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Macabea's Dichotomy

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When Macabea is dying, she suddenly understands that “a woman’s destiny is to be a woman” (Lispector 84), and as a result, she is a woman. Macabea’s realization that she is a woman could be generalized to what constitutes a woman, yet this would be an idealized reality: although by many arguments identification does indeed act as the definition of woman, whether one identifies as a woman or not, this does not dictate whether society treats you as one. Thus, there is a dichotomy: woman by identification, and woman by society’s assignment. Although Macabea was ignorant to being a woman, this still hugely affected how she was treated. This raises more classifications: throughout the text, Macabea was regularly referred to as a girl, and before …show more content…

In this text, and often in society, virginity is what separates a girl from a woman, and although Macabea remains technically a ‘virgin’ (one who has not had sex) for the entirety of her life, she becomes no longer a girl or a virgin but a woman in her final moments because she undergoes a “painful and difficult reflowering that she enacted with her body” (Lispector …show more content…

The word ‘reflowering’ is created for this situation to oppose the word ‘deflowering’ which represents a woman’s loss of her virginity—the context in which ‘deflower’ is normally used emphasizes the fact that it is something done to a woman by someone else, whereas in Macabea’s reflowering, she does it to herself. Reflowering is not a term used outside of botany, and its meaning in this situation is abstract: if it is indeed the opposite of ‘deflowering’ it implies Macabea has once again become a virgin, but that is impossible, and she never lost her ‘virginity’ in the first place. This points to a larger notion, especially in consideration with the declaration that Macabea “had never really flowered” (30) in the first place. This phrase references puberty more so than sex, yet it is impossible that Macabea never went through puberty however undeveloped she might be. The metaphor of flowering has greater implications in connection to what men and society assigns, monitors, and takes away from women: confidence, comfortability, and autonomy in their gender and

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