to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle. With her white linen dress, her winter gloves, her sweet toothless smile, and the mischievous gleam in her hazel eyes, she looked exactly as she had when Alba was a child. Clara also brought the saving idea of writing in her mind, without paper or pencil, to keep her thoughts occupied and to escape the doghouse and live. She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life, and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of sorrow, ignoring, despite all evidence, that only blocks away from their happy world there were others, these others who live or die on the dark side.

Here, Allende connects magic with creativity. Rather than having the capacity to alter historical and personal events, magic instead is the means through which we can survive them. Even at her most alone, in solitary confinement and close to death, Alba is connected with the spirits, who in turn connect her with her own spirit, the magical creativity within her. In this scene, the dead care for the living, so that the living may in turn care for the yet-to-be-born. Moreover, Clara suggests that Alba write her story to connect with others who do not realize their connection to the suffering of those "on the dark side," and in spite of being able to live in denial about these connections, because of the suffering of others are themselves "adrift on a sea of sorrow" without knowing it. As Z. Nelly Martinez notes, "Allende suggests that it is only by aligning themselves with 'spirit,' 'magic,' or 'Eros,' that human beings may recover their wholeness and thereby recover the wholeness which is, in fact, the world—an interrelatedness that celebrates cooperation rather than competition, and deliverance rather than repression." Allende stresses that aligning oneself with magic is a choice; because of their interconnectedness, the female characters enable one another in making this choice. As Nora Glickman writes, "Nívea's stories are imprinted in Clara's journals. Blanca's letters mold Alba's character, the latter's life testimony reaches the reader in episodic segments that Alba announces, elaborates, orders and revises to offer that reader the most sensible way to rescue the past." The sharing of writing and stories among the various generations of females symbolizes their shared spirit, which enables them, as Clara enables her granddaughter, to endure.

By contrast, throughout the story, Esteban Trueba has disavowed or destroyed his connections with others. His need to possess Clara only further distances her, and his refusal to acknowledge his illegitimate offspring leads to the rage of Esteban García, which nearly destroys the person he loves most. Esteban fails to see the consequences of his support for the destruction of the popularly-elected regime, his destruction of the tenant village at Tres Marías, and his unwillingness to accept Pedro Tercero. As Richard McCallister writes, "His rape of Pancha García is revenged by Esteban García's rape of Alba, his early support for the overthrow of democracy is revisited in his political impotence under the military regime. Indeed, his acts of usurpation in the name of establishing a patriarchal lineage work precisely to prevent it from happening," which is shown most clearly in Esteban's initial support for the coup which leads to the death of his son Jaime. It is only when Esteban sees the impact his actions have had on others that he can find an inner peace which has always eluded him, and as Martinez writes, "to symbolize [Esteban's] redemptive awareness, Allende makes him assist in the telling of the story, done by the narrator, Alba, who most adequately fulfills the role of artist in the novel." Thus, the interconnected narratives of Alba and Esteban are interspersed throughout the novel such that the structure reflects the overlapping themes of interconnectedness. Moreover, Esteban's redemption is symbolized by his use of his own magical creativity, which occurs not only through his recognition of the harm he has done to others but by his alignment with Clara's gentle spirit, an alignment which is symbolized by his gradual shrinking to Clara's height.

As Martinez writes, Allende's novel ends with Alba's recognition that "the past, existing only as memory and hence open to transformation, loses its grip over the present as well as its power to effectively predetermine the future." In vowing to love her unborn daughter as she has been loved, even though that daughter may be the result of a rape, Alba vows to transform the future. As Helsper notes, Allende "proposes the family as a model for her divided country: members of this family have oppressed, wounded, and tortured each other, but they are the same ones who must now heal one another. The family she posits is all of Chile." In connecting the political, personal, and cosmic realms of her narrative, Allende offers Alba's spirit as a reflection of the spirit of all her fellow citizens and as a witness to us as readers of our own interconnectedness.

Source: Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, in an essay for Novels for Students , Gale, 1999.

The temporal setting of the action in The House of the Spirits spans fifty years—from the early twenties to about 1974. Historically, and fictionally, within the novel, these were the years in which the women's movement began to gather strength, and then gain progress. While it is apparent that Allende has traced the development of women's struggle for freedom in her novel, some critics have suggested that Nivea, Clara, Blanca, and Alba are allegorical characters which epitomize women at various phases of Chilean social and political history.

