undertake. In a passage from her manuscript \u201cObjeto gritante\u201d [Screaming Object], Lispector, for example, anticipates the shock of incomprehension that her \u201cbackcountry\u201d maid, Severina, would feel when she sees the sea for the first time: \u201cShe may feel bad. Because the sea is not understandable. It is felt and is seen. I am putting myself in the shoes of this maid named Severina. And being her, I get really frightened. I must have seen the sea for the first time. But I don\u2019t remember [\u2026.]\u201d (\u201cObjeto gritante,\u201d p. 71).8<\/a><\/sup> As is known, the sea constitutes an important motif in Lispector\u2019s work; in her writing, a simple act of entering the sea can become a solemn ritual. Among other factors, the sea exerted a true fascination on the author by stimulating her reflections on the possibilities of maximum self-expansion and of true contact with non-human existences. In the aforementioned passage, Lispector projects onto her maid\u2019s unprecedented encounter with the sea a reaction similar to her own or that of her literary characters, only to later abandon this projection: \u201cI will fire Severina: she\u2019s too empty. I didn\u2019t have the courage to take her to see the sea: I was afraid of feeling for her what she didn\u2019t feel. She\u2019s from the Northeast and is empty from so much suffering.\u201d (\u201cObjeto gritante,\u201d p. 74).9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is, therefore, from the accounts of the \u201csurprisingly\u201d talented, perceptive, and sagacious maids that the author creates the typical panorama of the domestic servants who frequent her chronicles. On the one hand, Lispector highlights the poetic meaning and effect of phrases said by the domestic servants in their daily interactions, as is the case, for example, of her maid Rosa, in \u201cThe Italian Girl\u201d (April 4, 1970; previously published in The Foreign Legion<\/em> as \u201cAn Italian woman in Switzerland\u201d): \u201cI really don\u2019t know why I like autumn more than the other seasons, I think it\u2019s because in the autumn things die so easily [\u2026.] She also says: \u2018Have you ever bawled your eyes out for no reason? Well, I have! And she roars with laughter\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).10<\/a><\/sup> In \u201cOne Thing Leads to Another\u201d (May 16, 1970), Lispector is moreover surprised by her cook \u201chumming a lovely tune, a kind of harmonious plainchant. I asked her who had written it. She replied: oh, it\u2019s just some nonsense I came up with myself.\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). Nonetheless, as happens with other projects to increase the aesthetic value of popular expression, in these chronicles, Lispector has to make use of her artistic authority to add to the \u201ccreative\u201d words or \u201charmonious\u201d melodies of her employees a symbolic value unrelated to their intention. As she herself admits, with respect to this cook whose \u201cmouth can sing,\u201d \u201cshe [the maid] didn\u2019t know she was creative\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of her most interesting chronicles on the subject of domestic servants, \u201cSunday Tea\u201d (March 7, 1970; published in The Foreign Legion<\/em> under the title \u201cThe tea-party\u201d), Lispector also highlights the poetic impact (albeit involuntary) of several isolated phrases that she attributed to the maids that she had had throughout her life. In this chronicle, the author imagines herself as the host of a tea party offered to \u201call the maids who have ever worked for me\u201d \u2013 \u201c[a]lmost like a tea for ladies, except for there would be no complaints about maids\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). Aside from the ironic tone of the comparison, the narration of this imagined social gathering does not intend to realistically portray this quasi \u201ctea for ladies.\u201d First of all, the imagined setting for the tea party would be Rua do Lavradio, where her character Macab\u00e9a would later walk in The Hour of the Star<\/em> (1977). Furthermore, it mixes elements of a peripheral urban setting (the port area of \u200b\u200bRio) with \u201ca certain air of theater of the absurd\u201d (Ar\u00eaas, \u201cPe\u00e7as<\/em>,\u201d p. 563):11<\/a><\/sup> at first the maids \u201cwould sit, hands folded on their laps [\u2026.] Silent\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), and then, \u201cbrought back to life, the living dead,\u201d they would begin to \u201crecite\u201d phrases that were once said spontaneously and that, through the effect of humor, beauty, banality, revelation, or even discomfort, were retained in the author\u2019s memory: \u201cSilent \u2013 until the moment when each one would speak and then\u2014brought back to life, the living dead, would recite what I remember them saying\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lispector, for example, once again \u201cremembers\u201d what the aforementioned Italian maid, Rosa, had said to her upon hearing the comment of a stranger on the street about the simultaneous fall of the last autumn leaves and the first snow: \u201c\u2018It\u2019s raining gold and silver.\u2019 I pretended not to hear him, though, because, if I\u2019m not careful, men can do whatever they like with me.