SOURCE: "Mask and Mirror: Isabel Allende's Mechanism for Justice in The House of the Spirits," in Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call for Justice, University Press of Mississippi, 1994, pp. 74-90.

[Kovach is an American educator and critic who has written works on such subjects as ethnic American literature and literary theory. In the following essay, she examines the ways in which Allende propagates a "prophetic vision of female integrity and justice" in The House of the Spirits, focusing on the role of memories in the book and Allende's narrative strategies.]

       No one brings suit justly,
         no one goes to law honestly;
       They rely on empty pleas, they speak lies,
         conceiving mischief and begetting iniquity.
 
                                      (Isa. 59:4)

The prophet Isaiah thus envisions how the lack of truth, righteousness, and integrity in relationships brings the divisiveness of sin into the world. Injustice splinters the wholeness of creation, causing a disintegration of personal and interpersonal integrity. Novelist Isabel Allende echoes this cry when she tells an interviewer: "I feel terribly angry at the world. I think that the world is a crazy place, very unjust and unfair and violent, and I'm angry at that. I want to change the rules, change the world." Such a changing of the world requires, in religious terminology, a conversion, a method of promoting reconciliation. But reconciliation must begin with oneself, and Allende seems to realize this requirement. Suffering isolation from family and country after going into exile as a result of a military takeover, Allende felt the need to recapture her inner being. She turned to writing, that very significant social practice embraced by those seeking to express both the spiritual and social requirements of integrity and justice. Her own spiritual goals upon writing her first novel, The House of the Spirits (which began as a personal letter to her dying grandfather still back in Chile), centered on a recovery of identity, a reconstruction of self, a fostering of emotional, psychological, and spiritual integrity. By recovering and recounting her memories Allende gained the kind of wholeness that ontological liberationists cite as a first step toward the attainment of economic and social justice.

Although usually associated more readily with the current Latin American aesthetic of magic realism and with secular political fiction rather than with theological perspectives, Allende says that The House of the Spirits achieved a spiritual goal: "I felt that my roots had been recovered and that during that patient exercise of daily writing I had also recovered my own soul." Allende's statement implies her sensitivity to that insight found in Isaiah that connects social justice with personal integrity. An inner sense of worth and wholeness that comes from connection to and recognition of family and culture remains a basic prerequisite for achieving social justice. What Allende achieved in her own life by writing the novel is reflected in the novel as well, for it illuminates how reconciliation and mediation, particularly within the self, work together as necessary precursors to achieving biblical justice, Moreover, Allende's novel highlights through the women characters a particularly feminist focus that reflects biblical feminists' concern for recovering human integrity within the female person and by means of female intercession.

The first step to understanding the mechanism Allende uses in The House of the Spirits to set up a prophetic vision of female integrity and justice is to look at how the novel presents the role of memories. Achieving personal integrity in the face of experiences and social structures that have served to shatter, oppress, or repress identity cannot be accomplished by simple imperative. Integration requires an exploration of possibilities, a trying-on of alternatives, a viewing and reviewing of experiences. Continual reintegration by means of seeing memories from all angles, in both masked and mirrored ways, allows—as we shall see—for the reconciliation of self. This process establishes in The House of the Spirits a framework for conversion, a literal "turning toward," an instance of what Kierkegaard described as the ancient ideal of "recollection": "just as they [the Greeks] taught that all knowledge is a recollection, so will modern philosophy teach that the whole of life is a repetition." The life that Allende "repeats" and "re-collects" throughout the novel by means of the women characters is her own and that of her family and country. Yet the novel points as well toward the possibilities of reconciliation inherent in all humanity; it speaks out for the conversion of oppressive social structures.

By writing, Allende breaks the oppression of her own silence and implicitly joins in the Latin American movement of concientizacion. This process of recovering the lost, of remembering what has been neglected, of reconstructing what has been left out, of reclaiming a forfeited heritage, is at the heart of a revolutionary liberation theology. This process of self-liberation "aims at breaking through the pervasive 'culture of silence,' that defines the oppressed condition, by an inner resurrection of soul that transforms a person from an object of conditions which determine his reality and consciousness to a subject of his own history and destiny." Perhaps more importantly, this movement prompts people to question the dominant power structure that forms the basis of their whole inherited tradition. The women of Allende's novel both individually and together shatter the silence that sustains and contributes to oppression; they discover the power of repeated memories; they forge a new personal and cultural consciousness positing a chain of connection, love, and reconciliation. Forms of repetition in their lives help lead to self-liberation and to reconciliation beyond the self.