A thorough and complex understanding of The House of the Spirits demands spatial interpretation, and thus a spatial examination of the treatment of women in the novel is imperative as well. There are treasures hidden in the spaces and rooms of Allende's novel, where the idea that bodies and structures are both houses, and that they are inseparable and essential, is fundamental. Careful examination reveals that, besides the bloody political battle between the military and the liberals, there is another war in the work. The battle of the sexes is cleverly manifested in the continuous struggle for space in the house; the main house in The House of Spirits is a divided one. Allende's magnificent representation of the fight for dominance between men and women, the discordant coexistence of the male and female, is a prime example of the author's perception and presentation of a universal theme.

Allende utilized spatial symbolism to emphasize and parallel the actions of female characters as they sought to overcome the tyranny of patriarchy. In her novel, structures, and the spaces they contain, serve as metaphors for or symbols of social and political barriers. Rather than allowing these metaphorical or symbolic obstacles to determine their lives, the women of the Trueba family overcame them. Clara, Blanca, and Alba managed to defeat Esteban Trueba, who, with traditional notions of honor, of a woman's "place," and of sexuality, attempted to possess and confine these women. The Trueba women confronted Esteban in his own space, usurped his control of that area, expanded their lives into alternative spaces, or left Trueba's property altogether. Trueba and "his" women were contenders struggling to dominate the space they should have shared; by the end of the novel, Trueba found that he had lost the battle and the war.

Trueba's attitude towards women, "possessing" them, and keeping them within his own structures became apparent spatially in the beginning of the novel. After he learned of Rosa the Beautiful's death, he regretted not having married her sooner and he thought that, if he had known that she was to die, he would have "built her a palace studded with treasures from the ocean floor," "kidnapped her and locked her up," and only he "would have had the key." According to Trueba, his betrothed would have never been "stolen" from him by "death" if he had kept her to himself. Like many traditional fathers and husbands, Trueba regarded his women jealously and attempted to confine them as treasure in a chest to maintain their loyalty. So intense was Trueba's determination to keep his women with him that he prepared a tomb with a place for not only himself, but for his wife and his long-dead Rosa. No one, or thing, was going to "steal" his women from him again.

No structure, however, could keep Clara isolated and protected from the outside world. Clara had inherited her mother Nivea' s determination to have her own way; she was a strong, willful woman. While Nivea enthusiastically promoted feminist causes, Clara quietly continued her own fight for freedom within her own home, the home that Trueba had built for her. Clara did not have to physically and permanently leave the structure of the house to escape the domination of her husband. She found freedom and battled Trueba with various spatial manuevers. She existed, spiritually, in another space or dimension, and brought the outside world inside the space of the house to her. She manipulated the space within the house as she pleased and, when all other techniques failed, she locked herself up, in her own secluded space, out of Trueba's reach.

Clara had developed the habit of seeking alternative mental spaces in which to dwell as a child in her father's home. She would escape her immediate reality as she read a book, or imagined herself in far-away places. Her "magic" and her attempts to move articles about with the power of her mind distanced her from the "real" world. Once she was married, Clara maintained her secret, interior universe. As she prepared to give birth to her first child, she announced: "I think I'm going to levitate." Clara "meant that she wanted to rise to a level that would allow her to leave behind the discomfort and heaviness of pregnancy and the deep fatigue that had begun to seep into her bones. She entered one of her long periods of silence." Clara was pregnant with more than a physical child, she was pregnant with love, creativity, and what would later be born as a text. Whether Clara's silence is interpreted as a retreat, a refuge or as a clever victory over the mundane, it is clear that she entered an alternative space as she "levitated" in silence.

Although, at the moment when Clara was preparing to give birth Trueba understood that this silence was a "last refuge," he later became distressed. He "wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him even in those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure." The patriarch "realized that Clara did not belong to him and that if she continued living in a world of apparitions...she probably never would." Trueba could build a house to contain wife, and he could enter the space within her body, but he would never be allowed to enter the home she had built for herself inside her own head. Clara had defeated male domination.

Clara's magic and the happiness she found as she practiced it was attractive to artists, poets, and spiritualists. The "big house on the corner" became a gathering place for these marginal people as Clara invited them into the space of her home. Clara also opened her home to the unfortunates who needed food and shelter. By encouraging these people to enter the exterior world that represented her interior self, Clara let them into the space that was forbidden to Trueba. Not surprisingly, Trueba objected to the carnivalization of his home and the daily parade that marched through it. He insisted that the "big house on the corner" was not a thoroughfare and coldly ordered that the celebration of the everyday be stopped. Clara and her children, especially Nicolás, continued to live as they pleased, and to fill the space as they desired, while Trueba was out of town. Upon his return, the atmosphere of the house changed, and the party was over—temporarily. Trueba continually struggled to dominate the space of the house in the city, and his family fought back with determined consistency.