\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). Sometimes, however, she confesses that a single banal phrase, such as \u201cI like movies about hunting\u201d was \u201call that remains to me of an entire person\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is likely, on the other hand, that from her daily interactions with domestic servants, the author learned that in the banality of certain phrases are found hard truths, such as \u201cWhen I die, a few people will miss me. But that\u2019s all\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). One observes in another phrase \u201crecited\u201d by one of her former domestic servants the revelation that maternal love can manifest itself in the form of a violent desire, which is not always repressed (a theme in her famous short story \u201cThe Foreign Legion\u201d): \u201cHe was such a lovely little boy that I almost felt like spanking him\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). But it is from the \u201coldest of them all,\u201d the maid whose \u201ctenderness always had a bitter edge,\u201d that Lispector seems to draw the most profound lesson \u2013 \u201cto forgive cruelty lovingly\u201d\u2014, which is for her a product of her humiliating servile condition:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here comes Her Ladyship,\u201d and the oldest of them all stands up, the one whose tenderness always had a bitter edge and who taught us early on to forgive cruelty lovingly. \u201cDid Her Ladyship sleep well? Her Ladyship likes her luxuries. She knows what she wants too\u2014she wants this, she doesn\u2019t want that. Her Ladyship is white. (Too Much of Life<\/em>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The aesthetic effect of a \u201ccertain air of theater of the absurd,\u201d as well as the emphasis on the performance of reciting the phrases, demonstrate that, if on the one hand the author proposes to \u201cgive voice\u201d to the maids by quoting phrases such as the aforementioned ones, on the other, she introduces such phrases in a decontextualized way \u2013 which intensifies their poetic force but dilutes their practical and, in some cases, political function. Furthermore, limited by her memory, Lispector recuperates from her interactions with various domestic servants only those phrases that would manage to reduce her uncomfortable and guilt-ridden social distance. In a sense, she \u201cresurrects\u201d through this curious tea party of ghostly maids the (verbal) fragments of this interaction that constitute the general picture of the domestic servants that the author would have liked to have, and to \u201cdeserve.\u201d The singularity of Lispector\u2019s domestic servants did not go unnoticed by the writer Paulo Mendes Campos, in whose chronicle \u201cMinhas empregadas\u201d [My Maids] he comments, with a certain jealousy, on the \u201csubtleties\u201d (p. 186) or \u201ca certain finesse of psychological reactions\u201d in his friend\u2019s domestic servants, when he, on the contrary, saw himself \u201cunfortunately destined to have maids who were a bit, so to speak, feeble-minded\u201d (Campos, \u201cMinhas empregadas,\u201d p. 185). According to Campos, \u201coften saying things that recall her characters,\u201d many of Lispector\u2019s domestic servants end up \u201cimitating her art\u201d (\u201cMinhas empregadas,\u201d p. 185).12<\/a><\/sup> The last paragraph of \u201cSunday Tea,\u201d actually a long collage of parts of the phrases recited at this pseudo \u201ctea for ladies,\u201d\u00a0 can be applied to Campos\u2019 comment: on the one hand, Lispector highlights, through the speech of her maids, certain invisible aspects of their \u201cpsychological conditions;\u201d on the other, she manipulates the speech of the domestic servant (by selection, composition, cuts, decontextualization) in such a way as to emphasize her own aesthetic and thematic preferences much more than the possible tensions that this speech would certainly generate in its real context:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Food is all a matter of salt. Food is all a matter of salt. Food is all a matter of salt. Here comes Her Ladyship: I hope you get what no one can give you, but only when I die. It was then that the man said it was raining gold, yes, what no one can give you. Not unless you\u2019re afraid of standing in the dark, bathed in gold, but alone in the darkness. Her Ladyship likes her luxuries, but the poor variety: leaves or the first snow. Savor the salt that you eat, don\u2019t harm any lovely little boys, don\u2019t giggle when you ask for something, and never pretend that you didn\u2019t hear if someone should say: Listen, woman, it\u2019s raining gold and silver. Yes. (Too Much of Life<\/em>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In her weekly chronicles about domestic servants, Lispector thus recognizes the tensions of this intersocial\/racial domestic coexistence, and although she is overcome with embarrassment and guilt, she tries to dissolve such tensions through the narration of very humorous situations. In addition, the author values \u200b\u200bthe perceptive and creative potential of domestic servants as a means of diverting to aspects of this daily relationship that could alleviate the embarrassing social inequality and their servile condition. Nonetheless, she sometimes resents not being able to perform this \u201credeeming\u201d gesture, as is the case with the aforementioned domestic servant Severina, the \u201cempty\u201d Northeastern woman, who, perhaps for reinforcing (instead of diminishing) her guilt, she ends up firing: \u201cI want a maid who\u2019s completely alive even if she gives me more work,\u201d the author justifies. \u201cI can\u2019t have a dead thing at home\u201d (\u201cObjeto gritante,\u201d p. 75).13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Various chronicles by Lispector reveal, however, that a \u201cmaid who\u2019s completely alive\u201d can be equally problematic, not only because she \u201cgives me more work,\u201d but also because she disrespects the protocols of servile behavior and the social boundaries that the author, although guilty, is not interested in breaking. For example, in the chronicle \u201cThe Silent Girl from Minas Gerais\u201d (November 25, 1967), the maid Aninha seems to overcome her \u201cempty,\u201d half-dead state by means of an unusual interpellation of her author\/employer; in this case, a request to Lispector to lend her one of her books. The sequence of scares, hesitations, pretenses, and finally, refusals on the part of the author reveals that she also does not wish to replace a relationship of social exploitation (despite the embarrassment that this imposed on her) with a less \u201chierarchical\u201d social contract between author and reader: \u201cI didn\u2019t want to give her one of my books to read, because I didn\u2019t want to create an overliterary atmosphere at home, and so I pretended I had forgotten\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of the chronicle, mistress and maid silently perform the domestic activities that at the same time define them in the hierarchical organization of domestic service and separate them physically and socially: \u201cOne morning, she [the maid] was tidying a corner of the living room, and I was in another corner, doing some embroidery\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). The aforementioned request from the maid, although made in a \u201cmuffled\u201d voice, nonetheless comes not only to disturb the comfortable silence of that morning, but also to bring to light the embarrassing social difference: \u201cI felt embarrassed,\u201d reveals the author. \u201cI was frank though: I told her that she wouldn\u2019t like my books because they were rather complicated.