The narrative focuses on Eva's survival throughout her difficult childhood and adolescence, and progresses to her discovery of success and fulfillment as a television scriptwriter. Eva's claiming of language empowers her to choose her own destiny and eschew dependence on a male character to speak and provide for her.Cuentos de Eva Luna (1989; The Stories of Eva Luna) again focuses on Eva's character, and transforms several of the biographical sketches in Eva Luna into more detailed short stories. The Infinite Plan follows Gregory Reeves, a young man raised in a poor Chicano neighborhood in Los Angeles. His father is an ex-preacher who subscribes to his own personal philosophy of salvation, called the "Infinite Plan." When the patriarch becomes ill, Gregory must help support his family before attending law school and then serving in Vietnam. After the war he returns to the United States and seeks happiness through the attainment of material goods, power, and sex. Only when he ends his quest for monetary riches and begins to find emotional fulfillment through other means is he finally able to achieve happiness and peace. Paula was written as a family memoir that Allende planned to give to her daughter Paula once she recovered from her coma. The work traces Allende's family history through several generations, recounting her own privileged upbringing, the terror of her uncle's assassination, and the subsequent military coup. Hija de la fortuna (1999; Daughter of Fortune) is a multigenerational novel involving characters at the fringes of "proper society." The novel traces the life of Eliza Sommers, an orphan who was unknowingly reared by her biological aunt in Chile. Eliza falls in love and becomes pregnant, but the child's father leaves during the California gold rush. Eliza follows him to the United States, but miscarries while a stow-away on the ship to California. She becomes deathly ill and is saved by Tao Chi'en, the ship's cook. While searching America for her lover, Eliza keeps in touch with Tao Chi'en by exchanging letters. She finally realizes that what she feels for her missing lover is more like a dream than the real bond she shares with Tao Chi'en, and she returns to California to marry the man who truly loves her. Retrato en sepia (2000; Portrait in Sepia) is a continuation of The House of the Spirits and Daughter of Fortune. Due to severe trauma, Aurora del Valle—the granddaughter of Eliza Sommers—is unable to remember her childhood years. She decides to piece together her fragmented past and, using photographs and language, explores her family history. As she reclaims each memory, she is "reunited" with the strong women from her family history whose spirits have lent their strength to her. By learning their stories, Aurora is able to remember her own life story and write her future in a manner of her choosing.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Often described as one of the first women to enter the male-dominated Latin-American literary scene, Allende is widely credited with launching the post-"Boom" era in South and Central America with the publication of The House of the Spirits. Much of the critical analysis of Allende's work has been devoted to studying her feminist perspective and her focus on marginalized people in society: women, homosexuals, blacks, and Hispanics. Her illumination of female roles in a patriarchal society has been applauded, though some critics charge that Allende's portrayals of Latin males are stereotypical and that she at times resorts to clichés concerning Hispanics. Allende has been noted as a valued commentator on the turbulent nature of Latin American society and also as an author of powerful, humanistic fiction. Although some scholars have faulted her use of magic realism and picturesque language, many reviewers have viewed these embellishments as inherent elements in stories employing a feminine perspective. Such critics have asserted that these methods are natural in fiction written by and for women.

El embajador (play) 1972

* Civilice a su troglodita: Los impertinentes de Isabel Allende (essays) 1974

La casa de los espíritus [The House of the Spirits] (novel) 1982

De amor y de sombra [Of Love and Shadows] (novel) 1984

La gorda de porcelana (juvenilia) 1984

Eva Luna (novel) 1987

Cuentos de Eva Luna [The Stories of Eva Luna] (short stories) 1989

El plan infinito [The Infinite Plan] (novel) 1991

Paula (memoir) 1994

Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas y otros afrodisiacos [Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses] (essays, folklore, and short stories) 1997

Hija de la fortuna [Daughter of Fortune] (novel) 1999

Retrato en sepia [Portrait in Sepia] (novel) 2000

La ciudad de las bestias [City of the Beasts] (juvenilia) 2002

Mi pas inventado: Un paseo nostalgico por Chile [My

Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey through Chile] (memoirs and prose) 2003

El reino del dragon oro [The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon] (juvenilia) 2003

* This work is a compilation of Allende's "Los impertinentes" columns for Paula magazine.

SOURCE: Allende, Isabel. "Writing as an Act of Hope." In Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel, edited by William Zinsser, pp. 39-63. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

In the following essay, Allende discusses her reasons for writing, the lessons she hopes her novels teach, and the marginality that women writers face.

In every interview during the last few years I encountered two questions that forced me to define myself as a writer and as a human being: Why do I write? And who do I write for? Tonight I will try to answer those questions.

In 1981, in Caracas, I put a sheet of paper in my typewriter and wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits: "Barabbas came to us by sea." At that moment I didn't know why I was doing it, or for whom. In fact, I assumed that no one would ever read it except my mother, who reads everything I write. I was not even conscious that I was writing a novel. I thought I was writing a letter—a spiritual letter to my grandfather, a formidable old patriarch, whom I loved dearly. He had reached almost one hundred years of age and decided that he was too tired to go on living, so he sat in his armchair and refused to drink or eat, calling for Death, who was kind enough to take him very soon.

I wanted to bid him farewell, but I couldn't go back to Chile, and I knew that calling him on the telephone was useless, so I began this letter. I wanted to tell him that he could go in peace because all his memories were with me. I had forgotten nothing. I had all his anecdotes, all the characters of the family, and to prove it I began writing the story of Rose, the fiancée my grandfather had had, who is called Rose the Beautiful in the book. She really existed; she's not a copy from García Márquez, as some people have said.

For a year I wrote every night with no hesitation or plan. Words came out like a violent torrent. I had thousands of untold words stuck in my chest, threatening to choke me. The long silence of exile was turning me to stone; I needed to open a valve and let the river of secret words find a way out. At the end of that year there were five hundred pages on my table; it didn't look like a letter anymore. On the other hand, my grandfather had died long before, so the spiritual message had already reached him. So I thought, "Well, maybe in this way I can tell some other people about him, and about my country, and about my family and myself." So I just organized it a little bit, tied the manuscript with a pink ribbon for luck, and took it to some publishers.

The spirit of my grandmother was protecting the book from the very beginning, so it was refused everywhere in Venezuela. Nobody wanted it—it was too long; I was a woman; nobody knew me. So I sent it by mail to Spain, and the book was published there. It had reviews, and it was translated and distributed in other countries.

In the process of writing the anecdotes of the past, and recalling the emotions and pains of my fate, and telling part of the history of my country, I found that life became more comprehensible and the world more tolerable. I felt that my roots had been recovered and that during that patient exercise of daily writing I had also recovered my own soul. I felt at that time that writing was unavoidable—that I couldn't keep away from it. Writing is such a pleasure; it is always a private orgy, creating and recreating the world according to my own laws, fulfilling in those pages all my dreams and exorcising some of my demons.

But that is a rather simple explanation. There are other reasons for writing.

Six years and three books have passed since The House of the Spirits. Many things have changed for me in that time. I can no longer pretend to be naïve, or elude questions, or find refuge in irony. Now I am constantly confronted by my readers, and they can be very tough. It's not enough to write in a state of trance, overwhelmed by the desire to tell a story. One has to be responsible for each word, each idea. Be very careful: the written word cannot be erased.

I began to receive academic papers from American universities about the symbols in my books, or the metaphors, or the colors, or the names. I'm always very scared by them. I just received three different papers on Barabbas, the dog. One of them says that he symbolizes the innocence of Clara because he accompanies her during her youth, and when she falls in love, symbolically, the dog dies in a pool of blood. That means the sexual act, it seems. The second paper says that the dog represents repression—the militarists—and the third paper says that he is the male part of Clara, the hidden, dark, big beast in her. Well, really, Barabbas was just the dog I had at home. And he was killed as it was told in the book. But of course it sounds much better to answer that Barabbas symbolizes the innocence of Clara, so that's the explanation I give when somebody asks.

Maybe the most important reason for writing is to prevent the erosion of time, so that memories will not be blown away by the wind. Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten. But then, why write novels? Probably because I come from Latin America, a land of crazy, illuminated people, of geological and political cataclysms—a land so large and profound, so beautiful and frightening, that only novels can describe its fascinating complexity.

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape. In a novel we can put all the interrogations, we can register the most extravagant, evil, obscene, incredible or magnificent facts—which, in Latin America, are not hyperbole, because that is the dimension of our reality. In a novel we can give an illusory order to chaos. We can find the key to the labyrinth of history. We can make excursions into the past, to try to understand the present and dream the future. In a novel we can use everything: testimony, chronicle, essay, fantasy, legend, poetry and other devices that might help us to decode the mysteries of our world and discover our true identity.

For a writer who nourishes himself or herself on images and passions, to be born in a fabulous continent is a privilege. In Latin America we don't have to stretch our imaginations. Critics in Europe and the United States often stare in disbelief at Latin American books, asking how the authors dare to invent those incredible lies of young women who fly to heaven wrapped in linen sheets; of black emperors who build fortresses with cement and the blood of emasculated bulls; of outlaws who die of hunger in the Amazon with bags full of emeralds on their backs; of ancient tyrants who order their mothers to be flogged naked in front of the troops and modern tyrants who order children to be tortured in front of their parents; of hurricanes and earthquakes that turn the world upside down; of revolutions made with machetes, bullets, poems and kisses; of hallucinating landscapes where reason is lost.