As she found herself trapped in a particular space and time, and could not divorce Trueba, Clara had to manipulate her immediate area. She attempted to move objects with the power of her mind, and she redefined the limits of the structure Trueba had built for her in the "big house on the corner."

In response to Clara's imagination and the requirements of the moment, the noble, seignorial architecture began sprouting all sorts of extra little rooms, staircases, turrets, and terraces. Each time a new guest arrived, the bricklayers would arrive and build another addition to the house. The big house on the corner soon came to resemble a labyrinth.

The use of the word labyrinth is telling, for it suggests a space that, rather than possessing a masculine, linear order, is as complex as the intuition of a woman. Trueba's perfect, logical space was transformed by a woman. Instead of allowing his space to enclose her, she opened it and recreated it to suit her.

The struggle for space came to a climax while Clara was still alive and surrounded by her eccentric friends and Trueba campaigned for the office of Senator of the Republic. Clara needed space for her continuous spiritual celebrations, and Trueba needed space for the operations of his political party.

The house filled with political propaganda and with the members of his party, who practically took it by storm, blending in with the hallway ghosts, the Rosi-crucians, and the three Mora sisters. Clara's retinue was gradually pushed into the back rooms of the house…

The house became a house divided as "an invisible border arose between the parts of the house occupied by Esteban Trueba and those occupied by his wife." As the house has traditionally represented the unification of its occupants, the "invisible" spatial division within the house is a symbol, not only of the Trueba's spliced relationship, but of the separation of the sexes.

Trueba believed that the spirituality that captivated his wife and her friends was for women only. Before Nicolás departed to India, he told him "I hope you return a man, because I'm fed up with all your eccentricities." He considered his other son, Jaime, to be eccentric as well, because he cared for the underprivileged and didn't want to join his father in business. Jaime, therefore, was not a "well-adjusted man." Other readers have noticed that with some special exceptions, such as Jaime, Pedro Tercero García, and the prostitute Tránsito Soto, the men in the novel operate with logical thinking while the women depend on their spiritual and emotional strength to survive. This presentation of men and women is based on beliefs which are prevalent in Latin America. The author of The House of the Spirits herself has stated that "at times science is more efficient than magic." As the "big house on the corner" in Allende's novel is a symbol for the family, the house naturally reflects the fact that the family, and the world, exists only because of the differences between two groups: women and men. It is not surprising that Allende chose to represent the schism spatially; as she spoke of her childhood, she noted that men and women were "segregated," and this implies a spatial understanding of the problem.

In the arena of the house in the city, Clara was victorious as she defended her independence. While the "façade of the house underwent no alterations" the most intimate interior of the house belonged to, was dominated by, and represented Clara. Even "the rear garden," once a perfect, strict emulation of "a French garden" became hers, "a tangled jungle in which every type of plant and flower had proliferated and where Clara's birds kept up a steady din, along with many generations of cats and dogs." The house belonged to Clara.

By manipulating the space of the house, it began to represent Clara, instead of Trueba. Gone was the house that Trueba had desired, planned, and built. His house was not a reflection of himself, as he had wanted, but of Clara, the family, and his relationship to them. One might venture as far to say that the house was female. With spatial symbols, Allende communicates the message that, although the patriarchy may seem to be in control, women and traditionally feminine spirits prevail behind the façade.

After Trueba slapped her and knocked her teeth out as she tried to defend her daughter, Clara's response to his physical violence was twofold. First, she refused to speak him and then, she locked herself in her room. Clara's denial of access to the space of her room, of her body—the spaces which Trueba had violated—was a powerful weapon. Even more potent was her refusal to allow Trueba to enter her mental space; she would never verbally communicate with him again. Clara had once again defeated Trueba with his own space; he was the one who had built and decorated her room. While some have mistaken both of these manuevers for passivity, spatial analysis demonstrates that Clara's actions were far from passive, and thus provides evidence to support Agosín's assertions regarding feminine silence in the novel. Clara had refused the masculine body access to her feminine world, and she swore not to enter masculine verbal space. Trueba was more than frustrated, defeated; he could not touch Clara's soul, let alone control it.

Blanca, Trueba's only daughter, continued the tradition of independence begun by her grandmother. Although she did not rally for women's suffrage, or practice magic like her mother to assert her freedom, Blanca defied her father. Trueba would have never sanctioned the love that Blanca had for the peasant leader Pedro Tercero García. The house that divided Blanca and Pedro Tercero García was the elaborate symbol of elite wealth and social grace; her home at The Three Marias sharply contrasted with the little hut in which her peasant lover lived. It would have been absurd for Pedro to cross into Trueba's space, to visit the big house, and it would have been scandalous for Blanca to debase herself by setting foot in the peasant's quarters. Nevertheless, Blanca asserted her freedom with her actions and by symbolically passing through space.