This radical recovery and reconstruction is at the center of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's ground-breaking In Memory of Her, a work that uses a combination of New Testament historiography and theology to define a "discipleship of equals": "Feminist biblical spirituality must be incarnated in a historical movement of women struggling for liberation. It must be lived in prophetic commitment, compassionate solidarity, consistent resistance, affirmative celebration, and in grassroots organizations of the ekklesia of women." This stance promotes unity and reconciliation; it provides a formula for justice that arises from relationships supported by repeated memories. Indeed, the very essence of solidarity for Fiorenza resides in the reclaiming of the lost: "to insist that women's history is an integral part of early Christian historiography [implies] the search for roots, for solidarity with our foresisters, and finally for the memory of their sufferings, struggles, and powers as women." Remembering this erased "her" takes the form of recollection, both as a kind of religious contemplation and as a recalling to mind of the temporarily forgotten. Solidarity is achieved by means of a recitation of memories, a repetition of the historical details that women share.

Such unity underpins the biblical call for justice, an appeal that centers on good and proper relationships—with God, with nature, and with other human beings. The personal, God-centered ideal seeks conversion, personal integrity, and self-discovery, what John S. Dunne calls "self-appropriation"; reverence for nature asks for responsible and ongoing stewardship of creation; social commitment reaches out beyond the self and penetrates both the macrocosm of political institutions and the microcosm of family life. Yet of all the relationships highlighted by Scripture, the first—personal peace and reconciliation with God (always for the Christian a product of the inner working of God's grace in one's life)—is perhaps the most important since it inspires attachment to the other two. As a result, the process of self-appropriation, the constant, repeated becoming of what one is, remains a prerequisite for this ideal and ultimately allows integration of all relationships into an harmonious whole, creating an experience of the shalom ideal described by Nicholas Wolterstorff. The act of self-discovery is a crucial step that leads to justice.

Primarily by means of the women characters of The House of the Spirits, Allende reconstitutes the biblical feminists' formula of solidarity by means of various kinds of repetition to achieve self-appropriation and shalom. The image of the mask (the irrational, the unconscious, the soul) and the image of the mirror (the rational, the conscious, the self) provide a mechanism for tracing the inner integrative conversion necessary for this rather complex but ideal form of justice. Allende's method is to create and re-create the images and themes of mirror and mask in a way that brings together the double-sided coin that unites the rational and the irrational, the objective and the subjective, the analytic and the intuitive. Repetition in its mirrored state and repetition in its masked form become for Allende a mechanism for complete reconciliation and justice.

The House of the Spirits reveals a world rife with injustice and peopled with individuals who lack the righteous integrity needed for such reconciliation. A family chronicle tracing several generations, the novel presents a concatenation of conflicting patriarchies that serve merely to spawn a chain of hatred and revenge. Personally, characters in the novel experience social alienation, spiritual perplexity, and psychological instability. Socially, the work depicts mistreatment of women, the abuse of tenant farmers, and the squalor of the city shantytowns. Politically, injustice reigns in the excesses of the conservative right, the extremes of the left-wing socialist reformers, and the violence of the deposing military dictatorship. Institutional religion stands as an oppressive purveyor of guilt and fear and a self-serving supporter of the status quo. Even nature adds its share of terror, destruction, and pain with the devastations of earthquakes and plagues.

Much of Allende's view of the world stems, of course, from her experience of injustice in her native Latin America. Exiled for sixteen years in Venezuela after the assassination in 1973 of her uncle, the former Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens, Allende draws deeply upon her family history and the political upheaval in modern Chile. Yet she sides with Isaiah and the Psalmists who recognize the potential for divine and human justice, the hope for ultimate reconciliation for the faithful people of God: "Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness. But rebels and sinners shall be destroyed together, and those who forsake the LORD shall be consumed." Allende's hope is evidenced by her novelistic choices: she does not depict in The House of the Spirits merely an unjust, unfair, violent world. Like Isaiah, she denounces evil but also proclaims the potential for unity and equality; like the Psalmist, she demonstrates the possibilities for love in the world.