It is very hard to explain to critics that these things are not a product of our pathological imaginations. They are written in our history; we can find them every day in our newspapers. We hear them in the streets; we suffer them frequently in our own lives. It is impossible to speak of Latin America without mentioning violence. We inhabit a land of terrible contrasts and we have to survive in times of great violence.

Contrast and violence, two excellent ingredients for literature, although for us, citizens of that reality, life is always suspended from a very fragile thread.

The first, the most naked and visible form of violence is the extreme poverty of the majority, in contrast with the extreme wealth of the very few. In my continent two opposite realities coexist. One is a legal face, more or less comprehensible and with a certain pretension to dignity and civilization. The other is a dark and tragic face, which we do not like to show but which is always threatening us. There is an apparent world and a real world—nice neighborhoods where blond children play on their bicycles and servants walk elegant dogs, and other neighborhoods, of slums and garbage, where dark children play naked with hungry mutts. There are offices of marble and steel where young executives discuss the stock market, and forgotten villages where people still live and die as they did in the Middle Ages. There is a world of fiction created by the official discourse, and another world of blood and pain and love, where we have struggled for centuries.

In Latin America we all survive on the borderline of those two realities. Our fragile democracies exist as long as they don't interfere with imperialist interests. Most of our republics are dependent on submissiveness. Our institutions and laws are inefficient. Our armed forces often act as mercenaries for a privileged social group that pays tribute to transnational enterprises. We are living in the worst economic, political and social crisis since the conquest of America by the Spaniards. There are hardly two or three leaders in the whole continent. Social inequality is greater every day, and to avoid an outburst of public rancor, repression also rises day by day. Crime, drugs, misery and ignorance are present in every Latin American country, and the military is an immediate threat to society and civil governments. We try to keep straight faces while our feet are stuck in a swamp of violence, exploitation, corruption, the terror of the state and the terrorism of those who take arms against the status quo.

But Latin America is also a land of hope and friendship and love. Writers navigate in these agitated waters. They don't live in ivory towers; they cannot remove themselves from this brutal reality. In such circumstances there is no time and no wish for narcissistic literature. Very few of our writers contemplate their navel in self-centered monologue. The majority want desperately to communicate.

I feel that writing is an act of hope, a sort of communion with our fellow men. The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. Only that, nothing more—a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers. This kind of writer is not seduced by the mermaid's voice of celebrity or tempted by exclusive literary circles. He has both feet planted firmly on the ground and walks hand in hand with the people in the streets. He knows that the lamp is very small and the shadows are immense. This makes him humble.

But just as we should not believe that literature gives us any sort of power, neither should we be paralyzed by false modesty. We should continue to write in spite of the bruises and the vast silence that frequently surrounds us. A book is not an end in itself; it is only a way to touch someone—a bridge extended across a space of loneliness and obscurity—and sometimes it is a way of winning other people to our causes.

I believe in certain principles and values: love, generosity, justice. I know that sounds old-fashioned. However, I believe in those values so firmly that I'm willing to provoke some scornful smiles. I'm sure we have the capacity to build a more gentle world—that doing so is our only alternative, because our present equilibrium is very fragile. In literature, we have been told, optimism is dangerous; it flirts with simplicity and is an insurrection against the sacred laws of reason and good taste. But I don't belong to that group of desperate intellectuals. Despair is a paralyzing feeling. It only benefits our enemies.

My second novel, Of Love and Shadows, tells about the desaparecidos, "the disappeared ones." It's based on a political massacre that took place in Chile in 1973 during the military coup that put an end to 150 years of democracy. The novel denounces repression and the impunity of the murderers, and it had a warm reception from most readers and critics. But it also drew some strong attacks. Some said it was too political and sentimental and not very objective, as if one could be objective about the crimes of a dictatorship. Maybe these critics would have forgiven me, as other writers have been forgiven, if the book had only been a story of horror and bitterness. They didn't like the fact that in the novel solidarity and hope prevail over death and torture. If the main characters, Irene and Francisco, had died in a torture chamber, or at least if the violent experiences they endured had drowned them in despair and destroyed forever their capacity to love and to dream, these critics might have been more tolerant. Evidently it's hard to accept in literature that love can be stronger than hatred, although it frequently is in life.

If my books are going to be classified as political, I hope readers will find out that they are not political for ideological reasons only, but for other, more subtle considerations. They are political precisely because Alba Trueba, in The House ofthe Spirits, who has been raped, tortured and mutilated, is able to reconcile herself with life; because Irene and Francisco, in Of Love and Shadows, make love in spite of terror; because in my third novel, Eva Luna, Eva defeats the odds of her fate with generosity and candor; because these characters search for truth and have the courage to risk their lives.

I suppose I have the secret ambition to become a great writer, to be able to create stories that will resist the passage of time and the judgment of history. Yes, I know, it's terribly pretentious! But I'm more interested in touching my readers—as many of them as possible—on a spiritual and emotional level. To do this from a feminine point of view is a beautiful challenge in the society I live in. The political literature that some women writers have begun to create is so revolutionary that no wonder many critics are scared. Women are questioning the set of values that have sustained human society since the first apes stood on their feet and raised their eyes to the sky. After centuries of silence, women are taking by assault the exclusive male club of literature. Some women have done it before, of course, struggling against formidable obstacles. But now half of the novels published in Europe and the United States are written by women. Our sisters are using the cutting edge of words to change the rules we have always had to obey. Until now, humankind has organized itself according to certain principles that are considered part of nature: we are all born (it has been said) with some original sin; we are basically evil, and without the strict control of religion and laws we would devour each other like cannibals; authority, repression and punishment are necessary to keep us in line. According to these theories, the best proof of our perverse nature is that the world is what it is—a round rock lost in the cosmic nightmare, where abuse, war, inequality and hatred prevail.

But a small group of women and young men are now making the most astonishing statements. Fortunately, most of them work in the best universities, so even if they are only a few, their voices have great impact. These people are questioning everything, starting with our own image as human beings. Until now, men have decided the destiny of this suffering planet, imposing ambition, power and individualism as virtues. (They don't admit this, of course; it is more eloquent to speak of peace and cooperation.) These values are also present in literature. Critics, most of them men, as you probably can guess, have determined what is good in literature—what is valuable or artistic, according to our aesthetic, intellectual and moral patterns—leaving aside the feminine half of the human race, whose opinions on this or any other matter don't interest them.

I think it's time to revise this situation. But it is not the Old Guard who will do it. It will be done by women and by young men who have nothing to lose and therefore have no fear.

In the process of analyzing books, critics have exalted all kinds of literary experiments, some of them quite unbearable. How many books have you tried to read lately and haven't gotten past page fifteen because they were simply boring? Flamboyant literary techniques win awards even though the subject is deplorable. The worst vices are glorified if the writing is elegant. Lies, bitterness and arrogance are forgiven if the language is original and the author already has his laurels. Pessimism is in fashion.

But many novels that don't fit that pattern are now being written by women and by some brave men, not all of them young—for example, García Márquez, who wrote that incredible and sentimental book Love in the Time of Cholera, which is a sort of magnificent soap opera about two old people who fall in love, and they love each other for eighty years. It's wonderful.

Those writers are shaking the literary world nowadays because they propose a completely new set of values. They don't accept the old rules anymore. They are willing to examine every-thing—to invent all over again and to express other ethical and aesthetic values; not always to replace the prevailing ones, but to complement them. It's not a question of changing male chauvinism for militant feminism, but of giving both women and men a chance to become better people and to share the heavy burden of this planet. I believe that this is the true political literature of our time.

All political systems, even revolutions, have been created and directed by men, always within the patriarchal regime. Important philosophical movements have tried to change man and society, but without touching the basis of human relations—that is, inequality of the sexes. Men writers of all periods have written political literature, from Utopia to parody, but feminine values have been scorned and women have been denied a voice to express them.

Now, finally, women are breaking the rule of silence and raising a strong voice to question the world. This is a cataclysm. It is a new literature that dares to be optimistic—to speak of love in opposition to pornography, of compassion against cruelty. It is a literature that's not afraid of colloquial language, of being sentimental if necessary; a literature that searches the spiritual dimension of reality, that accepts the unknown and the unexplainable, confusion and terror; a literature that has no answers, only questions; a literature that doesn't invent history or try to explain the world solely with reason, but also seeks knowledge through feelings and imagination. Maybe, this literature says, it's not true that we are perverse and evil. Maybe the idea of original sin is just a terrible mistake. Maybe we are not here to be punished, because the gods love us and are willing to give us a chance to decipher the clues and trace new paths.

The effect of these books is hard to measure, because the old instruments are no longer useful. Probably the strongest literature being written nowadays is by those who stand unsheltered by the system: blacks, Indians, homosexuals, exiles and, especially, women—the crazy people of the world, who dare to believe in their own force. We dare to think that humanity is not going to destroy itself, that we have the capacity to reach an agreement, not only for survival but also to achieve happiness. That is why we write—as an act of human solidarity and commitment to the future. We want to change the rules, even if we won't live long enough to see the results. We have to make real revolutions of the spirit, of values, of life. And to do so we have to begin dreaming them.

So I will continue to write: about two lovers embracing in the moonlight, near an abandoned mine where they have found the bodies of fifteen peasants, murdered by the military. Or about raped women and tortured men and families who sell themselves as slaves because they are starving. And also—why not?—about golden sunsets and loving mothers and poets who die of love. I want to tell stories and say, for example, that I care more for the free man than the free enterprise, more for solidarity than charity. I want to say that it's more important for me to share than to compete. And I want to write about the necessary changes in Latin America that will enable us to rise from our knees after five centuries of humiliations.

