By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Clarice Lispector (1920-77) has not had as much attention as her fellow titans of South American literature, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. But her short stories are often dazzlingly inventive and, like the best of Borges, carry the force of a miniature parable or fable.
‘A Chicken’ (‘Uma galinha’) is a case in point. Running to just four pages in the English translation of Lispector’s Complete Stories, this tale is filled with allegorical meaning.
Summary
One Sunday morning, a chicken which is due to be killed and cooked for the family’s Sunday dinner remains alive in the kitchen. Although she had avoided attracting attention since the previous day when the family had selected her for their dinner, she puffs herself up and flies up and out to the roofs of the neighbouring houses.
The man of the house – probably the eldest son – chases after her. Although she initially eludes him, he eventually catches up with her. She is carried back to the kitchen where she is violently placed on the floor. In her frantic state, the chicken lays an egg. The daughter of the family runs off to tell her mother not to kill the chicken, because it has laid an egg and so ‘cares about us’.
Both the father of the family and the little girl who’d witnessed the chicken laying the egg tell the mother that if she kills the chicken, they will never eat chicken again. The mother shrugs in reluctant agreement. And so the chicken ends up living with them, becoming ‘queen of the house’.
Whenever it looked as though the family had forgotten about her, she would puff herself up again, as she had done on that morning when she had escaped onto the roof. Doing so would make her feel much happier. The story ends with the family eventually killing and eating the chicken some years later.
Analysis
The story begins with an immediate surprise: ‘She was a Sunday chicken, still alive …’ Or perhaps two surprises: first, the chicken being gendered or sexed as ‘she’ rather than the more usual ‘it’, and then – relating to this – the revelation that the ‘Sunday chicken’ is actually still a living, breathing animal, rather than a slaughtered piece of poultry ready to be cooked and eaten.
And it’s hard to avoid the fact that Lispector intends the story to be read as not just about a chicken’s lot, but about attitudes to women more generally. At the beginning of the story, the chicken had had to endure the family’s ‘feeling up her intimate parts’ as they try to ascertain whether she’s sufficiently plump to serve as their Sunday dinner.
Then, when she is attempting her flight to freedom, Lispector’s third-person narrator tells us that the chicken is different from a male (rooster), which is proud and victorious. The (female) chicken remains unsure of her identity, much as women – or so Lispector seems to be saying – are ‘trained’ or conditioned to be humble and modest, unlike young men who are raised to be self-assured and swaggeringly proud.
The chicken also has no ‘being’ or identity, unlike a rooster which vainly locates its sense of self-worth in its ‘comb’. (Indeed, the word ‘coxcomb’ – literally, a ‘cock’s comb’ – was used for centuries, such as in the plays of Shakespeare, to refer to a vain, conceited man.) The hen is emptied of any inherent meaning or identity, and is defined from outside by those who seek to control and own it (and, through doing so, eventually to eat it).
When she lays an egg in frantic panic, the chicken saves herself from being slaughtered. In becoming a mother, she proves her ‘worth’ to the family much as (Lispector seems to suggest) a woman is deemed valuable to society when she bears and raises children. A woman’s identity, much like a hen’s, is defined by her ability to bring forth life. But this is not some miraculous and happy turn of events, for several reasons.
First, it’s not exactly a positive feminist message that the chicken is only spared from slaughter because she has proved her maternal worth. This, of course, is precisely Lispector’s point: the chicken has gone from being viewed as food to being considered a producer of food, but if we regard this as an allegory for a woman’s lot, it’s simply replacing one set of labels with another: the woman’s, and the chicken’s, perceived value to society (or the family) is still measured in terms of her body and what she can provide or produce.
Second, the chicken only has a stay of execution: once she has exhausted her ability to lay eggs, she will be killed and eaten all the same, much as a mother will become worthless in society’s eyes, Lispector suggests, once she has passed the age where she can have children.
Curiously, it is the father of the house, not the mother, who joins the little girl in her demand that the chicken be spared because it has brought forth an egg. The patriarchal head is still the one in control of the female’s fate, even here.