\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). The use of humor at the end of the chronicle reveals, I repeat, that the author\u2019s recognition of the tensions and disencounters inherent in her day-to-day life with the maids does not take place without, at the same time, her trying to attenuate (but not resolve) such tensions: \u201cIt was then, as she continued her tidying, and in an even more muffled voice, that she said: \u2018I like complicated things. I don\u2019t like sugared water.\u2019\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). Lispector would reserve the narration of the continuation of this brief interlude with her maid Aninha for the aforementioned chronicle \u201cWhat Lies Behind Devotion,\u201d published on the Saturday following \u201cThe Silent Girl from Minas Gerais.\u201d To compensate for her refusal to comply with her maid\u2019s request, \u201cbecause I didn\u2019t want to create an overliterary atmosphere at home,\u201d the chronicler, \u201c[i]nstead, I gave her a detective novel I had translated\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). However, despite the author\u2019s prejudices, the chronicle reveals that the maid Aninha\u2019s literary preferences did not seem to include a type of literature that Lispector considered more accessible: \u201cI\u2019ve finished reading that book,\u201d says Aninha, referring to the detective novel translated by Lispector. \u201c\u2018[I] liked it, but I did find it a bit childish. I\u2019d like to read one of your<\/em> books.\u2019 She\u2019s persistent, the girl from Minas Gerais. And she actually used the word \u2018childish\u2019\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). It is possible, without a doubt, to relate these passages about Aninha\u2019s literary tastes to the negative criticism that Lispector received about the hermetic nature of her literature; in other words, the author may have used the responses, invented or not, of a maid to ironically retaliate against the opinion then current among readers and some critics that her books were excessively obscure and unpopular. Nonetheless, her refusal to share her literary production with a maid reveals, on the other hand, that the author, although resentful of the critical attacks, also did not seem interested in promoting herself as a writer who was read and appreciated by members of different social classes.14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The maid Aninha would be the theme of two more chronicles for her column in the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>: \u201cGod\u2019s Sweetnesses\u201d and \u201cMore of God\u2019s Sweetnesses\u201d (December 16, 1967). But, unlike the previous chronicles about this \u201csilent girl from Minas Gerais\u201d who liked to read complicated texts, here humor and irony are substituted by lyricism. Lispector would choose the same lyrical tone for another chronicle about (former) maids, \u201cGentle as a Fawn\u201d (January 27, 1968). In both chronicles, the change or substitution of tone constitutes, in my opinion, the materialization of a maternal feeling, which the author would reserve only for a few maids, particularly those who are associated with the aforementioned \u201cunconscious\u201d type. In \u201cGentle as a Fawn,\u201d the \u201cunconsciousness\u201d of the maid in question, named Eremita, is associated with her moments of mental \u201crepose\u201d or \u201cdistraction:\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n


For [Eremita] had moments of distraction. Her face took on a smooth mask of impassive sadness. A sadness more ancient than her nature. Her eyes became vacant; one might even say a little cold. Anyone near her suffered without being able to help. All one could do was to wait. (Selected <\/em>Cr\u00f4nicas, p. 19).
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cGod\u2019s Sweetnesses,\u201d as I will demonstrate, the mental \u201cdistraction\u201d of the maid Aninha acquires a pathological aspect, although at the same time \u201csweet\u201d and \u201ccrude.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is valid, on the one hand, to associate Lispector\u2019s special interest in her \u201cunconscious\u201d domestic servants with her long trajectory of exploring and valuing irrational modes of experience, or in the terms of the narrator of \u00c1gua Viva<\/em>, what one experiences when one courageously frees oneself from the limits imposed by \u201creasoning\u201d to acquire, \u201cbeyond thought,\u201d the paradoxical vision of the formless: \u201cbut now I want the plasma \u2013 I want to eat straight from the placenta\u201d (Lispector, \u00c1gua Viva<\/em>, p. 3). In the context of her chronicles about domestic servants, on the other hand, this experience inspires a particular interest because it is presented as a possibility of redemption from the servile condition of this social group. Perhaps this is the reason why, contrary to the expectations of her employer class, the chronicler, in \u201cGentle as a Fawn,\u201d shows herself more interested in the almost not at all productive \u201cdistractions\u201d or \u201creposes\u201d of the maid Eremita than in her services. Furthermore, even when reintegrated into the order of capitalized domestic chores (e.g. washing clothes, mopping the floor, hanging the laundry), Eremita remains above her status as a servant, given that such tasks are transformed, in this text, into a simulacrum of a primitive ritual of worship \u201cto other gods.