Much skill will be needed to write about these things eloquently. But with patience and hard work I hope to acquire that skill. I suppose I'm being very ambitious. Well, most writers are, even women writers.

Now, for whom do I write?

When I face a clean sheet of paper, I don't think of a large audience or of the people who would raise their knives to cut me in pieces. If I did, terror would paralyze me. Instead, when I write, a benevolent image comes to my mind—that of Alexandra Jorquera, a young woman who lives in Chile whom I scarcely know. She has read my books so many times that she can repeat paragraphs by heart. In fact, she knows them better than I do. She quotes me and I don't know she's quoting me. Once she told me that she had discovered in my books the history of Chile that is denied by the official textbooks of the dictator-ship—the forbidden and secret history that nevertheless is still alive in the memories of most Chileans.

This is the best compliment my work has ever received. For the sake of this girl I am very demanding with my writing. Sometimes, tempted by the beauty of a sentence, I am about to betray the truth, and then Alexandra comes to my mind and I remember that she, and others like her, don't deserve that. At other times I'm too explicit, too near the pamphlet. But then I step back, thinking she doesn't deserve that either—to be underestimated. And when I feel helpless against brutality and suffering, her candid face brings back my strength. All writers should have a reader like her, waiting for their words. They would never feel lonely, and their work would have a new and shining dimension.

In Latin America today, 50 percent of the population is illiterate. Among those who can read and write, only very few can buy books, and among those who can buy books, very few have the habit of reading. What, then, is the importance of a book in Latin America? None, would be the reasonable answer. But it's not exactly that way. For some strange reason, the written word has a tremendous impact in that illiterate continent. The totalitarian regimes have persecuted, tortured, sent into exile and murdered many writers. This is not an accident; dictators don't make mistakes in these details. They know that a book can be dangerous for them. In our countries most of the press is controlled by private enterprises or by inefficient governments. Eduardo Galeano, the great writer from Uruguay, puts it bluntly: "Almost all mass media promote a colonialistic culture, which justifies the unjust organization of the world as a result of the legitimate victory of the best—that is, the strongest. They lie about the past and about reality. They propose a lifestyle which postulates consumerism as an alternative to communism, which exalts crime as achievement, lack of scruples as virtue, and selfishness as a natural requirement."

What can writers do against this persistent and powerful message? The first thing we should try to do is write clearly. Not simply—that only works with soap advertising; we don't have to sacrifice aesthetics for the sake of ethics. On the contrary, only if we are able to say it beautifully can we be convincing. Most readers are perfectly able to appreciate subtleties and poetic twists and symbols and metaphors. We should not write with a paternalistic attitude, as if readers were simpleminded, but we should also beware of elaborate and unnecessary ornamentation, which frequently hides a lack of ideas. It has been said that we Spanish-speaking people have the vice of empty words, that we need six hundred pages to say what would be better told in fifty.

The opportunity to reach a large number of readers is a great responsibility. Unfortunately, it is hard for a book to stand against the message of the mass media; it's an unfair battle. Writers should therefore look for other forms of expressing their thoughts, avoiding the prejudice that only in books can they make literature. All means are legitimate, not only the cultivated language of academia but also the direct language of journalism, the mass language of radio, television and the movies, the poetic language of popular songs and the passionate language of talking face to face with an audience. These are all forms of literature. Let us be clever and use every opportunity to introduce ourselves in the mass media and try to change them from within.

In Venezuela, José Ignacio Cabrujas, a playwright and novelist, one of the most brilliant intellectuals of the country, writes soap operas. These shows are the most important cultural phenomenon in Latin America. Some people watch three or four a day, so you can imagine how important that kind of writing is. Cabrujas doesn't elude reality. His soap operas show a world of contrasts. He presents problems such as abortion, divorce, machismo, poverty and crime. The result is quite different from "Dynasty." But it's also very successful.

I tried to put some of that soap opera stuff in Eva Luna, because I'm fascinated by that version of reality. The ladies on TV wear false eyelashes at eleven in the morning. The difference between rich and poor is that the rich wear cocktail gowns all the time and the poor have their faces painted black. They all go blind or become invalids and then they recover. Just like real life!

Many of the most important Latin American writers have been journalists, and they go back to it frequently because they are aware that their words in a newspaper or on the radio reach an audience that their books can never touch. Others write for the theater or the movies, or write lyrics for popular songs. All means are valid if we want to communicate and don't presume to be writing only for an educated elite or for literary prizes.

In Latin America a book is almost a luxury. My hairdresser calls me Dr. Allende because I usually carry a book, and she probably thinks that a doctorate is the minimum prerequisite for such an extravagance. In Chile a novel of three hundred pages can cost the equivalent of a laborer's monthly wages. In some other countries—like Haiti, for example—85 percent of the population is illiterate. Elsewhere in Latin America, nothing is published in the Indian languages of the majority. Many publishers have been ruined by the economic crisis, and the price of books imported from Spain is very high.

However, we should not despair. There is some hope for the spirit. Literature has survived even in the worst conditions. Political prisoners have written stories on cigarette paper. In the wars of Central America, little soldiers, fourteen years old, write poetry in their school notebooks. The Pieroa Indians, those who haven't yet been exterminated by the genocide being carried out against the aborigines of the Amazon, have published some legends in their language.

In my continent, writers often have more prestige than they do in any other part of the world. Some writers are considered witch doctors, or prophets, as if they were illuminated by a sort of natural wisdom. Jorge Amado has to spend part of the year away from Brazil in order to write, because people crowd into his house seeking advice. Mario Vargas-Llosa directs the opposition to Alan Garcia's government in Peru. García Márquez is a frequent middleman for Central American presidents. In Venezuela, Arturo Uslar Pietri is consulted on issues like corruption and oil. These writers have interpreted their reality and told it to the world. Some of them even have the gift of foretelling the future and put in words the hidden thoughts of their people, which of course include social and political problems, because it is impossible to write in a crystal bubble, disregarding the conditions of their continent.

No wonder Latin American novels are so often accused of being political.

For whom do I write, finally? Certainly for myself. But mainly for others, even if there are only a few. For those who have no voice and for those who are kept in silence. For my children and my future grandchildren. For Alexandra Jorquera and others like her. I write for you.

And why do I write? García Márquez once said that he writes so that his friends will love him more. I think I write so that people will love each other more. Working with words is a beautiful craft, and in my continent, where we still have to name all things one by one, it has a rich and profound meaning.

SOURCE: Frenk, Susan. "The Wandering Text: Situating the Narratives of Isabel Allende." In Latin American Women's Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, edited by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies, pp. 66-84. Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1996.

In the following essay, Frenk considers the gender-based, socioeconomic, and political motivations for feminism in Allende's fiction.

Negotiating a path through the critical geographies which have mapped the academic reception of the narratives and public personae of Isabel Allende is a disorienting experience indeed. For all their differences, however, most of these geographies participate in a general deterritorialization as they steer her texts down unmarked roads. This essay offers a reading of the faded signposts and diversion signs along the way, with a tentative sketch for an alternative journey.

Texts are produced and exchanged in a global market-place. In the process a woman, some women, come to represent 'women's writing'—as Jean Franco notes, a commodity that currently sells well in pluralist regimes (Franco 1992). Allende's texts, which engage from exile with Chilean society, are marketed additionally through a dehistoricized 'magical realism' (Martin 1989) and through an academic 'teaching machine' which markets cultures to students while simultaneously feeding the media profiles of trends and superstars (Spivak 1993). It is from within this machine that I write, an outsider to Chile trying not to fall into too many of the potholes excavated by critics working on post-colonial terrain. As they wander from Chile to North American and UK academe and through different fields of discursive struggle Allende's texts generate many readings. The readings produced here are motivated in part by a need to celebrate the achievements of a woman writer in institutions and societies where (despite recent market successes) writing by women and the work of women who teach and research it remain devalued. This essay starts, however, from the assumption that we risk compounding these women's difficulties if we fail to contextualize the voices we gather, or to tease out the threads of 'woman' into the women who speak through these texts, those who do not, and those who are spoken by them inadequately.

What follows is a first stage in this process. It starts with the women's movements which, in different ways, have challenged the linguistic regime of lo no dicho (the unsaid) and the attempted abolition of the interlocutor, risking gendered, 'private' bodies in order to assert a broader integrity of the body. Allende's first novel, La casa de los espíritus, appeared only in 1982 and cannot be read as part of the literature of immediate resistance (Boyle 1992) nor assimilated to the different forms of testimonio (testimonial) generated by women inside Chile.¹ Nor is La casa de los espíritus as radically disjunctive in formal terms or as wide-ranging in its representation of subaltern relations as the writing of, for example, Diamela Eltit. Instead, I would argue, it is precisely the familiarity of Allende's narrative modes which empowers women readers, enabling them to respond through different forms of resistance and rebellion. This involves the reappropriation of their bodies, not as the liberation of a natural body, but through the reinscription of bodies in new discourses, including the expansion of political rights to a similarly de- and reconstructed pleasure. What is at stake here is not pleasure as a libidinal escape route from the social but an investigation of the politics of romance. Unlike Wolfgang Karrer—who has claimed that in Eva Luna 'Mimí and Eva submit gender structure to change, but ultimately preserve it' (Karrer 1991: 161)—I would argue that the politics of romance in Allende's narratives preserve the specificity of different bodies while troubling the dominant sex-gender naturalizations of them.