Instead of opening her window and waiting for her lover to climb over a wall and into her father's space, Blanca crossed the barriers of her father's home herself. She waited until her father was asleep, until the landscape was hidden in the darkness, to lock her bedroom door and leave her father's house and domination. She would slip out the window, climb down a trellis covered with flowers, and run in the darkness. She did not go to the peasant quarters to meet her lover—that space, technically, belonged to her father. Instead, she and Pedro Tercero García met far from the structures, the houses and the huts, which symbolized the tyranny imposed over both of them, and found each other by the banks of the stream, which for them, represented the flow of life, freedom, and passion.

Trueba's characteristic reaction to Blanca's defiance was to violently regain his powerful authority over her. He beat her and forced her to marry the Count. When Blanca arrived at the big house the morning after her wedding to visit her mother, Trueba ordered her to return quickly to her husband. By leaving the hotel to go to her mother's house and space, Blanca was symbolically negating her marriage. Trueba sent Blanca away, out of his space. He could not tolerate the fact that his daughter had willfully negated his position by leaving his house in order to meet Pedro Tercero García. Trueba knew that, by leaving the protective space of his house, Blanca had escaped his masculine domination, and that she aspired to sexual freedom by inviting a man of her own choice to penetrate her physical space. While Blanca did obey her father and marry the Count, she did manage to keep a sacred space within her womb for the product of her union with Pedro: Alba. Later in the novel, Blanca subverted her father's dominion with the brazenly defiant act of bringing Pedro into Trueba's home.

While Clara didn't care to concern herself with the daily up-keep of the house, Blanca, and later, Alba, became devoted to its maintenance. They would feed the members of the household, keep the birds singing, the plants green, and do the gardening. During Trueba's absence, these women effectively ran the household. Bachelard discussed the idea that, while men build the external house, its is the women who, immersed in the day-to-day project of maintenance, make the house livable, or better—make it a home. "In the intimate harmony of walls and furniture, it may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside." In fact, as time passed, the women of the "big house on the corner" were responsible for the renovation and rebirth of the house. At the end of the novel it is Alba who convinces her father to renew the house and resurrect the garden, the symbol of freedom. Allende's message seems to be that with love and patience, women maintain their nations as well as their homes.

Alba's youth coincided with the late sixties and the early seventies, a time of sexual revolution. Despite the ideas of the youths, those of the older, empowered generations did not look favorably upon these developments. Trueba would never have consented to Alba having a pre-marital sexual relationship with anyone. He wouldn't have tolerated mere courtship if her suitor were someone like Miguel, a radical leftist. Like her mother, however, Alba did not let her grandfather's attitude stop her from loving the man of her choice.

Alba did not run away from her home to live as she desired. Although at first she and Miguel would meet in his apartment, she found that the most comfortable solution was to bring Miguel into Trueba's home, where "in the labyrinth of the rear rooms, where no one ever went, they could make love undisturbed." The use of the word "labyrinth" reminds the reader that the house was still Clara's house, even though, after her death, it deteriorated for lack of her laughter. "One by one the lovers tried out all the abandoned rooms, and finally chose an improvised nest in the depths of the basement." Alba would lead Miguel in through the garden (the symbol of freedom) into the basement. It is spatially significant that the lovers went to the basement because their love, like the basement was "underground"—a secret.

The basement is, as the reader will remember, also a metaphor for the womb [Campos, Rene, "La casa de los espíritus : mirada, espacio, discurso de la otra historia." Los libros tienen sus propios espíritus, 1986.] Alba was leading Miguel to the most intimate of spaces, the space where life, (and text, in the cases of Clara and Alba,) is created. Their entrance into the basement was symbolic of sexual intercourse as well as of a more profound act of love. Alba and Miguel rearranged the space Trueba had created, as had her grandmother Clara, although they transformed the basement into a love nest. Alba and Miguel utilized the long-forgotten artifacts they found to turn their underground "nest" into an "nuptial chamber." Although they occupied the same space that Alba's grandparents had, Alba and Miguel shared a more fruitful love, and they did so by transforming the vestiges of an old world into a new "home."

Of all the actions of the women who had gone before her, Alba's spatial statement was by far the most assertive. Instead of preserving her intimate space with silence and magic, as Clara had, or leaving her "father's" home as Blanca had, Alba lived as she pleased in the space where she had grown up. This spatial relationship represents a confrontation with the patriarchy. Alba and Miguel's complicity as they recreated the basement, the history of the Truebas, to suit themselves, suggests that a new generation, women and men alike, would overcome that patriarchy.