\u201d In confluence with other chronicles, Lispector describes the distracted moments of Eremita, \u201cthis strange infanta,\u201d as a dangerous descent into her inner depths, or rather, to the \u201cprofundity\u201d and \u201cdarkness\u201d (Selected <\/em>Cr\u00f4nicas, p. 12) of herself (\u201cYes, she had hidden depths\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the chronicle \u201cState of Grace\u2014A Fragment\u201d (April 6, 1968), this descent constitutes an \u201centrance to that paradise\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>); here, it is a \u201cshort cut into the forest\u201d (Selected <\/em>Cr\u00f4nicas, p. 12). According to the chronicler, upon returning from the \u201cforest,\u201d Eremita set herself to subversively performing her duties, since by appearing (simulating?) obedience to her mistress, she actually \u201ctook care to serve from a much greater distance, and to serve other gods:\u201d \u201cFor anyone looking closely would have noticed that she washed clothes in the sun; that she mopped the floor \u2013 drenched by the rain; that she hung the sheets \u2013 out in the wind\u201d (Selected <\/em>Cr\u00f4nicas, p. 12). \u201cGentle as a Fawn\u201d is, in this sense, one of her most transgressive representations of the social order, where the hierarchical mistress-maid relationship is established; at the same time, ironically, this text constitutes one of the most comfortable types of domestic servant in her chronicles, where even the social signs associated with Eremita \u2013 hunger, \u201cthe rudeness typical of maids,\u201d fear, and \u201cpetty theft\u201d \u2013 are naturalized, or devoid of a political-ideological meaning, to serve the mysterious and insubjugable image of the girl: \u201cThere was nothing hard about her, there was no suggestion of any perceptible law. \u2018I was afraid,\u2019 she would say quite naturally. \u2018Boy, was I hungry!\u2019 she would exclaim, and for some strange reason there was never any more to be said\u201d (Selected <\/em>Cr\u00f4nicas, p. 12).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is only in the chronicle \u201cGod\u2019s Sweetnesses\u201d that Lispector, on the contrary, reveals the frustrations and failures implied in the attempt to compose an empowered image, redeemed from guilt, of her maids. At the beginning of \u201cGod\u2019s Sweetnesses,\u201d Lispector addresses her readers, in an almost accusatory tone, to point out their indifference to, and neglect of, her maid Aninha, despite only two weeks having passed since the publication of \u201cWhat Lies Behind Devotion:\u201d \u201cYou will probably already have forgotten my maid, Aninha, the silent girl from Minas Gerais, the one who wanted to read one of my books even if it was complicated<\/em>, because she didn\u2019t like \u2018sugared water.\u2019\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). I am drawn by the ambivalence of this passage by Lispector, which denounces the neglect of her readers (a reflection, certainly, of a dominant culture of indifference to domestic servants), while acknowledging, on the other hand, their admiration and loyalty as constant readers of her columns; such a passage reveals that Lispector, a few months after her first chronicle in the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>, assumed that she had achieved a loyal readership, who regularly followed the texts of her column on Saturdays. At the same time, it caused her some embarrassment to benefit from a social system in which writers received the affection and loyalty of a public that, for its part, was incapable of treating its maids in the same way. Furthermore, the author denounces the forgetfulness of the readers, which contrasts with her qualities as an affectionate mistress and the dominant lyricism in this text: \u201cwhat I did not perhaps mention was that, in order for her to exist as a person, she needed you to like her. You may have forgotten her, but I will never forget her\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chronicler \u201cwill never forget\u201d a morning when Aninha had returned home from a supposed trip to the market, with the money still crumpled in one hand, and her shopping bag full of bottle caps and pieces of dirty paper in the other, to \u201cdecorate my [her] room.\u201d Examined by a resident doctor at the Pinel Institute, the girl was promptly diagnosed as a victim of a psychiatric episode and committed, not without the intervention of some of the author\u2019s influential friends. The unique way in which Aninha\u2019s pathology is described reveals that, despite the affection and care of her mistress, it was necessary for the maid to go crazy in order to effectively \u201cexist as a person.\u201d First of all, Aninha (whom the author, without knowing why, insisted on calling \u201cAparecida,\u201d or the one who \u201cappeared\u201d) \u201cwas somehow a little more aparecida<\/em>, as if she had taken a step forward\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). Furthermore, \u201cnow her very expression was childish and clear:\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve never seen such sweetness,\u201d the author reinforces (Too Much of Life<\/em>). The brief dialogue between Lispector and the psychiatrist, \u201cwhom I later learned was Professor Artur\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), nevertheless, snatches the author away from her world of \u201cchildish expressions\u201d and \u201csweetnesses\u201d to the social reality of that which only to her \u201cwas somehow a little more aparecida<\/em>:\u201d Aninha, actually, was nothing but a servant to the others. Upon learning of the author\u2019s identity, the resident psychiatrist \u2013 himself a reader of Lispector \u2013 was \u201cfar more interested in me than in Aninha\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). There is a repetition, at the level of the story, of the same feeling of discomfort that sometimes admiration (in this case, from her readers) can cause, above all when it is based on an unfair social hierarchy: \u201che added politely, effusively, far more interested in me than in Aninha: \u2018It\u2019s such a pleasure to meet you.