A reading of the integrity of sexually differentiated bodies, and of the discursive empowerment of gendered subjects as a strategic response to the situation of Chilean women, can take us beyond the theoretical impasse of 'feminist misogyny'. In her recent exploration of this phenomenon Susan Gubar notes that, since both feminists and misogynists must exploit and expropriate words from a common linguistic store, 'their discourses necessarily intersect in numerous ways, undercutting or supplementing each other over time [in] a cultural "heteroglossia" of gender ideologies and power asymmetries' (Gubar 1994: 465). This is helpful in reassessing the articulation of two pivotal elements in the seemingly polarized critical reception of Allende's writing, and in writing on Latin American women generally: femininity and motherhood. Anxious to escape the straitjacket of motherhood as naturalized self-abnegation, critical writings as diverse as Jean Franco's illuminating but ultimately negative analysis of motherhood in Rosario Castellanos (Franco 1992) and Debra Castillo's lament at the prominent role of marriage in Allende's narratives (Castillo 1992) seem to want to abolish positive representations of motherhood. However, such writing can be revised in a matrix which recognizes the systemic positioning/construction of women while at the same time enabling their agency—in negotiating, resisting, and transforming systemic relations and generating new identities—to be appraised.

If we relate La casa de los espíritus to the power of motherhood in the mobilization of Chilean women's groups, and to the rearticulation in the novel of this power in opposition to the discourse of the Pinochet regime, motherhood emerges as historically variable. Mother-daughter relations in particular do not replicate a natural femininity but accommodate new versions: they do not reinforce the patriarchal power of the father but instead provide a mode of empowerment of women's bodies and psyches which the patriarch cannot control. The later novel, Eva Luna (1988), expands this type of intergenerational relation between women beyond the biologically grounded narrative of motherhood. It also removes female-male relations almost completely from marriage. This, I would suggest, is related both to a more developed concern with subaltern experience and to the growing autonomy of women's movements (in Chile and elsewhere) through the 1980s, as a consciousness took shape of the need to negotiate political alliances with and within mixed, but still masculinist, opposition groups from a separate sphere of female identification and empowerment.

Allende's narratives can also be read as confronting the oppressive regime through a discursive experience of pleasure and desire which can seem scandalously inappropriate to the scale of suffering under Pinochet. Yet if we read Allende in the light of Patricia Chuchryk's study of women's organizations in the Chilean transition to Democracy (Chuchryk 1989) we can trace a process in which survival and resistance lead to a questioning of patriarchal relations, and in which pleasure and desire are no longer perceived as luxuries but identified as the very substance of those relations. These pleasures are produced in relations of denial and internalized self-denial, prohibited by external and self-imposed surveillance, and mobilized in the service of powerful others. They are harnessed within a specific phallic order which must be re-appropriated and redirected according to a different imaginary economy, as a vital part of political projects to alter other relations. These relations include the socio-economic, which was until relatively recently the only sphere recognized as political by the Left.

In this analysis, the question of the integrity of the body expands from the bodies of the disappeared to include the discursive relations in which the bodies of the protesting women are imprisoned. It links domestic violence and state violence through the deconstruction of relations of gender and sexuality. There is a growing corpus of critical work which argues convincingly that Allende does more than 'put "quality" writing … at the service of the formulas that have always acted as female pacifiers—heterosexual romance combined with seigneurial goodwill toward the subaltern classes' (Franco 1992: 73). Franco goes on in the same piece to include Allende among a number of women writers who unsettle 'the stance that supports gender power/knowledge as masculine … displacing the male-centred national allegory and exposes the dubious stereotyping that was always inherent in the epics of nationhood that constitute the Latin American canon' (Franco 1992: 75). Yet her earlier comment implicitly excludes Allende from the confrontation of the middle-class woman's specific social positioning and the 'ambiguous overlapping of privilege and the aesthetic' (1992: 75) in women writers, a confrontation which she analyses in the writing of Clarice Lispector, Carmen Ollé, and Tununa Mercado. The analysis of post-colonial gender politics here must therefore integrate the representation of subaltern relations.

In Eva Luna and La casa de los espíritus these relations are associated with appropriations of bodily and discursive pleasure,

[Consuelo] sacó la cuenta de que en sus treinta y tantos años no había conocido el placer y no lo buscó, convencida de que era un asunto reservado a los protagonistas del cine. Resolvió darse este gusto y de paso ofrecérselo también al enfermo a ver si partía más contento al otro mundo.

(Allende 1988: 22)

[Consuelo] looked back over her thirty-odd years and realized that she had not experienced pleasure, nor sought it, convinced that that sort of thing only happened in films. She resolved to have a taste of it herself and to offer some in passing to the sick man, to see if he would depart this world in a happier state.

In Eva Luna, Consuelo's appropriation of the pleasure which has been unavailable to her as marginalized sirvienta (maid) comes about through a process of rebellion. This process is linked to the issue of discursive power, which initiates a series of actions that affirm her as an agent, gradually transforming her from the mirror image of her master's desires. When she decides to try to save the life of the indian gardener (who has been bitten by a poisonous snake) we are told that 'por primera vez en su silenciosa existencia, Consuelo desobedeció una orden y tomó una iniciativa' (for the first time in her silent existence Consuelo disobeyed an order and took the initiative) (Allende 1988: 21).²

Consuelo reappropriates her body in a ritual undressing which culminates in loosening her hair: 'deshizo el rodete que llevaba enrollado en la nuca como exigía su patrón' (she unfastened the hair which, at her master's insistence, she wore coiled at the nape of neck) (Allende 1988: 22). Then, as she begins to make love for the first time, she initiates a dialogue with the stricken indian/subaltern/male other in a language produced by her own desire: 'Susurrándole palabras recién inventadas' (murmuring newly invented words) (1988: 23). The love she offers the indian is accepted, he is restored to agency, and in the mutual pleasure and exchange of their lovemaking Eva is conceived.

A second ritual of reappropriation and inscription marks Eva's birth, celebrating it as 'el momento más importante' (the most important moment) of Consuelo's life and deromanticizing the birth process by foregrounding the 'labour' involved (1988: 23-4). Consuelo's apparent self-sufficiency becomes mutual dependency with the woman who helps her to cut the cord and to whom she eventually entrusts her daughter before dying. This relation is the first of a series of encounters between women which challenge their internalization of patriarchal discourses of the feminine body. It is the godmother who says 'Mala cosa, es hembra' (What bad luck, it's a girl) (1988: 24) and insists on baptizing Eva and giving her a surname, the traditional marker of women as the property of men. Consuelo counters with positive reinscriptions and compromises based on respecting the beliefs of the other. By choosing the tribal name of the father as the child's surname Consuelo simultaneously endows it with a different collective meaning. She identifies Eva with the marginalized indians rather than the criollista patriarchal order and reinscribes her in a feminine lineage, since the tribe's name means 'children of the moon' (1988: 24).

Eva's birth brings further release from Consuelo's long education in self-silencing. Consuelo is represented as generating a rich store of counter-stories about herself and the dominant order. Because that order refuses a dialogical relation with her, however, these stories can only be told when Eva becomes first a listener and then their mediator/narrator: 'Aprendió a permanecer quieta y guardó su desmesurado caudal de fábulas como un tesoro discreto hasta que yo le di la oportunidad de desatar ese torrente de palabras que llevaba consigo' (She learned to remain silent, treasuring her boundless stock of stories discreetly until I gave her the opportunity to unleash the torrent of words within her) (1988: 13). Consuelo's discursive transformations are confined to la intimidad, the private sphere: in public she maintains a silence that renders her invisible to the powerful, 'como si no existiera' (as if she didn't exist) (1988: 5).

Consuelo's empowerment and double legacy of rebelión (rebelliousness) and storytelling are central to her daughter's eventual transformation,

De mi padre heredé la sangre firme, porque ese indio debió ser muy fuerte para resistir tantos días el veneno de la serpiente y en pleno estado de agonía darle gusto a una mujer. A mi madre le debo todo lo demás … Las palabras son gratis, decía y se las apropiaba, todas eran suyas.

(1988: 25-6)

I inherited my strong blood from my father, because that indian must have been pretty tough to hold out against the snake venom all those days and make love to a woman when he was on the point of death. Everything else I owe to my mother … words are free, she would say, and she appropriated them, they were all hers.

As Eva Luna progresses, Eva saves her own life by appropriating language and storytelling, sometimes adapting to the desires and discourses of others, eventually constructing alternative her/histories. Despite economic and social disempowerment, her belief in the integrity of her healthy woman's body and the possibilities of discursive exchange as a counter to capitalist relations enables Eva both to survive and to participate in the process of social transformation and public discourse.

