The House of the Spirits: Magical Realism and Feminism

Posted on Sep 28, 2024 in Latin

Magic Realism

The term “magical realism” appeared in the third decade of the twentieth century. Magical realism is a literary movement whose main features are the tearing of reality for fantasy action in a realistic manner described in the narrative.

  • Magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives: one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as reality. It is also an innovative movement in literature as it integrates the physical and symbolic universe of the American Indian world: the old ideas of nature, history, myth, and magic.
  • The writer defies reality and breaks it into pieces to find out what is impenetrable and hidden in objects, existence, and human actions. A good practitioner of this genre, the narrator, tells a fact that seems quite normal. It disturbs us and seems unusual; that’s the illusion of “unreality.” In this type of fiction, reality is presented as something magical and therefore ceases to be real. The writer’s pattern implies a supernatural atmosphere without leaving the environment, and their tactic is to distort reality. There are no double meanings or psychological analyses of characters but well-defined contrasts. No actors are ever puzzled in front of the supernatural. Nor are there any feelings of fear or terror motivated by an unexpected event since the unusual becomes real and is no longer unknown.
  • Complex representation of the world, at the same level that supports the rational, the dream, and fantasy.
  • It poses as the only possibility to treat South American reality, very different from the survival of European magic and the marvelous and the telluric force of nature.
  • Features:
    • Incorporation of magic, the legendary, and the mythical.
    • Formal innovations with the use of new narrative techniques: interior monologue, complex structures, disorder, chronological, etc.
    • Novels with urban settings.
    • Miguel Angel Asturias (Lord President), the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (The Cathedral), and the Mexican Juan Rulfo (Pedro Paramo), Jorge Luis Borges

The House of the Spirits

Literary-Historical Context

  • This book was written by Isabel Allende during her exile (1982).
  • It is a family chronicle set in the whirlwind of political and economic changes that occurred in Latin America. The novel was well received by critics, who saw in it certain elements of magical realism.
  • This novel was made into a film by Danish director Bille August. “The House of the Spirits” is a real history book, where it teaches politics, changing social mores, and colonization.

Style and Work

  • Regarding the style, though Isabel Allende acknowledges having written the book in a year, we must recognize that the language used is cultured and elaborate, full of symbols and stylistic resources. Ultimately, a very refined style. Since it is a foreign writer, there are some terms in her language belonging to her language.

Point of View

  • The narrator’s point of view is dominated by an omniscient third-person narrator who lives all events, past, present, and future. It is a narrator who knows and knows how to analyze psychologically the inner feelings, experiences, and concerns of all the characters.
  • On the other hand, there is a first-person narrator who is always Esteban Trueba; this character narrates his experiences and does so in his own voice using the first person. Next to the first-person narrative, which Esteban uses, there is the monologue.
  • Space
  • The House of the Spirits is a novel where there are two opposing spaces: on the one hand, an open outer space, which is the countryside, specifically the Three Marys. And on the other, a closed space that corresponds to the house on the corner.
  • Outer space is a symbol of freedom, even barbaric disorder. In the countryside, people are free; they give vent to their passions. It is in the countryside where Esteban Trueba raped some young women, where Blanca lived an unbridled passion with a farmer, and where Clara felt really happy. The town house represents an enclosed space marked by social rules, order, topics, etc.
  • Time
  • The novel tells the story of four generations of women, starting with Nivea, Clara’s mother. The main narrator, Clara, writes and narrates the story in the book of life. Blanca has something more like a secondary character, and Alba, Esteban Trueba’s granddaughter, represents the new generation of liberated and intellectual women. The time in The House of the Spirits is the route from barbarism and slavery to a modernized society where women have an important role and where conservative politics will usher in a liberal and socialist era. At no time is there any reference or concrete chronological order, but we have a linear and open time in which some ninety or a hundred years could pass.

Structure of Report

  • This work, like most consistent written works, consists of three highlighted parts: an introduction, a middle, and an end:
  • We define this novel as an introduction to the part that runs from the first chapter until the death of Rosa and Esteban’s consequent march to the Three Marys.
  • The knot begins in the second chapter with his march to the Three Marys and continues until the prostitute, Transit Soto, informs Esteban that she managed to rescue his granddaughter. At this point, everything that has happened during the time between Esteban Trueba’s separation from his granddaughter Alba is explained.
  • Finally, in the outcome, Alba takes note in the “life record books” and begins to sort and read, completing the work in the same way it began.