In recovering her own memories, Allende mirrors her own experiences and magically weaves a world in which women preserve their memories in various artistic forms, simultaneously breaking the silence of oppression and achieving solidarity. Clara's notebooks give witness to life; Blanca recounts the magic stories from her uncle Marcos's enchanted trunks; Alba cherishes the past in her own writing, succeeds in getting her grandfather to write his memories, and retrieves her grandmother's notebooks. Likewise, Rosa's fantastically embroidered tablecloth, Blanca's creches of imaginary animals, and Alba's amazing frescoes record the "wishes, memories, sorrows, and joys" of their lives. In every case, the recall of memories involves a constant and inexhaustible recurrence or repetition of shared actions, events, feelings that begin to carry out the program for community and remembering that Fiorenza advocates. Even the narrative structure of the novel itself reflects the goal of iterating personal memories in a way that mirrors the connection of the characters. The combination of Clara's notebooks (which span the whole period of her life), Alba's notes and experiences, and Esteban's reminiscences forges the essence of the three major personalities of the novel; the narration that shifts among these memories reflects these characters' close emotional and physical interrelation. Indeed, Clara's notebooks are organized according to events, not chronologically, to emphasize that the process of remembering in life often makes exact dates secondary to powerfully remembered personal experiences, events that can only be mirrored experientially rather than categorized systematically. Such repetition serves as a mirror of life and adds to the viewing and reviewing of self that eventually aids in the working out of conversion, redemption, reconciliation, and understanding. Repeated memories function as a mirror to bring into the open what is needed to realize emotional and spiritual integrity.

Another aspect of repetition appears in the image of the mask in which the action of concealing also serves, in a surreptitious way, to promote integration of the self and the soul. Early in the novel Nana tries to cure Clara's muteness by scaring her with innumerable costumes—much as one would try to cure a case of hiccups. In another instance where a type of healing is required, Férula is described as wearing an idol's mask when she returns from her agitated, detailed confession of what she witnessed as she peered through the partially opened door to Clara and Esteban's bedroom. Later, when she dies alone, having been expelled from the Trueba home by the wrathful Esteban, Férula is discovered decked out, masked, in finery found on the garbage dump. This masquerade shrouds her tortured soul yet speaks to the nature of the desires that her life of denial caused her to reject. Alba, too, knows the secret of the mask as she learns from her uncle Nicolas how to "conquer pain and other weaknesses of the flesh" by calling to mind countless examples of frightening, even macabre situations, or by inflicting physical pain so that she can learn to relax and let it pass through her. As a result, much later she does survive her ordeal of torture by masking reality and immersing herself in the task of retelling her story. In addition, the various establishments in which we meet the prostitute Transito Soto provide costumes that mask the truth of the situation and provide illusion for those for whom reality is unthinkable. The mask satisfies the inherent need for subconscious healing through the rehearsal of hidden, secret feelings. Only after the experience of such personal healing can the greater goal of reconciliation with the world and others successfully take place.

The narrative structure of the novel also adds another layer of mask. It contains an amalgam of first-person and third-person narratives, with Alba as the main compiler. The resulting shifts from the first person to the third, reflecting as well the "appropriation" of each person by each of the three narrators, keep the reader continually off balance in regard to point of view. The reader is made to experience at first hand a masking of voice, an (at least) intermittent veiling of person and reality. Moreover, the culling of event rather than chronology from Clara's notebooks may mirror many people's experience of life, but it also serves to incorporate a translucency that hides as much as it reveals. Reading the novel, then, becomes an experience of being transported into the sometimes hazy world of memories, the place where dreams, reminiscences, facts, guesses, wishes, and regrets intermingle.

Besides providing repeated thematic images, the juxtaposition of mask and mirror within the novel's narrative strategies begins to show how, in Jungian terms, the tensions between the irrational and the rational are evoked. Jung explains how elements sometimes found in dreams are not derived from the dreamer's personal experience but appear to be "aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind." Such irrational pieces, these "archetypes," are part of the so-called "collective unconscious," "the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal." As human beings we all share this collective heritage, manifested in ritual, dream, and literature. Feminist archetypal critics note how repeated rituals, especially their modern manifestations in the form of novels, aid in the process of recovery and healing: "The novel performs the same role in women's lives as do the Eleusinian, dying-god, and witchcraft rituals—a restoration through remembering, crucial to our survival." Allende's juxtaposition of irrational mask and rational mirror in her novel serves to move her characters to these deeper levels of conscious and unconscious experience. As Allende also knows, recovering the lost requires the exercise of memory and the result is a reintegration of self that leads to personal integrity and the possibility of justice in the world. Creative expression, as in Allende's own exercise of it in The House of the Spirits and in the various examples of it in the lives of the female characters in the novel, provides an ideal landscape for repeating memories in their masked and mirrored forms in order to work out issues of identity and integrity.