Eva is the sole, albeit extraordinarily complex, narrator of Eva Luna. In La casa de los espíritus, bodily integrity and discursive power are explored through counterposed female and male narrative voices. Trueba embodies the monologic regime of authoritarian patriarchy, which encompasses censorship, disempowerment through discourses which demean the other (campesinos, women, or communists), and physical violence (raping campesina women or hitting Clara). His granddaughter Alba is eventually revealed as the female narrator who restores the interlocutor, both by directly contradicting Trueba and by writing down a counter-herstory of the forms of resistance offered by other women and campesino men, socialist politics, and protest songs. Gabriela Mora's concern about what she sees as Alba's 'passivity', too-ready desire to forgive past injustice, and her 'limiting' of political activity to writing can thus be rethought through a new understanding of politics in the novel (Mora 1987: 58-9). The centrality of discursive relations to regimes of power, the establishment of a solidarity between women which is not contained within a single party politics, and the dimensions of sexual politics in Alba's relationship with Manuel are all part of this rearticulated politics. Furthermore, as Ronie-Richele García Johnson has shown, Alba's situation at the end of the novel represents the apex of a gradual 'conquest of space' in the house (García Johnson 1994). We can read this as the democratization of the private which the Chilean women's movements came to see as indivisible in the struggle to democratize the public sphere in the 1980s. The difficult issue of Alba's discourse of forgiveness needs to be reread in the light of Susan de Carvalho's interesting study of male narrative voice in La casa de los espíritus and El plan infinito (Carvalho 1993-4). Carvalho argues that,

Allende's male narrators in the novels both reach a nadir at which they are forced to admit their impotence; but the narrative perspective allows also a portrait of the 'post-masculine' male, the man emerging from that nadir, who then reviews his past in segments intercalated throughout the novels. Thus the narrative structure involves various externalized images of the male character, each followed immediately by the repentant male narrator's enlightened commentary on the man he had once been, his recognition of lost opportunities—in most cases opportunities to express love.

(1993-4: 271)

It is in this context of self-analysis, repentance, and reconstruction by authoritarian figures that Alba's projection of a future forgiveness is situated.

The integrity of the (gendered) body is restored, then, through the dismantling of an authoritarian regime which exchanges bodies as commodities, the property of the patriarch, in the different but interrelated economies of desire, discourse, and money. Women and other subaltern groups reappropriate their bodies through acts of resistance that simultaneously rewrite the political discourse of the Chilean Left. The strategic foundationalism of bodies can play a multiplicity of roles in this process. First it celebrates—without idealizing—the female body which has traditionally been discursively deployed to sublimate the male body, while male bodies are desublimated, brought under scrutiny in a deconstruction of their phantom identification with the phallus of power (Gimbernat de González 1991). It also reasserts the integrity of the body against physical and discursive violations, while separating the body into bodies which have historically been gendered differently. Finally, it provides a point of identification across the specific struggles of different women which acts as a mooring post in a journey of collective transformation.

By representing desires that cannot be reduced to the specularisms of desire for the phallus—whose rejection in Eva Luna is linked to Eva's reassertion of an autonomous gender difference—Allende undermines the monologic system of patriarchal difference. Instead of Lacan's descriptive/prescriptive family romance, Eva Luna, for example, starts from a refigured family in which the maternal and feminine are privileged. Eva first reaches out to the male other not in psychic rejection of her dead mother, nor even in substitution of that mother('s lack). She reaches out in desire and, in part, in response to the economic positioning of women and to the problematic models of femininity internalized by her other 'mothers' (Madrina and Elvira).

Eva undergoes a learning process which begins with love for the father, Riad Halabi. As she later realizes, his paternalist form of patriarchy permits her to appropriate the positive aspects of his discourse of femininity, to survive through his protection, and to be encouraged by him to depart on a journey towards an equal subject status which transcends paternalism. Nostalgia for the 'protection' afforded by a paternalist patriarchy was a common feature of the early years of the Pinochet regime, not only in the regime's own refiguration of the ideal family but amongst many women obliged to take on sole responsibility for family income in harsh economic conditions (Chuchryk 1989; Boyle 1992). In the novel, Eva's nostalgia is dissipated in a double movement. On the one hand, there is her realization that a paternalist regime infantilizes women. On the other, there is Riad Halabi's failure to recognize her as an independent woman who seeks equal subject status. She is thus outside the specularisms of paternalism, desirable neither as daughter nor as daughter/lover.

This experience is related to the reader in the critical self-commentary which characterizes key moments in the complex time shifts of the narrative voice (Aguirre Rehbein 1991). Another mode of critical appraisal is dialogue between characters of equal status united by bonds of affect and shared experience, as in Eva and Melecio-Mimí's discussions of bodies, genders, and relationships. Contested positions are set out in terms of both feelings and possible outcomes. Although, when Melecio-Mimí chooses not to have the operation, the narrative ultimately reinforces Eva's position, the different discourses have nonetheless illuminated their relationship and brought into play a range of evaluation systems. The final selection of one rather than another refers once again to the possibility of rejecting the violation of the body required to normalize Mimí in patriarchal gender terms. Having found a male lover who is not rigidly bound to the patriarchal order, Mimí goes on to make his/her gender troublingly public in Eva's telenovela.

Eva's journey takes her through a series of relationships with seductive patriarchal masculinities. However she finally chooses not the Romantic hero Huberto—whose performance of machismo continues in the gendered politics of the guerrilla group—but the contrasting male character Rolf Carlé. Despite their different histories Eva and Rolf are able to construct a common, hybrid, narrative together. Or rather Eva constructs one for them both. It is significant that, despite their equal socio-economic status, shared politics, companionship, and erotic compatibility, as in the basic pattern of romance literature there is still a difference to address—in this case Rolf's emotional difficulties: 'Ese hombre tan veloz cuando se trata de captar una imagen con la cámara, resulta bastante torpe ante sus propias emociones' (That man is quick to catch an image on film but pretty sluggish when it comes to his own emotions) (1988: 279).

Their relationship rejects configurations of unequal complementarity, absolute incommunication, or domination/submission. Instead it proposes an equality that works not through the abolition of difference (which would mean the death of the subject) or through the subsuming of one difference into the realm of the other (the logic of specularity) but through respect for what Jacques Derrida terms 'the trace of the other'. Here the reassertion of gender difference functions to preserve the integrity of ethnic and other differences in a rearticulation of hybrid micro and macro identities. So, where Karrer reads the metaphors of fusion in Allende's writing as part of a homogeneous post-war mestizaje, I would argue a need to differentiate between specific ideologies of mestizaje in the context of emergent articulations of hybridity and transculturation.³

Yet we do need to look at the effects of the heterosexual focus in Allende's work, both locally and more broadly: in relation to the regime of lo no dicho (the unsaid) and the growing audibility of lesbian voices in Chilean women's groups, but also in relation to the global reception of Allende's work in contexts where the politics of sexuality have played a more crucial role in the 1980s. These other reterritorializations of her texts need to consider whether their magic realism resists or risks reinforcing the exoticism and hierarchical otherness of Latin America, and the tendency to represent machismo as a 'Latin' problem. I will argue that the discourse of magical realism in Lacasa de los espíritus challenges the capitalist destruction of nature and people not merely with a picture of suffering victims but with alternative knowledges and economic relations, forcing the Western reader to engage with them. Through the family of Rolf Carlé, Eva Luna can in some ways be seen to take this process further, placing authoritarian regimes and patriarchal relations in Latin America in juxtaposition with Fascist European regimes of the 1930s. This pre-empts the discourse of Latin America as a continent predis-posed to authoritarian politics. At the same time it explores the colonial and postcolonial relationships between the two continents through Rolf's wanderings (including his period in the determinedly isolationist enclave of his aunt and uncle) and through the figure of Professor Jones, while problematizing masculinities in Europe as well as Latin America.

The question remains whether, given the situation of a double censorship—that of the regime's compulsory heterosexuality, and the women's movement's initial inability to move beyond the association of lesbianism with an imperialist, man-hating version of Western feminism—we can nonetheless mobilize lesbian and/or homoerotic desire in Allende's texts. And whether, even in this highly coded form, it can still disrupt the compulsory heterosexuality that may be pivotal to authoritarian masculinity and social relations. If we accept Adrienne Rich's theorization of a lesbian continuum, rivalry for any kind of male attention can be resituated along this continuum as forms of appreciation, affect, and solidarity. In this way, the self-love of women can resist patriarchy without recourse to representations of physical lovemaking. The view that the containment of women's erotic desire and pleasure within heterosexual relations requires a form of self-rejection, even self-hatred, would be displaced by a concept of self-love which can include a fully erotic lesbianism but does not depend on it. In this picture erotic desire is displaced from the central position it commanded—at least in Western politics—in the 1970s and 1980s and placed on a continuum, or field, of positively valued relations between women and between women and men. Relations between men are not reconstructed to the same extent in Allende's work. The sole instance of an openly homoerotic relation—Melecio-Mimí and Aravena—is caught up in Melecio's hatred of his own male body, although this becomes a partial self-acceptance as transvestite when he turns down the opportunity to have his body surgically remodelled as female. This seems to suggest that the patriarchal regime is less amenable to micro resistance and modification by men than by women.

If, as Mario Rojas has suggested, the relationship between Férula and Clara in La casa de los espíritus may be read as oneway lesbian desire it is hardly a positive representation (Rojas 1986). In its possessiveness it is a specularism of her brother's authoritarian, controlling desire, in which woman is once again object or private property. Yet, as Rojas goes on to argue, Férula is part of the textual opposition between the 'amor/cadena' (chained love) of the Trueba dynasty and the 'amor libre' (free love) of the Del Valle women (1986: 73). Nonetheless, as the clearest coded representation of lesbian desire it remains problematic.