The patriarchy, however, manipulated more than the freedom of the Trueba women. Just as Trueba attempted to control "his" women within the structures he had built for them, those with power in the country of which Allende wrote dominated the lives of workers, farmers, and every underprivileged citizen within the political structure. As Alba, and all the women of The House of the Spirits battled for their freedom as women, they struggled for political justice. The struggle for independence was not just a feminine one; it was a fight for the rights of all classes, creeds, and sexes. Clara had always been interested in the welfare of the poor. Blanca not only loved a leftist peasant, she hid this wanted man in her father's home after the Coup. Alba hid weapons for the resistance forces and her radical, guerrilla lover in her grandfather's home. She took food from the cupboards and sold furniture, including the portrait of her grandmother Clara, to feed the poor who were starving as a result of the Military's policies. Alba directly defied the government, and her grandfather, the symbol of conservatism, as she utilized Trueba's space and that which it contained. In The House of the Spirits, feminism and leftist liberalism were united in the struggle to preserve the Chilean home; feminine auras and the forces of freedom alike dwelt in the "House of the Spirits."

Source: Ronie-Richele Garcia-Johnson, "The Struggle for Space: Feminism and Freedom in The House of the Spirits," in Revista Hispanica Moderna, Vol. XLVII, No. 1, June, 1994, pp. 184-193.

The story began urgently, if unpretentiously, after a long-distance telephone call from Santiago de Chile to Caracas. Isabel Allende's grandfather, in his ninety-ninth year, was about to die. More precisely, he'd decided his time had come. Despite opposing ideologies, their family relationship had been close; and now, although from the remote region he was about to enter she couldn't expect a reply, she sat down to write him a long letter. Her purpose was to keep him living, in conformity with his own idea of immortality. "My grandfather theorized that death didn't really exist. Oblivion is what exists, and if one can remember those who die—remember them well—they'll always be with him and in some way will live on, at least in spirit." ("Entrevista con Isabel Allende," with Michael Moody, Hispania 69, March, 1986.)

"Living on" was a persistent tradition in Isabel Allende's family on her mother's side, and her late grandmother—the main model for Clara del Valle, "Clara la clarividente," in The House of the Spirits—had been practicing since premature death what Grandfather had always preached in life, with her periodic messages and visitations. The letter to Grandfather got longer, and longer. A year later (1982) it had grown to five-hundred pages. It was a diary in retrospect, a family chronicle, an autobiography, a political testimony, a group portrait and contemporary history, a series of experiments with magic. In other words, a novel. Allende was a journalist in search of a complementary medium. Aesthetically, she would now participate in the basic ritual of Latin American literature: a celebration of reality. Ethically, she wanted to bear witness to social injustice, political violence, and repression—having been motivated by the betrayal and murder by right-wing conspirators of an uncle on her father's side, President Salvador Allende.

In what circumstances was the novel under consideration written? Allende stressed the importance of the "moment of history the writer is born into," especially in Latin America, a world of great "struggles and defeats, brutality and magic." Increasingly aware of the New World's five-hundred-year tradition of violence, she matured intellectually with her uncle's socialist movement and became a novelist at her reactionary grandfather's death. Thus, her book is the celebration of a momentous social struggle in which those two figures were principals. Only fictitious names are used in the story, for places as well as for people, but the implications are obvious: this was to be a composite testimony of many voices (like One Hundred Years of Solitude, with which superficial comparisons have often been made), written with a recent exile's sense of urgency, and a family member's intimacy. The political dispersion of the family she tells about is microcosmic, for contemporary Chilean history is also one of dispersion, beginning the day after Salvador Allende's election in 1970 with a complex opposition program that included technical and financial assistance from our Central Intelligence Agency and State Department and accelerating after September 11, 1973, when military forces led by General Pinochet carried out their coup d'état.

Soon after Allende's election, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared at a National Security Council meeting, "I don't see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." In The House of the Spirits President Allende's niece has her principal male character say of the impoverished tenant farmers at Tres Marías, his country estate, "They're like children, they can't handle responsibility." A closer and more impetuous father-figure than the always distant Kissinger, Esteban Trueba was also unwilling to stand by and watch. In his paternalized utopia no one would go hungry, everyone would do his assigned work, and all would learn reading and writing and simple arithmetic—that is, enough to follow simple instructions and read signs, to write brief messages, and to count, y nada más, "for fear they would fill their minds with ideas unsuited to their station and condition." When, near the beginning of the century, Esteban took over the administration of Tres Marías—it had been in the family for generations— it was "a lawless heap of rocks, a no-man's-land." He quickly put things in order and regimented his tenant farmers; within a year the "heap of rocks" was a lucrative agricultural enterprise.