Although, roughly speaking, the mask in The House of the Spirits symbolizes irrational myth and the mirror evokes rational, objective reality, the interrelationship of these elements is complex. Jung holds that the artist is peculiarly attuned to the unconscious, which manifests itself in visions within the imagination. Unlike Freud, however, Jung believed that such visions were not personal but transcended the artist's experience. Allende's mirror tends to repeat personal visions; her mask simultaneously rehearses mythical forms. Together, mask and mirror move the self and soul to a higher level of understanding so that justice may result. Accordingly, Aniela Jaffé explains the archetype that blends myth and reality as the psychological phenomenon, occurring equally with artists and medieval alchemists, of finding in objects a "secret soul," a "mysterious animation," a "spirit in the matter."

This archetypal interplay of mask and mirror, of irrational and rational, also derives in part from the action of magic realism in the novel, which illustrates Jaffé's discussion of the "secret soul" in objects. The source of much of current Latin American literary enchantment, magic realism can be traced to Europe during the period between the two world wars. Menton describes the movement as "longing for order, stability, reality, tranquility, and naive optimism" despite political, economic, and social tumult. It is not difficult to envision a similar psychological situation in Allende's Latin America where violent dictatorships, outrageous inflation, and unconscionable poverty are common. Because the goal of magic realism is to discover "the magic quality of everyday life and things," it contains both an ordered, stable, objective, representational treatment (mirror) and a mosaic-like, ghostly, mythological, visionary, playful presentation (mask). The first evokes the rational side of repetition, which consciously mirrors reality in an analytic, lineal, objective, abstract way. The second shows a masked, unconscious side of repetition that draws upon the intuitive, concrete, subjective truth. Allende's narrative technique of magic realism thus negotiates both mask and mirror, embodying a holistic vision of the world. It allows the individual conversion of character evident in the archetypal elements to begin the important move to the wider realm of social responsibility.

The distinctions between the two types of repetition that make up such mediation—irrational masking and rational mirroring—are not always clear; however, with Allende's characters this vagueness becomes a virtue. Seen from another perspective, one might say that such repetitions are capable of drawing upon both sides of the brain. Indeed, findings in recent neuroscience indicate the importance of a linguistic theory that includes a consideration of language's dual tracks, roughly analogous to the action of the mask (right brain) and the mirror (left brain). As Brownstein notes, "it is likely that minds whose principal functions are managerial operate out of categorical imperatives, out of more heavily left-lateralized strategies, while the survival of women and other colonized people depends upon bilateral strategies, upon minds adept at negotiating difference." Allende's women seem to have this ability, and in The House of the Spirits this aesthetic forms a basis for the mediating mechanisms that allow justice through reconciliation.

Furthermore, to achieve reconciliation, neither mask nor mirror alone will suffice to mediate the discrepancies injustice propagates. The female approach in Allende's novel, especially that of the four women spanning generations, seems somehow to merge the two to create a kind of magical mediation—repetition with a difference. Accordingly, the novel gives insight into the mechanism of creative conversion and reconciliation; even the very names of the women repeat with a difference. Clara, Blanca, and Alba have names that indicate similar meaning: clarity of light, whiteness, brightness of dawn. The purity of the rose is hinted at in the name of Rosa. But for Allende's women, mediation requires an embrace of both the pain and the joy, the ugliness and the beauty, the evil and the good. Only then can an integrated wholeness serve as a reasonable expectation of justice.