The concept of a 'lesbian continuum' still allows us to read the all-female households, the friendships, sisterhood, and even the political consciousness-raising and alliance between the women in the concentration camp and between Ana Díaz and Alba at the end of the novel as instances of the self-love that empowers women and makes it possible to resist the system of misogyny. Like Férula and Clara in La casa de los espíritus or Eva and Rolf's cousins in Eva Luna, all transform their rivalry for male attention into friendship. However, it remains the case that the fulfilment of erotic pleasure in mutual love between equals is exclusively located in the (future) heterosexual relationship between Alba and Manuel in the former novel and between Rolf and Eva in the latter. Similarly, Melecio-Mimí's homosexual relationship with Aravena is represented as an attenuated version of dominant-submissive relations between a purely performative femininity and a powerful masculinity. Although set in political opposition to the authoritarian regime this masculinity still represents the name of the father for Rolf, whom Aravena addresses as hijo (son). Literally and metaphorically miles from Rolf's tyrannical biological father, he is none the less in power.

Here too, however, the text projects a dynamic of potential change. The possibility of the guerrillas entering the sphere of democratic political power and Rolf's defiance of his 'father's' injunction not to do anything too risky both point to the emergence of new relationships between men. Within such a relationship Melecio-Mimí, for example, would no longer need to deny the male body as the embodiment of the phallic order. In the novel, this need is positioned in terms of Melecio's brutal experiences and therefore figures as a historically produced desire, rather than the genetically imprinted imperative of the discourse first mobilized to explain his/her sense of self. However, there is nothing comparable for male readers to the spectrum of female to female relationships in Allende's writing: the mother-daughter relationships which permit change without requiring absolute separation or alienation; the sisterhood which moves from a biological representation, which acquires political and historical dimensions in La casa de los espíritus, to the metaphorical mother and sister relationships in Eva Luna. Even the male guerrillas—that potential site of homoeroticism and non-biological brotherhood and, perhaps, misogynist homosociality—remain locked in the mode of charismatic leadership.

This returns us to the issue of the mobilizing potential of texts which represent problems as well as solutions. Eva adopts a fraternal, friendly relationship with Huberto that is imbued with its own erotic history and posited as a temporary political alliance. However, it is rejected as a model for ideal relations between women and men within a narrative that ends in transition—political transition in the state, transitional relations between women and men—as the Utopian discourse of a reworked romance is both relativized and reiterated.

The representation of bodies in Allende's work is inseparable from the issue of her magical realism. Critics have broadly tended either to focus on Allende's debt to García Márquez or to read it as technique. Philip Swanson (1994) gives both of these tendencies a political twist in his analysis of La casa de los espíritus, and concludes that the magical eventually retreats as the women become more politically active. However, his assimilation of the magical to happy times now departed and his reduction of magical discourses to the status of anachronisms seem rather schematic. The early part of the novel has its share of horror after all, and the loss of the house identified with Clara is part of 'la época del estropicio' (the destructive era) in which the Pinochet coup takes place (Swanson 1994: 232). Moreover, the novel does not seem to support the parallel between Clara's magic and Trueba's fantasies asserted by Swanson. Rather, Clara's magic is recuperated by Alba in her (collective) narrative while Trueba finally comes to view his own law as part of a ninety-year history of lies.

A more productive line of enquiry is opened up by William Rowe's rearticulation of magical-realism, which he equates broadly with 'the suspension of Enlightenment rationalism with its emotion of superstition' (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 214). He traces its development to 'the imposition of the label "idolatry" upon native cultures [which] both foregrounded magic and denied it any cognitive dimension' (1991: 214). Magic thus became a marginal, syncretic,

alternative knowledge … shared by different social classes [and] primarily the province of women … In a second sense, insofar as the term has been used say of Arguedas' work, it involves native ritual practices which include not only the idea of magic as action produced by 'irrational' agencies but also a network of shared meanings which the practitioner engages with and reproduces.

(Rowe and Schelling 1991: 214)

In neither case is it reducible to the fantasy projections of individual desire.

Rowe goes on to note that magical belief is not treated exclusively as positive, but that its legitimation 'can be a vindication of pre-capitalist culture, against the logic of capitalist accumulation and positivist social engineering' (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 214). To this extent Allende's refashioning of the national allegory in La casa de los espíritus can be seen as a representation of a hybrid culture which differs from both the authoritarian capitalist modernization discourse of the regime and from the proletarianized vision of the Unidad Popular. Rather than an uncritical romanticization of campesino and female magical discourses, it is an evaluation of their power/knowledge relationships from the perspective of an outsider discourse—a discourse which proposes an ethics and politics of equality which does not threaten the integrity of equal embodied subjects. Where either the magical or the scientific are analysed as constructing subjects unequally, perpetuating inequality and/or violating the integrity of bodies, they are critiqued or abandoned. This is a postmodern relativization of discourses which confronts the politico-ethical dilemma of addressing conflict between discursive regimes. It also effects the troubling of the discursive boundaries between magical and non-magical to which Rowe refers.

In La casa de los espíritus, for example, campesino knowledge is represented as more efficacious than Western scientific knowledge in dealing with the plague of ants. This is a particularly richly layered scene in which the son who is modernizing distances himself from the discourse of his father yet has to recognize its validity. At the same time, the Western capitalist system is savaged for its 'black magic', for its reduction of people, the land, and knowledge to commodities, and for the large-scale destruction of peoples and territories set in train by these economic and discursive relations. Furthermore, the campesino resists this system with a narrative which symbolizes an alternative discursive relation to Nature, that of a conversation which places humans on an equal, not superior, level with the other inhabitants of the earth in relations of ecological negotiation. At first the son and the capitalist can only read this narrative literally, from the perspective of discourses which are constructed in the devaluation of the other. However, in the alliances between the different generations of campesino men and the Del Valle women the narrative proposes a place for both groups in an alternative narrative of the nation, presenting campesino patriarchy as different from the landowner's yet still in need of transformation.

The scene which ties these issues most closely to the integrity of bodies in La casa de los espíritus is the much commented-upon autopsy/rape of Rosa which leads to the symbolic silencing of Clara. Debra Castillo has written persuasively of the productive potential of analysing silence in writing by women. In this case it is a form of internal resistance to the regime which continues in Clara's spiritualist activities. As Swanson has noted, her second silence is part of an outward-looking rebellion which takes various public forms (Swanson 1994: 228).

Like silence, the discourse of love has made some critics uncomfortable and needs to be analysed in its specific (re)articulations. This is not the domain of the isolated couple of heterosexual romance, in which the dominant male and submissive female supplement one another's lack. Instead it offers a spectrum of affective relations which construct subjects respectful of the trace of the other, a will to relationship, perhaps, which can construct an equality in difference.

Towards the end of Eva Luna, Eva's bodily integrity is restored when she realizes that she has started menstruating again. She inscribes this in a discourse of love as an openness to a relation of mutual desire with the other, in this case with Rolf. This begins in companionship, in shared dreams and fears in the jungle, taking on an erotic dimension. It does not exhaust their relations, however. Eva is embedded in multiple relationships with others, across a spectrum of affect which sometimes includes sex but in which noneroticized relations are highly valued. The dual ending may reintroduce a particularly valued gran amor (great love) but it effectively relativizes Romantic versions of it: unlike Zulema, Eva will not die for or in love. She seeks not to annihilate Rolf's difference or her own, but to weave a collective story in which each participates equally, a conversation in which divergent histories are brought together. The Utopia inscribed here can thus be read in terms of the Chile of the transition to democracy. Suspicion of the authoritarian regime's motivation is coupled with hope for the possibilities of a better future. This hope emerges in the privileging of gender difference in the empowerment of women readers, the continuing struggle in both authoritarian and pluralist regimes, the representation of political alliances with Left men.⁴

The deconstruction of the Liberal Enlightenment subject has tended to rearticulate an ideal postmodern subject as infinitely mobile, while the deconstruction of oppressive sex/gender configurations in Western societies has tended to reduce the body to pure libidinality. As Spivak (1993) has reiterated, if the subject 'effect' is 'useful'—and in the case of the disappearances it is fundamental—then it can be deployed strategically (1993: 5). In La casa de los espíritus, economically privileged subjects are transformed through respect for the other, while Eva Luna's self at the end of her narration is indelibly marked with the traces of the others who have peopled her life in different kinds of relationships. The vision of subjectivity which emerges is kaleidoscopic, and memory mobilizes history not in the real time of events but in the simultaneity of each successive present,

Yo escribía cada día un nuevo episodio, inmersa por completo en el mundo que creaba con el poder omnímodo de las palabras, transformada en un ser disperso, producida hasta el infinito, viendo mi propio reflejo en múltiples espejos, viviendo innumerables vidas, hablando con muchas voces.

(Allende 1988: 273)

Every day I would write a new episode, completely immersed in the world I was creating with the all-encompassing power of words, transformed into a scattered self, repeated to infinity, glimpsing my own image in multiple mirrors, living innumerable lives, talking with many voices.

In this narrative various subaltern figures undergo fables of transformation, yet Allende's texts do not explore 'the heterogeneity of the subaltern' (Spivak 1993: 5) to the same degree in all cases. Broadly speaking La casa de los espíritus recognizes the subaltern nana but situates her entirely in the borrowed discourses of the dominant order. In Eva Luna, by contrast, Consuelo is the author of counter-discourses and Eva becomes an author of publicly circulated (televized) stories. Kavita Panjabi has argued persuasively that the figure of Tránsito Soto moves from the margins of Trueba's world to a central role which illustrates the interdependency of prostitute and wife in patriarchy and the need for the struggle of the women's movements to encompass all women (Panjabi 1991). She is nonetheless a sketchy figure in comparison with the narrative space occupied by the privileged female characters, and to this extent contributes to the long history of writing in Latin America which effectively silences subaltern women.