\u2019 And foolishly, mechanically, I responded:\u2019Oh, me too.\u2019\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). On the other hand, as Debra Castillo (2007) argues, this unbalanced exchange of effusions and sympathies (on the part of the doctor) and mechanical and shaken responses (from Lispector) makes evident the author\u2019s own unstable social position, which is conditioned by \u201csuppositions of social class and gender\u201d (Castillo, \u201cLispector, cronista,\u201d p. 105).15<\/a><\/sup> In fact, the question \u201cAre you a writer?\u201d \u2013 first asked by the maid Aninha and then by the resident doctor \u2013 generates two distinct responses, depending on the social position occupied by Lispector: \u201cAuthoritarian in the first case, confused and subordinate in the second\u201d (\u201cLispector, cronista,\u201d p. 105).16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to giving her the \u201cchildish and clear\u201d expression of a person who was, still in Lispector\u2019s terms, \u201cpartially awake\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), Aninha\u2019s \u201ccrazy sweetness\u201d was, so to speak, contagious: \u201cI, too, felt a kind of sweetness inside, which I can\u2019t explain. Yes, I can. It was love for Aninha\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>); or even: \u201cThe apartment was filled with the kind of crazy sweetness that only the now vanished Aninha could leave behind\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). But this is not the first time in her chronicles that the author highlights the \u201ccontagious\u201d component of \u201csweetness:\u201d \u201cThe sweetness is contagious: I grow still and sweet too,\u201d writes Lispector in \u201cBlack Doe\u201d (April 5, 1969; published in The Foreign Legion<\/em> as \u201cAfrica\u201d) when \u201csurrounded by skinny, black, half-naked girls\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), during her brief stay in Liberia. In this chronicle, Lispector describes a series of frustrated attempts to communicate with the residents of the \u201ctowns of Tallah, Kebbe and Sasstown, in Liberia\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), where a sign of goodbye (\u201cThey love waving goodbye\u201d) can be answered with \u201cobscene gestures\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), a very long sentence in which \u201cI cannot hear a single r<\/em> or s<\/em>, just variations on the scale of l<\/em>\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>) is summarized by the interpreter with a very brief \u201cShe likes you<\/em>,\u201d and even the English poorly assimilated by the natives sounded like \u201canother local dialect\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). For, to contrast with these lapses of language and gestures, or precisely at the moment when the author, feeling \u201cawkward,\u201d tries to show the use of her headscarf to an indifferent group of young black women, she becomes contaminated by the \u201csweetness,\u201d whose only concrete manifestation consisted, as in the case of the \u201ccrazy and gentle\u201d maid, in a certain expression on her face: \u201cIn their opaque faces, the painted stripes are looking at me. The sweetness is contagious [\u2026.]\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). The state of sweetness is as mysterious as it is frequent in Lispector\u2019s chronicles and fiction. This obviously does not concern the subaltern \u201csweetness\u201d idealized by the employer class (synonymous with absolute devotion, as is the case in the mammy myth), although it is generally associated in Lispector\u2019s work with those who are in a position of subalternity (animals, in \u201cState of Grace\u2014A Fragment\u201d a peasant woman, in \u201cSuch Gentleness;\u201d fools, in \u201cOn the Advantages of Being a Fool\u201d). Sweetness, in this case, is the crucial (utopian?) state for the contact, literally the tact, between women of distinct sociocultural conditions, since it dispenses with the desire for \u201ccomprehension\u201d and language: \u201cOne of them steps lightly forward, and as if partaking in a ritual\u2014movement and gesture are everything to them\u2014she very intently touches my hair, strokes it, feels it. They all watch. I don\u2019t move, so as not to frighten them.\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the chronicle \u201cGod\u2019s Sweetnesses,\u201d Lispector likewise narrates her \u201critual\u201d of contact with a domestic servant: here, it had been necessary for the maid to have \u201cappeared\u201d in her gentle madness, or contagious sweetness, and no longer through the disturbing desire to read her mistress\u2019 books. Nonetheless, for such a state of \u201csweetness,\u201d or of \u201clove,\u201d Lispector\u2019s reactions following the departure of her maid Aninha are somewhat \u201cfierce:\u201d \u201c[S]he didn\u2019t like \u2018sugared water\u2019 and she certainly wasn\u2019t that,\u201d writes the author, finally realizing a less ironic meaning, or effect, for such a clich\u00e9-expression. \u201cNeither is the world, as I realized again that night when I sat up into the small hours, smoking fiercely. Oh, how fiercely I smoked! Sometimes I was filled with anger, then horror, then resignation\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). According to Castillo, such reactions result from the experience of self-awareness, or revelation, in which the maid Aninha \u201cserves as Lispector\u2019s mirror, exposing the ugliness of her social preconceptions\u201d (\u201cLispector, cronista,\u201d p. 104).17<\/a><\/sup> In my view, nevertheless, instead of a narcissistic attention focused on oneself, where the other acts only as a \u201cmirror,\u201d such \u201cfierce\u201d reactions reveal, on the contrary, a \u201ctroubled sense of maternal obligation\u201d (\u201cFatos,\u201d p. 109), which is more consistent with the author\u2019s other social chronicles. In general, her encounters with the precarious reality of subjects who circulate in the immediate spaces of her chronicles are narrated as traumatic experiences of a renewed awareness of unresolved social wounds: \u201cNeither is the world [\u2018sugared water\u2019], as I realized again [\u2026.]