Rosa, the first mediator in the female sodality of Allende's novel, embodies the contradictory elements necessary for this kind of integrity. Her name is indicative of clearness and purity, yet does it imply a red or white rose? Paradoxically, this ambiguity acts to unite rather than to separate the elements of reality and myth, the apparent and the hidden, the concrete and the abstract. For Rosa surprisingly holds a beauty that "struck fear in their hearts," an apparent contradiction that does much to explain her unique nature. Concrete beauty, which should please and attract, instead causes the opposite emotions of dread and intimidation. Both immediate family and potential suitors recognize this special quality of Rosa, and it marks her as an unforgettable being who in her very essence transcends the ordinary. She herself exists on a level beyond what most people experience and thus points to the possibility of another reality. Opinions and beliefs do not separate people in such a world where both mask and mirror are integrated. The possibility of justice thus exists in an environment where one can accept, in spite of the pain or insecurity they might bring, the shock and despair as well as the joy and the surprise of disparate elements.

Besides indicating paradox, both red and white images are important in symbolizing Rosa's mediating function. The red rose of martyrdom, of blood, adumbrates Rosa's early death and the guiding symbolism of her spiritual, saintly mediating presence throughout the generations of the del Valle and the Trueba families. Indeed, Rosa's perfection seems reflective as well of the stainless, matchless Blessed Virgin Mary, the "Rose of Sharon," the "rose without thorn," the mediatrix par excellence. Her simultaneous oneness with nature and otherworldliness even in death comes with a "scent of roses" as Nana, unsuspecting, brings her a morning breakfast tray. As Esteban Trueba stands watch over her coffin, he sees the beautiful "green fountain of her hair," an indication of her ephemeral nature, a magically real symbol of how her fair skin made her not only appear delicate, sickly, a somewhat unreal creature from the sea (half woman, half mermaid), but also signaled—as Nivea's premonition foretells—that Rosa was "a heavenly being, that she was not destined to last very long in the vulgar traffic of this world." Her death from accidental poisoning, rather than from frailness of constitution, is then another example of how expectations formed by the outer reality can be usurped by the play of forces beyond one's control. Rosa's impact on her family, especially the female members, comes in large part from this striking amalgamation of mask and mirror, of the unexpected and the expected, of the hidden and the revealed.

Rosa as mediator serves as the first touchstone in the family, especially as a basis for the process of self-appropriation that presupposes an ability to be reconciled with the Almighty. C. H. Dodd reviews "the problem of reconciling the immanence and the transcendence of God, which has its roots in primitive tension between the 'otherness' and the familiarity of the Divine." He describes the mediating use of angels, the Law, and "poetical or philosophical constructions in which the immanent Divine … conceived as the Wisdom, or the Spirit, or the Word, of the transcendent God and these aspects of God are given a quasi-personal existence." Dodd sees these attempts at mediation as abstract, with the concrete manifestation emerging in the New Testament incarnation of the Word as Jesus Himself. Rosa mediates in a similar way by her ability to unite ephemeral otherworldliness with a very real sensual attractiveness. As angelic mediator, she can thus unite abstract and concrete, human and divine. Furthermore, she becomes a Christ-like symbol of mediation, a kind of scapegoat, in her death by innocently taking the poison intended for her father by his political enemies. But Severo del Valle's conscience is not cleansed by her death. On the contrary, he was "incapable of thinking that his daughter had died instead of him. He crumpled to the floor, moaning that he was the guilty one because of his ambition and bluster." She is a scapegoat, but an inadequate one. She can save her father from death (the action of the mirror), but she cannot redeem his conscience (the play of the mask). Rosa the Beautiful, the pure, becomes by her death enshrined in everyone's memory as the cause of the "shadow of suspended vengeance."

With these limitations, then, how does Rosa succeed as a mediator? Additional insights into mediating mechanisms can come from a look at René Girard's anthropological forays into the circumstances of mimetic desire as the mainspring of all human disorder and order. For Girard, identity or loss of difference stemming from the desire for identity can cause the disintegration of community structure: "The scapegoat victim provides an outlet for violence by unifying the entire community against him." Rosa operates instead in a more Christ-like capacity. Rather than forging community identity, Rosa unifies despite her inadequacy to relieve her father's suffering because identity is replaced by integrity. Instead of dissolving difference, Rosa embodies difference, the conflicting and competing elements of mask and mirror. The unification of community is thus not an artificial imposition of structure but a natural acceptance of heterogeneity. Christ's call to embrace one's enemies demands the embodiment of difference, the incongruency that Rosa represents in the family memory. She is the first in a line of women in The House of the Spirits who integrate mask and mirror in their lives symbolically and concretely. She displays her weaving of the rational and the irrational by embroidering "the largest tablecloth in the world" on which could be found concretely "a paradise of impossible creatures." An awareness of the destructive violence found within the desire for identity described by Girard should argue afresh for this alternative process, this integration of mask and mirror that Allende's women use to forge justice. With Rosa as the mediating scapegoat, the first step is taken in a self-appropriation, an action of becoming that includes both the dark, masked side and the reflective, mirrored part of experience. It is a process that unites positively rather than negatively and takes several generations to complete.

