Examining Whiteness Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison LEgEnda legenda, founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, English, French, german, greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature association. The Modern Humanities Research association (mhra) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research. Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. www.routledge.com EdITORIaL BOaRd Chairman Professor Colin davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, new College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English) Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (german) Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (german) Professor david Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, all Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor david Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor dr graham nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk Examining Whiteness Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison ❖ Lucia Villares Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2011 First published 2011 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2011 ISBN 978-1-906540-47-0 (hbk) All rights reserved. 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Contents ❖ Acknowledgements ix Copyrights and Translations xi Introduction: Clarice Lispector, Subjectivity and the national 1 The Threshold of the Unspeakable 4 The Pathological as a Way into the national 25 part i 1 A Question of Power: Unspeakable Miscegenation 40 2 Haunting in Toni Morrison’s Beloved 58 part ii 3 Welcoming the ghost: Haunting in A paixão segundo G.H. 80 4 Whiteness and the Construction of Subjectivity in O lustre 99 5 Modernization and the Phantasmagoria of Commodities in A cidade sitiada 126 6 Whiteness and Masculinity in A maçã no escuro 151 7 Racism and the Performance of Whiteness in A hora da estrela 167 Conclusion 189 Works Cited 194 Index 199 to my parents helena e luiz ACknowledgements ❖ I feel immense gratitude to a lot of people whose sympathetic reading and listening gave me the confidence to write this book; some of them are anonymous, others are not. The first version of this book has been presented as a Phd dissertation to the University of London. I have been extremely lucky to have had not one, but three supervisors whose trust and open mindedness have been of immense value to me. Carol Watts provided a crucial safe place to rehearse my initial ideas on the two English writers discussed here; david Treece the corrections and insights that kept me on my track; Jo Labanyi the reassurance and the direction that allows me now to look back at my years as a Phd student and see it for what it was: a time of plenty. My special thanks also to Hilary Owen, for her careful and supportive reading of the thesis and her advice in many occasions. I am deeply appreciative of the art and Humanities Research Board for providing me with the valuable financial support I needed to carry out this research. I would also like to thank Clare College Cambridge, alison Sinclair, and Santander Bank for their generous support while preparing this book. Three sections of Examining Whiteness were published previously in slightly different form. Chapter 3 appeared as ‘The Black Maid as a ghost: Haunting in A paixão segundo G.H.’ in Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector, edited by Claudia Pazos alonso and Claire Williams. Chapter 7 appeared in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies’ special issue entitled ‘Latin american Women’s Writing, Then and now’, edited by Thea Pittman and Chapter 5 in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. I thank the editors for their corrections and helpful comments. I thank the various conference organizers, chairs and audiences who provided the opportunity to test my ideas and the stimulating intellectual environment to refine them, both during and after the completion of my Phd. I have also benefitted immensely from the comments of many colleagues here and in Brazil. My special thanks to nadia Batella gotlib, Maria augusta Fonseca and Berta Waldman for finding time to see me and discuss my initial ideas. Closer to home, I thank my family and friends, here and in Brazil. Special thanks to Márcia May Morrissy for the encouraging words at crucial moments, and to Beth Silva, for her careful reading of long parts of the book and her encouraging advice. I would also like to thank my father, Luiz, for helping me find books in Brazil. I am also extremely grateful to my children, Laura and Leo, for coping for so long with such an absent-minded mother and for providing me with the distractions I needed in order to keep my mind reasonably sane. Most of all, I would not be able to complete this work without the love, patience and unconditional support of my husband Richard.