Via Crucis of the Body: Clarice Lispector visits advertising

Abstract

If anyone could write a story about a 77-year-old lady dreaming of shagging a pop star, it was Clarice Lispector. The Ukrainian refugee immigrated to Brazil as her Jewish family fled in the wake of the Russian Revolution. She is one of the most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century and her modernist prose is highly introspective and autobiographical. In this paper, I draw on two of her later collections, Where Were You at Night and The Via Crucis of the Body, both published in 1974, to outline several modes of ‘meno representation’, which offer alternatives to pathological perceptions of the menopause transition, and which can be adopted in advertising and marketing communications. Through feminist literary criticism of her stories, which focus in part on the lives of ageing women, I contribute to cultural strategy by suggesting new forms of meno representations in advertising.