In a magical, spiritual way Rosa even becomes in death the mediator between her former fiancé, Esteban Trueba, and her sister Clara. Described by Esteban as "an apparition" that entered his life "like a distracted angel who stole my soul as she went by," Rosa is his first love and remains with him in dream and fantasy. It is memory of her, in fact, that leads him to seek a wife in the del Valle household: "He had gone to see the del Valle family to inquire if they might still have an unmarried daughter, because after so many years of absence and barbarism, he knew of nowhere else to begin to keep his promise to his mother of giving her legitimate grandchildren, and he concluded that if Severo and Nivea had accepted him as a prospective son-in-law in the days of Rosa the Beautiful, there was no reason they should refuse him, especially now that he was a rich man." After Clara's death Esteban builds "the most fitting, the most luxurious mausoleum in the world … with statues made with angel wings" and plans to lie there one day between Clara and Rosa, thus finding support in life and death from the pair of sisters he loved so well and so long.

But Clara functions even more than Rosa as the mainstay of the family. Clara's clairvoyance often makes it seem that she too "lived in another world." Her reality is a "kaleidoscope of jumbled mirrors." Again, mediation occurs in a jumbled mosaic of the rational and the irrational, of the conscious and the unconscious, of the mirrored and the masked. By virtue of her clairvoyance, Clara has a special connection with nature. She is therefore quite sensitive to the contrasts between the life in the city and the life at Tres Marías, the Trueba ancestral homestead where Esteban had made "progressive" improvements for which he prided himself. From the first, Clara recognizes the situation at Tres Marías to constitute "her mission in life": "She was not impressed by the brick houses, the school, and the abundant food, because her ability to see what was invisible immediately detected the workers' resentment, fear, and distrust; and the almost imperceptible noise that quieted them whenever she turned her head enabled her to guess certain things about her husband's character and past." She devotes herself to teaching the inhabitants of Tres Marías the basics of hygiene, literacy, and women's liberation. Only when she once again becomes pregnant does she revert to her "visionary tasks, speaking with apparitions and spending hours writing in her notebooks." By the act of writing, communicating her memories, she retains the mirror within the mask of the supernatural and secures a true mingling of the concrete and the abstract.

Clara's ability to combine mask and mirror becomes most apparent during her periods of silence in which she communicates only through writing. Once when fatigued with advanced pregnancy and long travel between Tres Marías and the city, Clara announces: "I think I'm going to elevate." "Not here," her husband replies, unsure whether mask or mirror would be presenting itself. He was

[t]errified at the idea of Clara flying over the heads of the passengers along the track. But she wasn't talking about physical levitation; she meant 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—I think it lasted several months—during which she used her little slate, as she had in her days of muteness. This time I wasn't worried … since I had come to understand that silence was my wife's last refuge, not a mental illness as Dr. Cuevas said it was."

Whether masking her physical discomfort as in this pregnancy, or masking her emotional pain as in her childhood response to Rosa's death, Clara still continues to mirror, to externalize her inner self through writing.

Despite her psychological distance during much of her time with her family, Clara nevertheless serves as a mediating force throughout the generations. Her self-appropriation takes Rosa's to the next stage of unifying the self and the soul, transforming her experiences of both mirror and mask into a source for communication. As a result, despite her apparent otherworldliness Clara can show compassion to the poor, a clear example of personal integrity that leads to justice. In fact, she includes an important "active" element to both sides of her personality in her compassionate helping of the peasants at Tres Marías and, when again in the spiritual realm, in writing her memories. Clara intuitively seems to know that when Genesis describes how "God created man in his own image" (1:27) the message is that human beings have an innate ability to reach out and find God in others. As a result, Clara's trip to the hacienda becomes an outreach as she improves both the physical and spiritual plight of the farm workers and contends with the results of earthquake and plague. Similarly, the active, concrete exercise of writing in her notebooks serves the purpose of externalizing her memories. She thus reaches out to her family through the chronicling of tangible events.

