Clarice Lispector: a família no banco dos réus

Abstract

This article analyses the short stories published in Clarice Lispector’s volume Laços de família (Family ties), showing how family is a theme that structures nearly all of the texts. Using her subtly ironical style, the author questions the bourgeois nuclear family model, according to which the wife is confined to the home under the husband’s control. This is a hierarchical family, heiress of the patriarchal model, where the members differ from each other by their obedience to a disciplining force. The female characters, trapped in the female fate, have epiphanies that allow them to discover a full-blown life, open to the unforeseeable, to the “danger of living”.