Architectures of Insubordination in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. (2011)

Undergraduate: Corynn Loebs

Faculty Advisor: Inger Brodey
Department: Comparative Literature

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Clarice Lispector’s 1964 novel The Passion According to G. H. takes place solely within a Modernist high rise apartment in Rio de Janeiro, yet instead of exploring the expected themes associated with Rio of the early 1960s, Lispector favors the interior space of her protagonist. Through the protagonist, identified with the initials “G. H.,” Lispector crafts a work that confounded critics and broke with previous techniques of Brazilian literature. Through the disregard of conventional plot-based narrative, Lispector wrote a novel of architectural proportions, more constructed than written. The high rise becomes a space in which G. H. attempts to retell a mysterious experience she had in her former maid’s room, which challenged her notions of what the function of a room. The unconventional structure of the novel acts as an analogue to the interiority of the protagonist and more particularly, to her thought patterns and the way they relate to the structure of the novel as a whole. Lispector experiments with language and the structure of the novel by calling into question the stability of each; the experimentation attempts to transcend fixed notions of both containers, just as G. H.’s experience in the room transcends its physical, static space, to open up an abstract, interior space. Through this insubordination of the expected function and uniformity of architectural space, Lispector’s novel reconstructs the relationship between the interior and exterior space.