\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, no matter how traumatic this view of precariousness is, Lispector likewise feels\/expresses a compulsion to \u201csocial action,\u201d which in some texts she defines as a duty to \u201ctake care of the world.\u201d In the chronicle \u201cI\u2019m Taking Care of the World\u201d (March 4, 1970), she writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Before I go to sleep and take care of the world in the form of my dreams, I make a point of checking that the night sky is full of stars and is navy blue, because there are nights when it appears to be navy blue not black [\u2026.] I observe the boy who must be about tem, terribly skinny and dressed in rags. A tubercular future awaits him, if it hasn\u2019t already arrived [\u2026.] Is taking care of the world hard work? Yes. And I remember the terrifyingly inexpressive face of a woman I saw in the street. I take care of the thousands of people living in the favelas on the hillsides [\u2026.] You might well ask why I take care of the world: it\u2019s because that\u2019s the job I was given when I was born. And I\u2019m responsible for everything that exists [\u2026.]. (Too Much of Life<\/em>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If \u201ctaking care of\u201d means \u201cchecking\u201d on or being \u201cresponsible for\u201d something or someone, this expression can likewise be read as \u201ccaring for\u201d and \u201cprotecting\u201d the other whose capacity for agency is perceived as null or precarious. Lispector then feels called to respond maternally to the sight of the malnourished, tubercular boy, or to the difficult memory of an anonymous and \u201cterrifyingly inexpressive\u201d woman\u2019s face. In other words, she adopts a \u201cmaternal thinking\u201d (in Sara Ruddick\u2019s terms)18<\/a><\/sup> when she speaks of these anonymous, precarious subjects and \u201cpeople living in the favelas on the hillsides\u201d to justify her continuous and exhausting task of \u201ctaking care of the world\u201d and of feeling \u201cresponsible for everything that exists.\u201d I leave out of the discussion the impossibility of such an incumbency and, certainly, the maternalist implications of her role as \u201cprotector of the poor and animals,\u201d to highlight the fact that such an attitude makes reference to the sui generis form of social commitment based on an \u201cethics of care.\u201d19<\/a><\/sup> On the other hand, as Marta Peixoto (2002) argues, Lispector\u2019s \u201cactivity of taking care proves to be no more than a careful observation of the visual surfaces of the world and is thus completely self-enclosed, in no way affecting, for better or for worse, the objects of care, which include the dispossessed\u201d (\u201cFatos,\u201d p. 109). In the chronicle in question, Lispector tries to give the maid Aninha a better place in the world, where even her \u201cugliness\u201d (\u201cI forgot to mention that Aninha was very ugly\u201d), or her \u201clack of taste\u201d in dressing, \u201cwas another of her sweetnesses\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>). However, her maternal \u201cactivity\u201d is limited to recording Aninha\u2019s sweetness, even for an audience that, she knew very well, would forget her in a short time: \u201cDear God, who could possibly love her? The answer: dear God\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acting in Lispector\u2019s chronicles as a mediator between two socially opposed worlds and, on the other hand, as a sign of socio-racial otherness in the chronicler\u2019s family universe, the domestic servant therefore acts on the self-constitution of the ethical subject in an ambivalent manner: she is the pretext for the chronicler\u2019s traumatic but morally edifying incursions into peripheral urban areas, although she likewise acts in these chronicles as a source of guilt and embarrassment. Lispector recognizes her conflicts and the tensions inherent in the mistress-maid relationship, but she is unwilling to answer to the demand that the presentation of these conflicts produces. This is perhaps why such conflicts and tensions are manifested as a state of attention (versus a \u201csocial action\u201d). On the other hand, despite her oscillations between \u201cseeing\u201d and \u201cnot seeing\u201d (\u201cFatos,<\/em>\u201d p. 119) the conflicts generated by this affective-labor relationship of social exploitation, the chronicler proposes something original in the history of Brazilian literature. In the first place, she introduces the class trauma and guilt triggered by the encounter with poverty. As Jean Franco (2002) argues, \u201c[a]lthough apparently motivated by the modernist desire to represent and control dangerous material [in the form of cultural fields], Lispector\u2019s encounter with the low is invariably shattering\u201d (Franco, \u201cSeduction of Margins,\u201d p. 204). Furthermore, from the social disencounters in her domestic family universe, Lispector extracts an aspect \u2013 the maid\u2019s imaginary gaze at her mistress, or her \u201ccensored resentment\u201d \u2013 that for obvious reasons challenges the mythologized appropriation of the domestic servant as a symbol of interracial fraternization (the mammy, the seductive mulatto).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such reflections unfold in her 1970s narrative in a series of questions about the power of the intellectual, and of literature, to intervene in the state of things in the world. Certainly, her inquiries are somehow integrated into the \u201cculture of defeat\u201d (FRANCO, 2002), a characteristic of the post-utopian, or post-revolutionary, Brazilian literature of those years; in the terms of Renato Franco, a literature forced to \u201cnarrate the impasses of the writer who could not decide if it was more necessary to write or to become involved politically, thus constituting a type of novel that was disillusioned both with the possibilities for society\u2019s revolutionary transformation and with his or her own condition\u201d (\u201cLiteratura e cat\u00e1strofe\u201d [Literature and Catastrophe], p. 358).20<\/a><\/sup> In her own way, Lispector would arrive at similar impasses in those years. For example, in The Hour of the Star<\/em> (1977), the narrator is willing to tell \u201cthe lame adventures\u201d of the northeastern migrant woman Macab\u00e9a, although he does not expect to overcome, through literary mediation, the social distance between himself and his character: \u201cThis book is a silence. This book is a question.