The Smallest Woman in the World

“The Smallest Woman in the World” is a short story by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. It was originally published in 1959 in the literary magazine Revista Senhor and was republished in 1960 in the short story collection Family Ties (Laços de famı́lia). Lispector is one of the most famous 20th-century modernist writers in Brazil. In her literary works, she explores the themes of identity loss, intense mental and emotional states, and the distortion of perception. In this story, Lispector considers issues of racial and gender representation in the Western world, as well as the destructive potential of desire. Although the story is told from the perspective of a third-person narrator, Lispector’s modernist style often interweaves the character’s emotions and points of view into the narration.

The guide references the story as it appears in Clarice Lispector Complete Stories, published by Penguin Books in 2015 (translated by Katrina Dodson).

Content Warning: The short story and study guide discuss racial and gender violence and discrimination. In addition, the source material uses outdated, offensive phrases for people of color and Indigenous people, which are replicated in this guide only in direct quotes from the source material. The summary references an act of sexual violence related to the author’s biography.

The story follows the journey of the fictional French explorer Marcel Pretre as he searches for the smallest pygmy tribe in the world. During his expedition to Equatorial Africa, he encounters the tribe of the smallest people in the world in the Central Congo. Among them is the smallest woman in the world, whose height is only 18 inches. She lives atop a tree together with her consort, and she is pregnant. Pretre is perplexed by the existence of such an uncommon human being, who is deeply foreign and strange to him. In an attempt to establish familiarity and order in such an unfamiliar setting, he names the woman Little Flower.

Determined to learn more about Little Flower and her tribe, the Likoualas, the explorer documents their lives and experiences. Lispector uses technical language from the field of anthropology to describe their lives. Pretre’s fictional anthropological data recounts the hardships that the Likoualas face as they suffer from diseases, food scarcity, and the constant dangers posed by wild animals. However, the greatest threat to the Likoualas is the Bantu tribe, which hunts and eats them. In order to survive, Little Flower’s people have adapted to living in tall trees and only descend when necessary for cooking and hunting. Children are granted freedom soon after birth, although their lives are often cut short due to the hazardous environment.

Pretre is captivated by Little Flower and her extraordinary existence. He considers her an amazing discovery and contemplates the significance of her presence in the world. At the same time, he is conflicted: As an explorer, he considers his discovery to be a matter of great luck and significance, but as a white European man, he finds many of her gestures, habits, and physical aspects shameful and socially inappropriate. In some descriptions, he sees Little Flower as closer to an animal than a human being. Finally, the explorer decides to share Little Flower’s photograph in the Sunday newspaper.

Using seven vignettes, Lispector depicts the reactions of different people when confronted with Little Flower’s life-size photograph in the newspaper. Some feel longing, curiosity, or fascination, while others express distress, pity, or indifference. However, the running theme throughout the vignettes is the objectification of Little Flower. The third-person narrator depicts the difficulty and prejudice involved in relating to a radically different human being.

The first reaction is that of a woman who simply turns away from the newspaper because she feels pain when looking at Little Flower. In the second vignette, a woman feels “perverse tenderness for the African woman’s smallness” (167), which the narrator describes as a dangerous emotion that could lead to harm. In the third vignette, a five-year-old girl feels that she can relate to the smallest woman in the world because, in her family, she used to be the smallest before losing this special place. The little girl’s insight combines the realization that caring for a more vulnerable human being can be a source of both affection and oppression at the same time. In the fourth vignette, a young bride expresses pity at the sight of Little Flower, but her mother replies by comparing Little Flower to an animal, which allows her to feel superior.

The last three vignettes are the richest in imagery, affective impact, and philosophical-social insights. In the fifth vignette, a boy expresses his desire to own Little Flower and have her as a toy. His mother hears him from another room and remembers a story that she heard from the family’s cook: As a child, the cook lived in an orphanage where the girls once covered up another girl’s death so they could play with her body like a doll. The boy’s mother connects the cook’s story and her son’s reaction to Little Flower’s photograph, feeling both scared of the darkness in the boy’s desire and proud of the “insurmountable distance of millennia” between her world and Little Flowers (169). This combination of emotions leaves the woman anxious, which she tries to conceal.

The sixth vignette depicts a family’s interaction with Little Flower’s photograph. The family starts by measuring the life-sized photo, astonished at the woman’s smallness and equally desiring to possess her. In the middle of this vignette, the narrator turns to the reader and asks them to consider the following: “And, really, who hasn’t ever wished to possess a human being for one’s very own?” (171). The dialogue between the family members is based on the fantasy of possessing Little Flower, and each family member contributes their own image of the fantasy by considering who would get to use Little Flower, the size of Little Flower’s baby, and Little Flower serving dinner while pregnant.

In a sudden change of perspective, Lispector shifts the gaze by returning to the scene between Marcel Pretre and Little Flower. In this section of the story, Lispector recovers Little Flower’s fundamental humanity by showing her laughing, interacting with the explorer, and, most importantly, expressing her desire. Desire, one of the central themes of Lispector’s story, is the fundamental emotion that characters experience concerning Little Flower. However, despite her small size and the cultural differences between her and those desiring to possess her, she also experiences desire. Little Flower’s desire takes the shape of love directed at the explorer, his ring, and his boots. She becomes possessive, which Lispector emphasizes as a fundamentally human trait: “for it is good to possess, good to possess, good to possess” (72). At the same time, Lispector hints at the difference between the desire to possess a human being and Little Flower’s desire to possess her own tree in the jungle, which protects her from the Bantu tribe.

The seventh and last vignette closes Lispector’s story by restoring the distance between Little Flower’s world and the European context to which Pretre and the Sunday newspaper readers belong. This distance comes through an old reader’s reference to God, which allows her to close the newspaper: “God knows what He’s doing” (172).