Characters

  • The main characters that can be found in the book are: Esteban Trueba, Rosa del Valle, Clara, Alba, and her lover, Pedro Tercero Garcia.
  • Esteban Trueba is the undisputed star of all time. He describes himself as unloving, unsociable, but loyal and very stubborn. He is exceedingly fierce and furious, and then he realizes that he has done wrong and repents, but his life was the same.
  • Rosa del Valle, Esteban’s love. They said she was made from a material different from the human race; she is even feared for her extreme beauty. Her death from her father’s attempted murder is the main event as a result of which the whole story runs.
  • Clara is Rosa’s sister and Esteban’s future wife as a result of trust with the Del Valle family. She has gifts to divine the future and communicate with spirits and is not as beautiful as her sister, Rosa.
  • Blanca is Esteban’s daughter. She falls in love with Pedro Tercero, and this causes many disagreements with her father and constant tension. From a young age, she spends much of her life in the Three Marys, where she meets Pedro.
  • Pedro Tercero Garcia is Blanca’s lover, a forbidden love that reaches the point of having a daughter, Alba. Pedro is later a minister of the Liberal Party.

The Figure of Feminism Through Magical Realism in The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

  • The House of the Spirits was the first novel by Isabel Allende, published in 1982. It was inspired after her exile because of the coup in Chile that overthrew her uncle, President Salvador Allende, in 1973.
  • Her writing method is characterized by belonging to the literary movement of the Post-Boom. These writers are distinguished by having a series of technical innovations in the narrative, such as magic realism and magical realism.
  • The Latin American Boom refers to American literature published during the third quarter of the twentieth century in Europe, where the authors of the South American continent were disseminated.
  • In The House of the Spirits, we will analyze feminism through the magic realism that characterizes Latin American culture under the dictatorship in the 60s and 70s, which we will see in the characters in the novel.
  • Under this approach is the mixture of feminism with magical realism, where each main character manages to escape from patriarchal oppression uniquely and magically.
  • Clara, unable to divorce Esteban, escapes into her spiritual world. Blanca succeeds as well, being with the man she loves no matter that he was Esteban’s enemy, and Alba also escapes, becoming an idealist, completely contrary to Esteban’s politics. Each one symbolizes a way of seeing the fight for equality.
  • Our goal is to try and figure out the feminist analysis through magical realism that we find in the novel The House of the Spirits. We can justify that feminism through magical realism in this novel is remarkable because the protagonists are three generations of strong women who managed to defend their kind by means of magic, each one uniquely.
  • The House of the Spirits shows three generations of feminist women that stand out through magical realism and manage to beat machismo through the spiritual. It is interesting to see how Allende succeeds in creating these characters who overcome sexism in their own home, using that space for their needs no matter what Esteban thinks about it.
  • All women manage to escape Trueba’s domain, ignoring, avoiding, using his house for their personal purposes, and changing the house he built to serve according to their needs.
  • The characters are well-made women independent of man, society, and the patriarchal oppressor represented by Esteban Trueba. This is the independence that Clara had with her husband; she never seemed to need his love or anything that he could offer, as she rode her own world. We can also interpret how Trueba women use the space of the house as a personal and spiritual one where we see the magic involved.
  • The message Allende is sending is a utopia for society, one where there is no discrimination based on gender and women and men are viewed equally. This is a message that this novel has; besides being feminist, it is also seeking equality and justice for her country.
  • The magical side of the novel. Magical realism is a way of writing that reacts with the floor to the dictatorial regimes of the time in Latin America. Magic realism is defined as a stylistic concern and interest in showing the unreal or strange as everyday and common. The narrative voice of Alba refers to the magical times when her grandmother, Clara, lived. Clara is the character who serves as the best example of feminist magical realism in The House of the Spirits, as she escaped from the machismo of her husband, Esteban Trueba, through spiritualism, through which she saw spirits, spoke to them, and predicted the future of the characters.
  • Esteban Trueba is a character that represents the oppressive patriarchy that wants to have Clara’s love at all costs. Clara herself admits that she goes into another world from which he is excluded since it is only a world of spiritualism and women that he will never understand.
  • Another example of the magic contained in this novel is seen in Clara’s friends, who share the gift of clairvoyance and spiritualism.
  • As we see, The House of the Spirits contains characters, all women, with unusual gifts; these are the elements that make this novel feminist magical realism because Allende decided to give this magic only to women and not to men.
  • Then we will see a demonstration of the magic that Clara possessed as a woman and how her granddaughter Alba helps to keep fighting. We find that although Alba is from more realistic times, there is no doubt that the magic never goes away. At the end of the novel, when Alba is in jail and wants to die, she invokes Clara, who had already died, and she helps her survive.
  • It is clear that in this story, women are the heroines, and among themselves, they manage to support and move forward without having to rely on a man.” At no time did we see a man playing the role of hero or with magical gifts; this is why this novel is considered feminist.
  • As we saw, this novel is valued for the way in which Allende combined magical realism with the feminism of the three generations of Trueba women, showing different and unique ways to overcome the oppressive and patriarchal society in Chile at that time.
  • It is the utopia that Allende tried to show through the characters in a society where there is equality between male and female genders. It is wonderful how we view feminism from another point of view, such as through magical realism.
  • We have seen and analyzed through the traditional approach of the characters that let us see feminism and magic. Since this novel, we see what the Post-Boom brings to literature, showing that women fought through magical realism in the political problems that occurred in Chile.
  • Feminism has been a struggle for equality, which is almost always shown in strikes and external struggles. Instead, this novel showed feminism from a different approach; it is intimate; the women in this novel fought individually and used that special magic that Allende gave them. We understand that The House of the Spirits is well-achieved as the message that the writer wanted to convey, and her aim in writing this novel was achieved.
  • Topic: Abuse of power that a person can exercise to achieve their objectives at all costs, regardless of harming others.
  • Problems:
  • How can the despotism that a person has lead to the disintegration and loss of identity of the members of their family?
  • How can economic, ideological, or religious discrimination lead to frustration in people’s lives?

