Keywords

close reading, Brazilian author-artist, color symbolism

Abstract

Brazilian author-painter Clarice Lispector's work, especially her prose in her last published novella The Hour of the Star, is rich with deliberate color use; her abstracted prose style, including abstraction of punctuation, deliberate mention of specific colors during her narrative, and fragmented sentence structure all create an rich word-painting of the main character Macabea. This word painting creates an opportunity for Lispector to color her work with sharply pointed satire, convey political and social agendas of awareness, and ultimately places Macabea in an image-rich and meaning-driven view to the reader. This view is aided by further analysis of Lispector's little-known paintings, many completed within the last two years of her life. As possible connections between the author's artwork and the author's written word are drawn, the meaning of both becomes more clear and the power of both images and prose build to create a potent relationship between reader/viewer, author, and the characters on the page and on the canvas.