Near to the Wild Heart opens with a scene of the child Joana playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana's wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features. She is frequently compared to animals: over the course of the book Lispector compares her to a bird, a snake, a wildcat, a horse, and a dog. She commits transgressive acts—as a child she throws a book at an old man's head, for example, and as a married woman she leaves her husband, Otávio, and greets the news of his adultery—he has made another woman, his
The She-bear husband to promise to remarry only if the new bride was as beautiful as she was. Because he had only a daughter, soon after her death, he decided to remarry. After long inspection of many women, he realized that his daughter Preziosa was in fact as beautiful as her mother, and no other woman was. Preziosa took to her chambers in despair. An old woman gave her a chip of wood, which, when she put in her mouth, would change her into a bear. When her father summoned her to ask his councilors whether he could marry her, she used