Topics

Political Topic

  • It can be seen when there is a constant struggle between ideologies, causing popular chaos, in this case, between the Conservative Party and the Communist Party (Marxist).
  • “Senator Trueba, fighting against his political enemies, each day moving more in the conquest of power… his obsession was to destroy what he called the Marxist cancer that was leaking into the people” (p. 227).
  • “They’re idiots; they don’t realize that the right is arming” (p. 311).

Psychological Topic

  • The thirst for vengeance that a person experiences when being marred by another can lead to harmful acts to cause the same suffering that the latter inflicted.
  • “I went to get my gun and left. The child told me we had to go on horseback because Pedro Tercero Garcia was hiding in the Lebus sawmill…” (p. 182).
  • “The ax sparkled in the air and fell on Pedro Tercero Garcia; blood ran, jumping in my face.”
  • The uncertainty of man for wanting to know what their future holds or what lies ahead.
  • “…The soothsayers, realizing that their success could change the fate of the customers who followed their words exactly, were terrified and decided that this was the office of cheaters” (p. 16).

Religious Topic

  • It appreciates the misconception of religion that the priests had in previous centuries, only burdening and blaming people for their various mistakes and not giving them support and understanding to claim their behavior and change.
  • “The priest had a very long incriminating finger to point to the sinners in public and a language trained to stir up feelings” (p. 6).

Social Topic

  • Man often seems to live in circumstances that are not true, just to protect themselves from what others say.
  • “She realized that between her father and the French count, there was a commercial arrangement in which she had nothing to say. A change of surname for her grandson” (p. 183).
  • “I married to have legitimate children bearing my name, not bearing the bastards of the mother” (p. 170).

General Review of the Work

  • In our opinion, the novel The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende is a work that has the management of a saga of different characters, both subjective and real, that immerse us and take us to a reality where every detail is important and part of it.
  • The presence of social injustice and the search for identity. And therefore, it gives us the great lesson of not falling into situations of enmity and despotism to the point of violence, which is not the solution to our problems, since there is dialogue from which an agreement or reconciliation can arise.