Uma estranha descoberta: leitura do conto “A menor mulher do mundo”, de Clarice Lispector

Abstract

This article intends to analyze Clarice Lispector’s short story “A menor mulher do mundo” according to Freud’s essay “The uncanny”. We want to understand the domination re- lationship between a French explorer and his uncanny discovery in Equatorial Africa: a pregnant Pigmee. An interplay of alterities, estranging and identified between themselves, will open the way for an analysis that will try to unveil some levels of meaning against a background that puts in a dialectical relationship culture and impulse. The history of Brazil- ian colonization and the history of the constitution of the human subject are intermingled in this story, that dislocates habitual forms of positioning the ego in relation to the other. The text’s ironical effect appears when an inversion of expectations occur between the savage and the domestical orders, revealing surprising and perverse reactions in the latter.