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The various testimonies of domestic servants that emerged from the 1980s onwards in Brazil are a sign that, for one reason or another, the \u201csilence\u201d or the \u201cquestion\u201d did not meet the new political pressures imposed by the emergence of popular social movements. Nor did the \u201csilence\u201d serve as a response for the emerging domestic servant authors who saw their cultural practices as an unprecedented exercise in citizenship. Therefore, despite confronting the contradictions between her positionality as a mistress and her opposition to the culture of domestic servitude, Lispector is generally close to other canonical Brazilian writers. Her chronicles about domestic servants seem to be more at the service of building her public image than of the interpretative struggle to revise the stereotypes that have been producing stigma and injustice against domestic workers in modern Brazilian society.<\/p>\n

  1. This essay was originally written for the book O cuidado em cena: Desafios pol\u00edticos, te\u00f3ricos e pr\u00e1ticos<\/em>, 2018, edited by UDESC, from Florian\u00f3polis. We are grateful to Marlene Tamanini and Francisco Gabriel Heidemann for granting us permission to\u00a0republish\u00a0it.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quotes in Portuguese read: \u201ccomenta[r] a forma como vivemos, os costumes e valores morais no contrato social das grandes cidades;\u201d \u201cg\u00eanero de escritor;\u201d\u00a0 \u201csobressair-[se] no registro do cotidiano em toda a sua urg\u00eancia, na sensibilidade \u00e0 fascinante diversidade da vida, na constru\u00e7\u00e3o de cenas completas em vez de, secamente, recontar as not\u00edcias.\u201d[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. It is worth highlighting the fact that her sense of social responsibility and condescending attitude as a \u201cprotector of animals\u201d ends up reinforcing a certain maternalist ideology, which, according to Judith Rollins, tends to define the relationships between employers and their domestic servants.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. The maid as a sign of mediation between opposing worlds (house\/street; living room\/back of the house; etc.) appears frequently in literature, above all in childhood memoirs. See Leonore Davidoff\u2019s study on the domestic servant in children\u2019s memoirs of the British Victorian period, \u201cClass and Gender in Victorian England\u201d (In: Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class<\/em>. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); also see the analysis of the domestic servant in the shaping of the child Walter Benjamin\u2019s desire in Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, \u201cBelow Stairs: the maid and the family romance\u201d (In: The Politics and Poetics of Transgression<\/em>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). In Lispector, one of the most interesting examples of the domestic servant in her role as mediator between the bourgeois universe and that of poverty appears in a passage, still unpublished, from her manuscript \u201cObjeto gritante\u201d [Screaming Object] (on the passage in question, see my essay \u201cNunca fomos t\u00e3o engajadas: Style and Political Engagement in Contemporary Brazilian Women\u2019s Fiction.\u201d In: Anne J. Cruz et al. (ed.). Disciplines on the Line: Feminist Research on Spanish,<\/em> Latin American, and U.S. Latina Women<\/em>. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Press, 2003).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. Her little-known production as a columnist on issues \u201cfor women\u201d in some Rio de Janeiro newspapers was partially published after the exhaustive work of Aparecida Maria Nunes, who selected and edited her women\u2019s chronicles in three collections: Correio feminino<\/em> (2006), S\u00f3 para mulheres: conselho, receitas e segredos<\/em> (2002), and Clarice na cabeceira:<\/em> jornalismo<\/em> (2012) \u2013 all published by the Rocco publishing house.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. Her reference to domestic slavery constitutes one of the rare passages in her chronicles in which race is treated as a relevant factor in the structuring of relationships between mistresses and maids.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  7. As Vilma Ar\u00eaas reveals in \u201cPe\u00e7as avulsas\u201d [Individual Pieces], the view of the \u201c\u00f3dio censurado\u201d [censored hatred] of domestic servants appears in her literature based on the personal reading of a newspaper article, \u201cUn \u2018prol\u00e9tariat\u2019 en Tablier Blanc,\u201d written by Elvire de Brissac and published in Le Monde<\/em> on March 14, 1963. According to the article in question, the \u201ccondi\u00e7\u00f5es psicol\u00f3gicas\u201d [psychological conditions] of this social group, or the feelings that constitute their relationship with their mistresses, are precisely repressed resentment, humiliation, and alienation.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  8. LISPECTOR, Clarice. \u201cObjeto gritante.\u201d Clarice Lispector Archive. In: Archive-Museum of Brazilian Literature at the Rui Barbosa House Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, 1971. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quotes in Portuguese read: \u201csertaneja;\u201d \u201c\u00c9 capaz de sentir-se mal. Porque o mar n\u00e3o \u00e9 compreens\u00edvel. \u00c9 sentido e \u00e9 visto. Estou me pondo na pele desta empregada que se chama Severina. E eu sendo ela fico toda assustada. Devo ter visto uma primeira vez o mar. S\u00f3 que n\u00e3o me lembro\u2026\u201d] [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  9. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quote in Portuguese reads: \u201cMandarei embora Severina: ela \u00e9 oca demais. N\u00e3o tive coragem de ir lev\u00e1-la a ver o mar: temia sentir por ela o que ela n\u00e3o sentisse. \u00c9 nordestina e \u00e9 oca de tanto sofrimento.\u201d] [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  10. As the author explains in this chronicle, it concerns an immigrant maid from Italy during her years in Berne, Switzerland.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  11. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quote in Portuguese reads: \u201cum certo clima de teatro do absurdo.\u201d[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  12. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quotes in Portuguese read: \u201csutilezas;\u201d \u201ccertas finuras de rea\u00e7\u00f5es psicol\u00f3gicas;\u201d \u201cbastante fatalizado a ter empregadas um pouco, como se diz, s\u00f4bre a d\u00e9bil mental;\u201d \u201ca falar frequentemente coisas que lembram as personagens;\u201d \u201cimita[r]-lhe a arte.\u201d[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  13. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quotes in Portuguese read: \u201cQuero empregada toda viva embora me d\u00ea mais trabalho;\u201d \u201cN\u00e3o posso ter coisa morta em casa.\u201d] [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  14. Lispector would once again mention the use by a domestic servant of erudite, sophisticated words, that is, words \u201cproper\u201d to the employer class, to narrate a situation of social \u201cenigma.\u201d In the chronicle in question, \u201cEnigma\u201d (April 26, 1969), she accidentally meets a woman in the elevator of her building who \u201cspoke like the mistress of the house, her face was that of the mistress of the house,\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>), but who had entered \u201cher\u201d apartment \u201cby the service entrance\u201d and, moreover, \u201cwas wearing a uniform.\u201d Nevertheless, since it concerned someone else\u2019s maid, this shaking of social boundaries does not \u201cembarrass\u201d her; the final mood of this chronicle appears more out of obedience to its generic \u201cconventions\u201d than out of a need on the part of the author: \u201c\u2018And\u2014I swear\u2014she added this: \u2018Life has to have a sting in the tail, otherwise you\u2019re not really living.\u2019 And she used that expression \u2018a sting in the tail,\u2019 which I really like\u201d (Too Much of Life<\/em>).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  15. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quote in Portuguese reads: \u201cpressupostos de classe e sexo.\u201d] [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  16. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quote in Portuguese reads: \u201cautorit\u00e1ria no primeiro caso, confusa e subordinada no segundo.\u201d] [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  17. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quote in Portuguese reads: \u201cserve de espelho para Lispector, expondo a feiura de seu preconceito social.\u201d] [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  18. RUDDICK, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace<\/em>. 2nd<\/sup> ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  19. Despite the controversies surrounding her proposal to dissociate the \u201cwork\u201d of maternity from the figure of the biological mother, in addition to a somewhat bourgeois view of this maternal work, Sara Ruddick\u2019s book, Maternal Thinking<\/em> (1st<\/sup> edition, 1989) inaugurated an important debate on the ethical implications of maternal care. According to Peta Bowden, in Caring: Gender-Sensitive Ethics<\/em> (New York, London: Routledge, 1997), \u201cRuddick attempts \u2018to identify some of the specific metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities, and conceptions of virtue [….] that are called forth by the demands of children [adopted, biological, or raised]\u2019 (MT<\/em>, p. 61), with the aim of \u2018honouring\u2019 ideals of reason that are shaped by responsibility and love rather than by emotional detachment, objectivity and impersonality. Her claim is that the practices arising from mothers\u2019 responses to \u2018the promise of birth\u2019 have the potential to generate and sustain a set of priorities, attitudes, virtues and beliefs that inform an ethics of care and a politics of peace\u201d (Bowden, Caring<\/em>, p. 24\u20135).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  20. [Translator\u2019s note: the original quotes in Portuguese read: \u201ccultura da derrota;\u201d \u201cnarrar os impasses do escritor que n\u00e3o sabia decidir se era mais necess\u00e1rio escrever ou fazer pol\u00edtica, constituindo assim um tipo de romance desiludido tanto com as possibilidades de transforma\u00e7\u00e3o revolucion\u00e1ria da sociedade como com sua pr\u00f3pria condi\u00e7\u00e3o.\u201d] [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I In August 1967, Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) would accept a proposal from her journalist colleague Alberto Dines, who was aware of her precarious financial situation (\u201cClarice jornalista,\u201d p. 8), to write chronicles on varied subjects for a weekly column in the Jornal do Brasil.1 Journalism had already served as an opportune way (sometimes the only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":13860,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[328,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ensaios","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nClarice, Mistress - Clarice Lispector<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/site.claricelispector.ims.com.br\/2025\/04\/01\/clarice-patroa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Clarice, Mistress - 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