But behind this organizational rigor was an unbridled temperament, and deep sentimental frustrations. His fiancée, Rosa del Valle of memorable beauty, dies in the first chapter, which is narrated—like several other sections of the story—in first person singular by Esteban Trueba himself. Rosa's death is caused by brandy laced with rat poison from a decanter sent as an anonymous "gift" to her father, a prominent member of the Liberal Party. The extraordinary Rosa had bright green hair and the aura of "a distracted angel." Ensconced in the white satin of her coffin, she impressed her grieving fiancé as having been "subtly transformed into the mermaid she had always been in secret." Her autopsy and preparation for viewing are secretly witnessed by her little sister Clara in a semi-traumatic state, immediately after which Clara enters a nine-year period of unbroken silence. Her first words will be to announce, in one of the many psychic predictions over her lifetime, that she'll soon be married.

In chapter 2 we are told that not only did Clara, la clarividente, foresee her marriage but also the identity of her husband-to-be: Rosa's fiancé, whom she hadn't seen since her sister's funeral and who was fifteen years her senior. Two months later, to be sure, Esteban visits the del Valle residence and immediately formalizes their engagement.

The family was to grow in its strange diversity through three generations, but Clara and Esteban would always constitute its vital, antithetical nucleus. The latter embodies privileged power; the former, humanitarian resistance. History, for Trueba, was paternity and—whenever the situation called for it—aggression. One of his first rituals in organizing Tres Marías as a community was to start populating it, ranging through the wheatfields on horseback in pursuit of the peasant girls, raping and impregnating more than a few. History was procreation, and the father's subsequent attempts to deal with the results of procreation. The most troublesome outcome of his sexual escapades in the environs of Tres Marías was Esteban García, his natural grandson born of an offspring of Pancha García, his first wheatfield victim. After a childhood of deprivation and growing resentment, the grandson has nothing but the grandfather's first name for an inheritance. Since childhood he had wanted to become a policeman. And he became one.

During the ugly reprisals taken by the military government in the aftermath of the President's death (in a series of obvious allusions to the Pinochet regime's repressions starting in September, 1973), García reappears, having risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the political police. It is he who presides over the interrogation, confinement, and prolonged torture of his privileged cousin Alba, a university student who has been active in the socialist underground and Esteban Trueba's only recognized grandchild. Alba undergoes her torture partly in trauma, partly in an unconscious state. In the process she's raped an undisclosed number of times, and in the Epilogue we're told that one of the culprits is Colonel García. Third in a lineage of strong-willed women, Alba is the human instrument through which Esteban Trueba is made to pay psychologically for a lifetime of large-and small-scale transgressions. That is, instead of retaliating in a direct, physical way against the aged patriarch, Trueba's bastard grandson chooses to punish him through his "legitimate" counterpart: revenge against the privileged by the underprivileged, against the upper-class child of affluence by the peasant-child of want.

The principal antecedent to this reprisal comes in chapter 6. Trueba is then informed by Jean de Satigny, his daughter Blanca's effete and dandified suitor, that Blanca is having nighttime trysts. The secret lover, it turns out, is her childhood playmate at Tres Marías, Pedro Tercero García, who has grown up with revolutionary ideas and composes revolutionary songs for the guitar (including one based on a fable told to him years before by the first Pedro García: once there was a chicken coop invaded nightly by a fox who stole eggs and ate baby chicks; eventually the hens organized, and one night they surrounded the fox and pecked him half to death). About three weeks later Esteban García—then a boy of twelve—presents himself and offers to lead his grandfather to Pedro Tercero's hiding place in the woods. Agreeing to pay a reward, Trueba sets out with a pistol. Surprised in bed, the intended victim is still able to leap out, to dodge the only shot Trueba gets to fire and, a second later, to disarm his assailant by hurling a piece of firewood at him. Whereupon Trueba seizes an ax and swings—and Pedro Tercero, in a reflex-attempt at self-defense, loses three fingers from his right hand. Shock and loss of blood notwithstanding, he rushes from the cabin and escapes in the dark. Adding literal insult to literal injury, Trueba then refuses to pay the boy his promised reward, slaps him, and snarls, "There's no reward for [double-crossers]!"