So while the integrity of bodies in Allende's work represents a powerful counter-discourse to both authoritarian and pluralist regimes, these texts cannot be said to harness the empirical 'thickness of description' (Geertz 1983) which testimonial pursues with varying degrees of success. They do, however, reposition different subaltern groups and legitimate subaltern discourses, while, in Eva Luna, subaltern women move from the textual margins of Allende's writing to the foreground.

Both locally and globally, then, Allende's writing constructs readings which are intimately bound to the political struggles of women. In the seminar room, absences and problematic issues can be productively mobilized to discuss the sex/gender/sexuality systems of different cultural contexts. The readability of these texts and their critical engagement with familiar narratives—family romance, the telenovela—enables political, ethical, and discursive dilemmas to be worked through in relation to theory which is otherwise often intractable in its performativity, universalism, and abstraction. This is a space where it is also possible to bring together other texts whose availability is often limited. The question remains, however, as to how work carried out in the 'teaching machine' can play a wider role in the transformation of postcolonial relations, in different discursive spaces and political movements.

Notes

1. All references will be to the following editions of Allende's novels: La casa de los espíritus, 18th edn. (Barcelona, 1985), De amor y de sombra, 3rd edn. (Barcelona, 1984), Eva Luna, 3rd edn. (Mexico, DF). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
2. Consuelo's employer, Professor Jones, has no interest in trying to save the indian's life and, indeed, is eager to add an indian mummy to his 'museo de estatuas humanas' (museum of human statues), in true colonialist fashion.
3. Mestizaje is affirmed uncritically in Karrer's article as it has been in much academic writing on Latin America. For a more critical discussion of recent Latin American theorizations of hybridity, see Travesía, 1/2 (1992), and Rowe and Schelling (1991).
4. These alliances assume a clear consciousness of the machismo that has to be resisted, not least as a construction of desire in some forms of romance. Carlos Monsivaís is one of the few contemporary male cultural critics in Latin America to analyse machismo in both its historical and contemporary modes. For an introduction to his work which includes articles by a range of male critics, see Fem's special issue, 'Hombres', 18 (Apr.-May 1981).

List of Works Cited

Aguirre Rehbein, Edna (1991), 'Isabel Allende's Eva Luna and the Act/Art of Narrating', in Riquelme Rojas and Aguirre Rehbein (1991), 179-88.

Allende, Isabel (1984), De amor y de sombra, 3rd edn. (Barcelona).

——. (1985), La casa de los espíritus, 18th edn. (Barcelona).

——. (1988), Eva Luna, 3rd edn. (Mexico, DF).

Boyle, Catherine (1992), Chilean Theatre 1973-1985 (Rutherford, NJ).

Carvalho, Susan de (1993-4), 'The Male Narrative Perspective in the Fiction of Isabel Allende', Journal of Hispanic Research, 2.

Castillo, Debra (1992), Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca, NY).

Chuchryk, Patricia (1989), in Jane S. Jaquette (ed.), The Women's Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to Democracy (Boston, 1989), 149-84.

Franco, Jean (1992), 'Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private', in George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores (eds.), On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (Minneapolis, 1992).

——. (1990), Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (London).

García Johnson, Ronie-Richele (1994), 'The Struggle for Space: Feminism and Freedom in The House of the Spirits ', Revista Hispánica Moderna, 47/1 (June).

Geertz, Clifford (1983), Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York).

Gimbernat de González, Ester (1991), 'Entre principio y final: la madre/materia de la escritura en Eva Luna ', in Riquelme Rojas and Aguirre Rehbein (1991).

Gubar, Susan (1994), 'Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of "It Takes One To Know One"', Feminist Studies, 20/3 (Fall), 453-73.

Karrer, Wolfgang (1991), 'Transformation and Transvestism in Eva Luna,' in Riquelme Rojas and Aguirre Rehbein (1991), 151-63.

Martin, Gerald (1989), Journeys Through the Labyrinth (London).

Mora, Gabriela (1987), 'Las novelas de Isabel Allende y el papel de la mujer como ciudadana', Ideologies and Literature (Spring).

Panjabi, Kavita (1991), 'Tránsito Soto: From Periphery to Power', in Riquelme Rojas and Aguirre Rehbein (1991), 11-19.

Riquelme Rojas, Sonia, and Aguirre Rehbein, Edna (1991) (eds.), Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende's Novels (New York).

Rojas, Mario (1986), 'Aproximación socio-linguística a la narrativa de Isabel Allende', in Marcello Coddou, Los libros tienen sus propios espíritus (Xalapa).

Rowe, William, and Schelling, Vivienne (1991), Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London).

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine (London).

Swanson, Philip (1994), 'Tyrants and Trash: Sex, Class and Culture in La casa de los espíritus ', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 71: 217-37.

Zurita, Raúl (1993), 'Chile: Literature, Language and Society (1973-1983)', Travesía, 2/2.

RONIE-RICHELE GARCIA-JOHNSON (ESSAY DATE 1 MARCH 1991)

SOURCE: Garcia-Johnson, Ronie-Richele. "The Struggle for Space: Feminism and Freedom in The House of the Spirits." Revista Hispanica Moderna 47, no. 1 (June 1994): 184-93.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a thesis presentation on March 1, 1991, Garcia-Johnson examines the subtle feminist assertion in The House of the Spirits, noting that the women in the novel gain empowerment by first controlling their bodies and their living spaces.

Ayúdame a subir, Lucrecia, por estas paredes, veré mi dolor; si no hundiré con alaridos la casa de mi padre.

Melibea, La Celestina, Auto XIX

The temporal setting of the action in The House of the Spirits¹ spans fifty years²—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. Michael Handelsman has proposed that Nivea symbolized the early suffragist movement, Clara, more personal statements of liberty, Blanca, the movement towards free and healthy passion, and Alba, the consolidation of these distinct forms of protest and their most recent successes (57-62). Marjorie Agosín asserts that the novel is "feminocéntrica" (455). Patricia Hart argues that Clara and Blanca "indulge in passive behavior" (50). Gabriela Mora has insisted that, while both male and female characters broke some stereotypes, Allende's female characters were not feminists (53-61). While the insightful arguments of Handelsman, Hart, Agosín and Mora lead to various conclusions, a spatial interpretation of the novel contributes to the idea that the Trueba women were proponents of their own independence.

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 the 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" (36).³ According to Trueba, his betrothed would have never been "stolen" from him by "death" (34) 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 maneuvers. 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. This spatial analysis agrees with Agosín's interpretation; according to Agosín, Clara "inhabited her own space and her own imagination" (452)⁴ and thus "evaded the presence of her spouse" (452)⁵

Clara had developed the habit of seeking alternative mental spaces in which to dwell as a child in her father's home.⁶ 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.⁷ 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" (113). 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 …" (113). This last sentence is a key to Allende's use of pregnancy as a metaphor. Allende has said: "I need long periods of silence … because the books build up inside of me little by little. It's like expecting a baby for some time" (Foster 45). Clara was pregnant with more than a physical child, she was pregnant with love, creativity, and what would later be born as a text. This confirms Agosín's idea that Clara's silence was far from passive, it was a kind of writing (450). Whether Clara's silence is interpreted as a retreat, a refuge, as Agosín has termed it (453), or as a clever victory over the mundane, it is clear that she entered an alternative space, a "closed world free from any masculine insertion" (Handelsman 59)⁸ 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," (113) 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" (96). 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" (96).⁹ Trueba could build a house to contain [his] 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.¹⁰

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.¹¹ 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 carnivalization¹² 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 (Agosín 452), 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.

(224)

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.¹³ 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 friends¹⁴ 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 Rosicrucians, and the three Mora sisters. Clara's retinue was gradually pushed into the back rooms of the house …

(224)

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" (225). 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 Truebas's spliced relationship, but of the separation of the sexes.¹⁵

Trueba believed that the spirituality that captivated his wife and her friends was for women only.¹⁶ Before Nicolás departed to India, he told him "I hope you return a man, because I'm fed up with all your eccentricities" (271). 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" (229).

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 strength¹⁷ to survive.¹⁸ This presentation of men and women is based on beliefs which are prevalent in Latin America.¹⁹ The author of The House of the Spirits herself has stated that "at times science is less efficient than magic."²⁰ 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" (Allende, Address), 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.²¹ While the "façade of the house underwent no alterations" (225) 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" (225). The house belonged to Clara.

Campos discusses this conversion of space and, combining her ideas with those of Gastón Bachelard, concludes that the house "is Clara" … the space of the "unconsciousness, of the Imagination, of the mother" (24).²² Agosín states that Clara is the "soul" of the house on the corner (454).²³ The validity of these ideas is confirmed with Allende's statement that the basement of the house was a womb (Allende, Personal). 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 [as] 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.²⁴

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 [to] 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.²⁵ Instead, she and Pedro Tercero García met far from the structures, the houses and the huts, which symbolized the tyranny²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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" (68). In fact, as time passed, the women of the "big house on the corner" were responsible for the renovation and rebirth of the house. Bachelard is helpful with the concept of the renewal of the house as well: "housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch" (68). 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. For, in Agosín's words, Alba was "the one destined to leave the benevolent space of the house on the corner"²⁸ to join the struggle for social justice (456).

