Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star is a fascinating, minimalistic, and

revealing piece of literature. The text is ironic and anxious, the narrator is
telling a story but heavily relies on the reader to make sense of it. In return,
the reader tries and often fails to find a hopeful thread to latch onto in order
to dispel ourselves of the realities of the underclass -to which the
protagonist belongs. The first sentence is strangely hopeful “All the world
began with a YES.” The reader can safely presume the book has a neat,
tidy, and happy ending. Lispector uses the book as a way to reveal her own
thought process and there is nothing neat or tidy about it. The last sentence
is not a sentence, just a word, “Yes.”[77] She brings us back to the moment
in which we live; the now. In the now, we have no choice but to accept the
sweetness that nature benevolently provides. The text completely
undermines the process, the structure, and the system in place for writing
literature. As the professor stated: the ambiguity is written into the story, the
source of tension is in the narrator’s reluctance to make decisions about
the protagonist, the drama is in the thought process that is brought forward,
the honesty in the creation of the novel is the conception of a contemporary
attitude towards literature. I think this is how art is revealing in this text.
Below, I will summarize the points that stood out most to me and cross-
reference those points with the question of feminism and the significance of
the collapse of master narratives.

The question of whether or not this can be considered a feminist text is an

intricate one but it begins with the following understanding. The narrator,
Rodrigo, is male and the protagonist, Macabea, is female. The author is
deliberately creating a conflict regarding the hierarchy and importance of
these two roles. On one hand, this is the story of a woman, and on the
other, a man is more suited to tell it. The narrator “possesses more money
than those who go hungry” [10] Meanwhile, the protagonist Macabea was
so poor she would sometimes resort to “chewing paper into a pulp and
swallow”[23] by imagining it was beef. She is simple and he is cultured.
She faces one tragedy after the next, it gets grim, so Rodrigo spends as
much time talking about himself as he does about her -maybe more.
Regardless, we share Rodrigo’s confliction and the story makes us wonder
if there is any point in writing about someone whose life is so dispairing.
One thing that is clear, is that he really wants to tell her story in a way that
is truthful to her. My reaction to that premise is: well, how noble! Here is an
idea, maybe the best way to truthfully tell her story is as complicated as
actually letting her tell it. A woman is typing, authoring the story of another
woman, but a man must mediate it to legitimize and validate the integrity of
the novel. I suspect Lispector is directing us to a testament of what men
have done historically in writing literature -telling the stories of people they
cannot identify with. Anyhow, my answer is this: I don’t know that this text
specifically feminist, there are far too many arguments to make, but I do
find the following point a significant one to touch on. She, who suffers
throughout the book, has earned the right to scream but is so passive and
incompetent she can not. Alas, a man must do the thing the woman could
not, for “there is a right to scream...so I will scream”[5] says Rodrigo as he
valiantly metamorphoses from male to female for the sole purpose of giving
Macabea a voice. It is said, and here it is revealed, that the nature of the
story goes beyond words. The Hour of the Star says so much through the
silent contemplation of words and the illusory background track of a
“plangent violin.”[15] Sentences are not enough to encapsulate the
meaning of the story; strong enough words have not been designed. It
touches on the reality that men have, for centuries, felt entitled to make use
of a right they believe a woman has failed -or will fail- to make use of.
Literature and history are merely a catalog of the male perspective on life,
language, art, science, medicine, on who or what God is, and on human
existence. This is novel represents the collapse of literature as it once was.

In the end, Macabea dies -and not in an exciting or plot twisting way.
Evidently, her death was foreshadowed from the age of one; she explains
that her mother named her because of a promise to “Our Lady of the Good
Death...it works”[35] because she survived but it followed that “a promise is
also a great question of honor.”[35] Ultimately, she is hit by a bright, flashy,
yellow Mercedes -I still wonder if that constitutes a “good death”. A car that
symbolizes wealth strikes and crushes a poor woman, but we move past it
rather quickly. Maybe Lispector finds that the theme of poor vs rich has
been adequately played out. I think that is the most significant tragedy, it
neatly wraps up the theme of dystopia. The most significant irony is that the
story seems tragic and depressing but the point, in my opinion, is that it is
forward-looking. Rodrigo says “She was subterranean and had never
flowered. I’m lying: she was grass.” [22] The takeaway is that leaves will fall
every autumn, but spring is always around the corner. The grass gets
greener and flowers begin to bloom once again. People die, others are
born, and it sounds grim but we have no choice but to choose affirmations
in the end. At least that’s what I’ve gathered from this text.