No reward then. But ultimately Esteban García was to obtain one of sorts. Years later, at the very moment Senator Trueba of the Conservative Party was celebrating with champagne the Socialist president's overthrow, "his son Jaime's testicles were being burned with an imported cigarette." After refusing to accept his captors' offer of freedom in return for saying on television that the late president in a drunken state had committed suicide, Jaime is beaten a second time, left with hands and feed bound with barbed wire for two days and nights, then shot together with several other prisoners in a vacant lot. In the interests of good government and domestic tranquillity, the lot and the cadavers are dynamited immediately after the execution. Two weeks later the Senator is told the circumstances of his son's death, but he refuses to believe the eyewitness account. Only when Jaime appears months later as a ghost, "covered with dried blood and rags, dragging streamers of barbed wire across the waxed parquet floors," does he realize that he had heard the truth. It is in this penultimate chapter (13, "The Terror") that he concludes he had been wrong and that, after all, "the best way to overthrow Marxism" had not been found.

Systematic oblivion (it never happened; there's no proof), censorship, disinformation (the President, it has been reported, committed suicide in a drunken state), and the infinite ways of "disappearing" people (such as dynamiting political prisoners' corpses) are some of the methods by which authoritarian regimes maintain themselves in power. The Brazilian critic Antonio Callado remarked in 1974 that contemporary Latin America was "full of new ruins" (e.g., democracy in Uruguay and Chile, the Revolution in Mexico), that Latin Americans have displayed a peculiar resistance to "becoming historical," because they're "always trying to start again" amidst a detritus of infringed constitutions and derelict or disabled governments. ("Censorship and Other Problems of Latin American Writers," Working Paper No. 14, Center of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1974, 18-19.) The attempted starting-again, we could add, is more often ultraconservative or reactionary than revolutionary, and more motivated by frustration than by hope.

But against this antihistorical resistance, of which the cantankerous Esteban Trueba is a representative figure, another, more imaginative, more perceptive resistance arrays itself. In The House of the Spirits Clara, Blanca, and Alba are its persistent mainstays over three generations. Light is freedom and hope, and the luminous names of the three women are clearly symbolic. The dramatic nucleus of the book is the struggle between Trueba and the forces he generates, on the one hand, and the female members of his family, on the other. He is the blind force of history, its collective unconscious, its somatotonic (i.e., aggressive, vigorous, physical) manifestation. They embody historical awareness and intuitive understanding. Trueba is a semicomic version of the "world historical personalities" conceived of by Hegel; never happy, "they attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nothing but their master passion." (Hegel, The Philosophy of Hegel, 1956.) But unlike the three illustrious examples offered by Hegel—Alexander the Great died young, Julius Caesar was murdered, Napoleon Bonaparte ended up in humbling exile—Esteban Trueba lives through the problems and outrages he helps create. Possessed by a terrible temperament, violent and arbitrary in his treatment of peasant girls, his share-cropping tenants, his wife and daughter, and his political enemies, and subject to furniture-smashing tantrums, he is not permitted to recognize—or forced to acknowledge—the consequences of his acts until he's close to death. His author, it seems, decided to put off his death until he could be made to witness the full historical effect of his own retrogressive ideas and actions, and of his collaboration and conspiracy with like-minded people. Until that time of punitive recognition he is subjected to recurrent experiences of loneliness and frustration. His estrangement from his family (although he ends his isolation at Tres Marías and joins them in "the big house on the corner") leads him, halfway through the novel, to venture into politics as a Conservative Party candidate for the Senate, "since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared."

Symbolically in that same chapter (7), having won election as Senator, he becomes convinced that his body and brain are shrinking and travels to the United States for diagnosis. Symbolically in that chapter ("The Brothers") his two sons manifest themselves as ideologically incompatible with him and with each other: Jaime is socially and socialistically committed; Nicolás, the childlike seducer, equates the highest good with pleasure and later will found an Institute for Union with Nothingness and be arrested for singing Asiatic psalms naked before the gates of Congress. And, symbolically, in that chapter Alba is born (feet first, we're later told), harbinger of a new era.

Clara "la clarividente" died when Esteban was seventy, with twenty-nine years still to go, and when Alba was seven. Did the seven and its multiple of ten portend survival and good fortune for the old man and his granddaughter? Clara, Blanca, and Alba, I've already observed, embody historical awareness and intuitive understanding. Their role throughout the novel is the preservation of moral and social conscience and civic responsibility. Clara departs this life at a relatively young age, but she'll often return as a spirit to the halls and bedrooms of "the big house on the corner," and in chapter 14 ("The Hour of Truth"), to Alba's tomb-like prison cell. The latter apparition occurs at the crucial moment when Alba, having undergone the worst of the tortures directed by Esteban García, has decided to stop eating, drinking, and even breathing, in hopes of a quicker death. Clara succeeds in convincing her granddaughter that "the point was not to die, but to survive." Further, she strengthens Alba's will to live by urging her to write—"in her mind, without paper or pencil"—not only to forestall madness by keeping her mind occupied, but to preserve a testimony that sooner or later and one way or another must be revealed to the outside world. Her reason is that, given the ways in which the inside world works (through torture, deceit, abuse, betrayal, and cowardly concealment), no one has a right to ignorance or forgetfulness, and the true heart of literature is neither pleasure nor knowledge, but survival. The paragraph in which Allende describes how Alba tries to reconstruct what has happened to her could easily be adapted to an essay or textbook on the function of memory within the creative process:

