Critical Response Archive: Family Ties

Clarice Lispector stretches the idea of what is “realistic” in her short story collection Family Ties. The stories in Family Ties are intimately realistic, even if they do not adhere to strict realism. The reader really gets inside the heads of the main characters, while not learning of her every thought, hope, or fear. Her prose is detailed to the minutest degree; we get the feelings of some characters as they stand or throw a fit, as in “Preciousness.” Even in “The Chicken,” we are with the chicken, viewing the world at her level, though cognitively processing it above her level of thinking. It allows one to observe them while actually being with them as the action unfolds. Which isn’t much.

Most of the stories are defined by a single event: for Laura, it is when she receives a bouquet if roses in “The Imitation of the Rose,” for the chicken, it is when she makes a break to escape her fate; for the woman in “The Buffalo,” it is when she meets the buffalo while wandering aimlessly at the zoo. Not much happens outside of the characters’ heads, but so much happens inside of them that we still get to know the characters one way or another. Lispector’s stories must be carefully read, and separately, so that one can process the psychological and existential crises occurring in the everyday lives of her characters, and consider their motives. In this way she is creating distinctly feminist prose.

Most of her characters are women who feel alone or oppressed in one way or another, and in painting their sadly ordinary lives, Lispector creates characters and situations that are not only uniquely female, but also human. The humanity of women was and still is often negated from artistic expression in the Western world, women’s roles being relegated to the background or as archetypal representations or love interests. Literary critics outside the feminist circle have not even labeled Family Ties as feminist, even while such stories as “The Chicken,” “The Interpretation of the Rose,” and “Preciousness” make some pretty obvious critiques of perceptions of female beauty and maturity, the confines of the home, and the general oppression of women by the patriarchy. This could in fact a good thing, however, as it shows that she is worthy of being shelved next to the likes of Borges, instead of being slapped with a specialized label that would detach her work from canonical texts. Her stories, after all, rival the artistic innovation of many of her male contemporaries.