There Was No Escape Epiphany

Abstract

Clarice Lispector is one of the most prominent figures of literary modernism in Latin America. Her oeuvre explores themes of existentialism, narratives of silence, and various ideas of freedom. Her self-reflexive style of writing and experimentation with the Portuguese language reflects her attempt to invoke alternate meanings through her narrative. The characters' identities in her short stories through their exploratory nature give rise to a great deal of identity and gender play. They provoke possibilities and prospects to create new gender roles and subversive practices by the manifestations of thoughts and actions in various ways. This chapter examines her use of the epiphany in her short story “Love” from the collection of short stories entitled Family Ties. The focus rests on the symbolic violence that ensues from this deviation through thought (language) and action as a response to subversion under patriarchy. The theoretical approach reads against the grain in the light of Viktor Shlovsky's “defamiliarization” and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus and field.