The Daydreams of a Drunken Woman

Introduction

The Portuguese woman in Lispector's story "The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman" may, in some ways, be considered the reverse image of Laura in "The Imitation of the Rose." Whereas Laura negates and tries to obliterate her body, the Portuguese woman flaunts it: sensuous, healthy, conscious of her physicality, her laughter, the narrator tells us, comes "from the depths of that security of someone who has a body" (Rich, 12). All is not well, though; as the story a progress, the reader becomes aware that her relationship to her body, for all that, is no less problematic. Although the woman's disgust at what she terms a "degrading and revolting existence" frequently erupts in angry deprecations directed at herself and others, she is at a loss to account for the source of her dissatisfaction (Rich, 13). Having internalized society's prescriptions which have reduced her to the functions of child bearer and sexual object, she seeks the causes of her discontent in herself: "Ah, what's wrong with me! She wondered desperately. Have I eaten too much? Heavens above! What is wrong with me?".

Discussion Analysis

Only when she is drunk--her drunkenness serving as "a beacon that sweeps through the dawn while one is asleep", does she become dimly aware of the problem, and even then she can express her feelings only metaphorically: "Her white flesh was as sweet as a lobster, the legs of a live lobster wriggling slowly in the air. Disgusted at the thought of being a lobster, a passive object of consumption, the urge to assert herself as an active and autonomous being subsequently produces a different image in her mind: "She was no longer a lobster, but a harsher sign--that of the scorpion. After all, she had been born in November" (Pontiero, 37).

In the foreword to her study Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich states that "woman's status as childbearer has been made into a major fact of her life. Terms like 'barren' or 'childless' have been used to negate any further identity”. In Lispector's story, the Portuguese woman tries to justify her existence and assert her personality by having recourse to society's glorification of motherhood: she is obsessed with the procreative potential of her body.

Imagery related to pregnancy and the proliferation of flesh abounds in the story. The triple mirror in the opening paragraph of the story becomes a symbol of the woman's physical multiplicity: ...