A Study Guide for Clarice Lispector's "The Imitation of the Rose"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Clarice Lispector's "The Imitation of the Rose", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535868068

Book preview

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The Imitation of the Rose

Clarice Lispector

1960

Introduction

The Imitation of the Rose—in the original Portuguese, A imitação da rosa—is a short story by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector that first appeared in the Rio de Janeiro literary magazine Senhor in 1960. It was published in her short-story collection Laços de fam000ED;lia (Family Ties) later that same year and as the title story of her fifth collection in 1973. It has been reprinted in The Complete Stories (2015), an omnibus edition of her short work, and anthologized in Contemporary Latin American Short Stories (1974) and Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (1986).

The story concerns the rapid relapse into mental illness of Laura, a housewife recently discharged from a psychiatric hospital. As with much of Lispector's fiction, the story outwardly has only a minimal plot; the bulk of the tale is an interior monologue, spiraling and repetitive in structure and with striking imagery and turns of phrase. In tracing the evolution of one person's mental fixations about order and routine, it winds up illustrating the subjective nature of reality itself, as well as the inaccessibility of one's inner nature to outsiders. The Imitation of the Rose, in common with much of Lispector's fiction, has been extensively analyzed as a critique of gender roles.

Author Biography

Lispector was born on December 10, 1920, as Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector, in the Ukrainian village of Chechelnik to Jewish parents, Pinkhas and Mania Lispector. After the Russian Revolution, a wave of pogroms—orchestrated campaigns of violence against Jews—had forced the family to flee from one community to another; at one point Mania was gang-raped by Ukrainian soldiers. They arrived in Chechelnik as refugees and fled Russia for Romania after Lispector's birth, finally traveling to Brazil in 1922.

Lispector spent most of her life until the age of fifteen in the Jewish quarter of the city of Recife, where her father worked as a peddler; lunch was typically orange juice and a piece of bread. As soon as she was able to read and write she began composing stories. She submitted them to the children's page of