Alba tried to obey her grandmother, but as soon as she began to take notes with her mind, the doghouse [i.e., her undersized, dark prison cell] filled with all the characters of her story, who rushed in, shoved each other out of the way to wrap her in their anecdotes, their vices, and their virtues, trampled on her intention to compose a documentary, and threw her testimony to the floor, pressing, insisting, and egging her on. She took down their words at breakneck pace, despairing because while she was filling a page, the one before it was erased. This activity kept her fully occupied. At first, she constantly lost her train of thought and forgot new facts as fast as she remembered them. The slightest distraction or additional fear or pain caused her story to snarl like a ball of yarn. But she invented a code for recalling things in order, and then she was able to bury herself so deeply in her story that she stopped eating, scratching herself, smelling herself, and complaining, and overcame all her varied agonies.

Of course, after Alba is set free—and it is through the intervention of Tránsito Soto, a prostitute friend of Esteban Trueba's from many years back who owes him a favor, that her release is made possible—she tells us in the first-person singular Epilogue that her grandfather was the one "who had the idea that we should write this story." He also helped write it, with a memory that was intact "down to the last second of his ninety years." More basic still is the contribution of Grandmother Clara, who had superior psychic powers but a poor memory; but even before becoming deliberately mute at the age of ten she had begun to write copiously in her notebooks about everything that happened in her eccentric family. It is only after finishing the book and then returning to the first page that we can identify with certainty the "I" in the phrase, "never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own." Clara's notebooks—arranged not chronologically but according to the importance of events—are mentioned on the last page in the same context as they were on the first.

Clara the Clairvoyant was, then, the creative spirit who at the same time that she bore witness to history was able, on occasion, to alter it and even to perceive its predetermined elements (for the same reason she frequently foresaw what was going to happen). If observation of what occurs, changing the course of what occurs, and understanding what must occur are the three most important attributes of the narrative writer, then Clara fully and dynamically symbolizes the narrative writer. Although she kept forgetting things—menial everyday details—she forced her memory to work through writing (the Notebooks). Although Esteban Trueba pampered her and regaled her with luxuries including a canopy bed with gauze curtains "that looked like a sailboat on a sea of silken blue water," she had a keen social conscience and on her first stay at Tres Marías immediately sensed the workers' "resentment, fear and distrust" upon which Colonel García as a boy was nurtured. Although with distracted sweetness she "lived in a universe of her own invention," she simultaneously endured the abuses of society and her husband—who knocked out four of her front teeth when he discovered that their daughter Blanca was Pedro Tercero García's secret lover.

Clara became immune to surprise (her nursemaid tried for several years to frighten her into speaking during the nine-year silence).

Clara interpreted dreams.

Clara predicted with demonstrated accuracy deaths, earthquakes, and evil actions.

Clara was able to move objects without touching them.

Clara could invoke ghosts.

Clara played Chopin on the piano without raising the lid over the keyboard. And so forth.

Only a writer endowed with a comparably wide range of secret powers is likely to exercise effectively the art of survival in the twentieth century. By the art or literature of survival I mean the ultimate power of testimony through the creative use of memory. That is, creative memory enables testimony to transcend obstacles, ignorance, and repression.

In The House of the Spirits magic and the flights of fancy are the instrumental privilege of a select few: the "extraordinary women" to whom Isabel Allende dedicates her novel. Amidst the abuse and the madness that surround them, orientation is not lost. When Alba is finally released one night on a garbage-strewn vacant lot, she is granted provisional freedom, a possibility of putting things together again if only in writing. She doesn't know whether the child in her womb was engendered by a rapist or by Miguel, for whom she'll wait. She considers what has happened to her as "another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself." Yet she is determined "to break that terrible chain" that hatred has so relentlessly fashioned. She finds her basic hope in Grandmother Clara's insightful Notebooks, and in the pages she herself is engaged in writing.

Source: Peter G. Earle, "Literature as Survival: Allende's The House of the Spirits," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4, Winter, 1987, pp. 543-554.