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" (329). 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.²⁹

The basement is, as the reader will remember, also a metaphor for the womb.³⁰ 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.³¹ Alba and Miguel utilized the long-forgotten artifacts they found to turn their underground "nest" into an "nuptial chamber" (329). 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.³² 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. In Campos's words, they were the "salvation of the future" (25).³³

The patriarchy, however, manipulated more than the freedom of the Trueba women.³⁴ 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".

Notes

This article originally appeared as one chapter of a senior honors thesis presented to the Department of History and Literature at Harvard College on March 1, 1991. The complete thesis may be found in the Harvard Archives under the name of Ronie-Richele Garcia. I wish to express my gratitude to Ellen Lokos, my thesis advisor and mentor, for her excellent guidance and support as this work progressed. I am also indebted to the Ford Foundation for the fellowship grant which allowed me to revise this thesis.

1. The edition referred to is The House of the Spirits. Trans. Magda Bogin. New York: Bantam, 1986. All cited page numbers will refer to this edition.
2. For an example, see Marcelo Coddou ("Historia" 170). Also see Coddou (Leer 82), where he argues that, in Allende's novel, women have access to more than their immediate spaces.
3. Readers of Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares will remember the Estremaduran's paranoid determination to keep his wife imprisoned in the space of his house, and the disastrous results of this obscession in "El celoso extremeño."
4. This is my translation. Clara "habitaba por su propio espacio y su propia imaginación."
5. This is my translation of "evade la presencia de su marido."
6. Agosín supports this idea. She argues that Clara found refuge from "poder autoritario" within herself (451) and also notes that Clara's space was one of magic (449).
7. I disagree with Hart's conclusion that clairvoyance in the novel is a metaphor for passivity (53). Agosín's assertion that Clara's silence was not passive (449-450) supports the notion that Clara's preoccupation with the spiritual was not submissive—Trueba could not restrain Clara in the world to which she transcended.
8. This is my translation of "mundo cerrado y libre de cualquier intromisión masculina."
9. At this point, it is interesting to note the work of Jane S. Jaquette, who states that "The image of the female as mysterious, unfathomable, somehow beyond men's rules, is the second significant archetype in Latin American literature" (20).
10. Handelsman reminds his readers that despite Trueba's facile violation of the peasants, he could not penetrate Clara's interior; Clara had found a "personal state of feminine autonomy and liberty in a patriarchal and machista world that was represented by Esteban" (59-60, my translation). The actual quote is "estado personal de autonomía y libertad femeninas en un mundo patriarcal y machista represando por Esteban."
11. Agosín speaks of Clara's social work "Clara brinda tenura y alimentos a todos los seres indigentes que deambulan por su inmensa casa de la esquina y, por extensión, en el país" (449). My translation: Clara invites tenderness and food to all indigent beings that walked through her immense house on the corner, and by extention, in the country."
12. The use of this word implies that Trueba's home was not static; it was unpredictable, like the streets described by Da Matta (208).
13. Women and men, of course, share logic as well as intuition. Allende's novel, however, seems to suggest that the differences between some men and women are found in the disparity between logic and intuition.
14. Handelsman suggests that these "eccentrics" represent Clara's court, and this metaphor implies Claras matriarchy and the "poder que la mujer ejerce en" (power that the woman exerts in Latin America (60).
15. In this discussion of the house and street in Brazil during carnival, Da Matta notes that "The street implies movement, novelty, and action, while the house implies harmony, warmth, and calm" (208). Clearly, the Trueba house seems to fit Da Matta's description of the street. This inversion of the street/house relationship reflects the idea that something was amiss in the "big house on the corner."
16. Muñoz notes that Esteban Trueba thought that the home, the kitchen, magic, and religion, were for women. He also refers to the power of the system of patriarchy. (442).
17. Talmor, for one, notes that with the exception of Jaime, women in the novel "grasp … what is good, true, and beautiful" while "men grasp properties, capital" and "jobs" (310).
18. See Earle. He believes that Clara's testimony allowed her to survive, and that "the true heart of literature is neither pleasure nor knowledge, but survival" (551).
19. According to Evelyn P. Stevens, "Marianismo," (not to be confused with a Catholic movement,) the "cult of feminine spiritual superiority, which teaches that women are semi-divine, morally superior to and spiritually stronger than men," is "just as prevalent as machismo" (91) in Latin America.
20. This was Allende's reply to a question about the episode of Mr. Brown and the ants: "a veces la ciencia es menos eficiente que la magia" (Moody, "Conversación" 58).
21. Rojas discusses the idea that the patriarch loses control of his home and he links the idea of Clara's importance to the house in Bachelard's work. Rojas's interpretation, however, leads him towards his concept of the "imagen caleidoscópica" ("Caleidoscopio" 84).
22. This is my translation. "es Clara"…"inconsciente, del Imaginario, de la madre."
23. This is my translation of "alma."
24. This suggestion is supported by the fact that, after her death, the house "changed into a ruin" and the garden "became a thick underbrush" (296). Clara's room, like her ghost, "remained intact" (297). Handelsman notes that the Truebas's world decayed after Clara's death and comments on her importance (60). Rojas also notes this opening of the house ("Aproximación" 96).
25. Campos agrees that Trueba's home in the city is representative of the patriarch (24).
26. Handelsman states that Blanca "derrumba las barreras sociales entre la clase pobre y la burguesía chilena" ("collapsed the social barriers between the poor class and the Chilean bourgeiose") (61), as she made love to García; Blanca and her lover thus escaped more than tyranny, but the social system as they left Trueba's structured property.
27. Here it should be noted that the fruit of the prohibited union was a cross between the rich and the poor, the elites and the peasants, the city and the country, as Cánovas has explained (122).
28. This is my translation of "la destinada a salir del espacio benevolente de su casa de la esquina."
29. René Campos cites Bachelard's discussion of the significance of the basement and notes that the family treasures were located there (24).
30. Campos states that the basement is the womb. Her interpretation of the consequences of this idea differs from mine. Paraphrasing her argument, the womb is the most intimate space of the mother, and the space of the past, of Imagination, and of myth (25).
31. See Bachelard's chapter entitled "Nests" (90-104).
32. Most critics agree on this point. Hart goes as far [as] to say that Alba represents a "new generation" which broke "the chain of passivity" (54). (I have already argued that Alba's mother and grandmother were not passive.)
33. This is my interpretation of "salvación del futuro".
34. Mora agrees with this statement. She writes that Allende's novels "demonstrate the oppression and the dependence in the woman of the oligarchy as well as in the poor peasant woman." (54). This is my translation of "muestran la opresión y la dependencia tanto en la mujer del oligarca como en la campesina pobre".

Works Cited

Agosín, Marjorie. "Isabel Allende: La casa de los espíritus" Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 35 (1985): 448-458.

Allende, Isabel. La casa de los espíritus. Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1982.

——. The House of the Spirits. Trans. Magda Bogin. New York: Bantam, 1986.

——. Address. 31 January 1991.

——. Personal Conversation. 31 January 1991.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Campos, Rene. "La casa de los espíritus: mirada, espacio, discurso de la otra historia." Los libros tienen sus propios espíritus. Ed. Marcelo Coddou. Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1986, 21-28.

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. Novelas Ejemplares. Zaragoza: Libreria Bosch, 1974.

Coddou, Marcelo. "La casa de los espíritus: De la historia a la historia." Texto Critico 11 (1985): 165-172.

——. Para leer a Isabel Allende: Introduccion a La casa de los espíritus Concepcion, Chile: Ediciones Literatura Americana Reunida, 1988.

Da Matta, Roberto. "Carnival in Multiple Planes." Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: ISHI, 1984.

Earle, Peter G. "Literature as survival: Allende's The House of the Spirits." Contemporary Literature 28 (1987): 543-554.

Foster, Douglas. "Isabel Allende unveiled." Mother Jones 13 1988: 42-46.

Glickman, Nora. "Los personajes femeninos en La casa de los espíritus" Los libros tienen sus propios espíritus. Ed. Marcelo Coddou. Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1986, 54-60.

Handelsman, Michael H. "La casa de los espíritus y la evolucion de la mujer moderna." Letras Femeninas 14 (1988): 51-63.

Hart, Patricia. Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickenson UP, 1989.

Jacquette, Jane S. "Literary Archetypes and Female Role Alternatives: The Woman and the Novel in Latin America." Female and Male in Latin America. Ed. Ann Pescatello. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 1973, 89-101.

Moody, Michael. "Una conversacion con Isabel Allende. Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 16 (1987): 51-59.

Mora, Gabriela. "Las novelas de Isabel Allende y el papel de la mujer como ciudadana." Ideologies and Literature 2 (1987): 53-61.

Munoz, Willy O. "Las re escrituras de La casa de los espiritus." Discurso Literario 5 (1988): 433-454.

Rojas, Fernando de. La Celestina. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989.

Rojas, Mario A. "La casa de los espiritus, de Isabel Allende:

Un caleidoscopio de espejos desordenados." Los libros tienen sus propios espíritus. Ed. Marcelo Coddou. Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1986, 83-90.

Stevens, Evelyn P. "Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America." Female and Male in Latin America. Ed. Ann Pescatello. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 1973, 89-101.

Talmor, Sascha. "The House of the Truebas." Durham University Journal 18(2) (1989): 309-312.