Even after Clara's death her notebooks, "which gave witness to life," give her granddaughter Alba the courage to transcend her ordeal at the hands of Colonel García. These notebooks also inspire Alba to convince her grandfather, the toughskinned, violent patrón who started the chain of hatred and revenge, to write the story, the memories of their lives. Clara thus mediates primarily by uniting the mirror of memories and the mask of the visionary within the medium of her notebooks.

In the case of Clara's daughter Blanca, mediation takes place as a human defiance of social class in the quest for love and as a mystical connection to nature in her creative work in clay. The first form of mediation draws upon the mirror of concrete, uncompromised passion; the second appears within the mask of artistic self-expression. Indeed, when Blanca—this intended "white" one—is born, she shocks everyone with her hairy darkness and is described as appearing at birth as an "armadillo." Her double personality emerged even as a child:

She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation … she showed not the slightest inclination for her mother's spiritualism or her father's fits of rage. The family jokingly said that she was the only normal person for many generations, and it was true she was a miracle of equilibrium and serenity.

Emblematic of the secret, hidden soul behind the evident, mirrored self, Blanca—despite her surface differences from other family members—retains in her artistic creations of imaginary animals the visionary ability of the beautiful Rosa who embroidered fantastic tablecloths and of Clara the Clairvoyant. She is especially important in the process of self-appropriation occurring in Allende's family of women because she mirrors the biblical message of reconciling love on all three levels of religious experience. Significantly, Blanca is first introduced to the process of pottery and the use of clay by Old Pedro García, her lover's grandfather, when he wishes to help her keep her hands busy and her mind off of her migraine headaches. Later, she shares this therapeutic gift of nature with mongoloid children, bringing them joy by teaching them how to mold the clay. Most importantly, through the power of human love, she transcends distinctions of class, essential to attaining justice in the world. Her devoted love for Pedro García Tercero, who was not of her own social class, adds the human side of Fiorenza's "praxis of agape" to the iterative yet incremental process of self-appropriation throughout the generations of women.

Alba, Blanca's daughter from her liaison, similarly contains the double action of self and soul. Her name, in fact, containing within it the idea of "white" and "dawn," also embraces the mediating connection that makes distinct definition unattainable, for it is impossible to determine exactly when night is completed and daybreak has arrived. In Spanish, the word can also mean "alb," the full-length white linen vestment with long sleeves that is gathered at the waist with a cincture and worn by a priest at Mass. Alba's mediating function is certainly priestlike in her ability to bring consolation to the tortured soul of her wrathful, vengeful, bitter old grandfather; indeed, she has always been the only one who could brighten the aging patriarch's life. Her visible legacy from her great-aunt Rosa, the first mediator, comes as distinctive "algae tones in her hair," a reality that cannot help but influence Esteban's feelings. Despite Alba's illegitimacy and the fact that her father is Esteban's bitter enemy, she becomes for Esteban "the only person I would ever have close to me the rest of my life." Wearing metonymically the masked vestments (hidden concrete outside garments) of the reconciler, Alba is likewise in the novel described as showing her mirrored soul (revealed abstract inside reality) when her transforming vision in the basement comes from a veritable "kaleidoscope of the mirror." Attributes of mask and mirror, inside and outside, abstract and concrete, soul and self, are finally merged in this woman who is able to transcend the hatred of several generations by piecing together the memories of many events, first in the torture chamber without paper or pen and later with the help of her grandfather Esteban's remembrances and of her grandmother Clara's notebooks. Because Alba has appropriated not only her own life experiences but also the souls of her women forebears, she forges community and can say that "now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand the existence of Colonel García and the others like him, as I understand my grandfather and piece things together from Clara's notebooks, my mother's letters, the ledgers of Tres Marías, and the many other documents spread before me on the table." Alba realizes that not only through the repetition of life events through writing, thereby communicating the events, experiences, and "mission" of a person, a family, indeed of all human beings, but also through the repetition of the inner soul (which stage by stage brings one to be what one truly is) can the inimical, masked, dark side of the soul and clear-sighted self-integrity converge. This elimination of anger makes possible reconciliation and justice.

Alba's self-appropriation includes the appropriation of the qualities of her great-aunt Rosa, her grandmother Clara, and her mother Blanca, as well as her own experiences. She more than anyone else learns how to heed the biblical call for justice through a reconciliation with other people. Through her period of torture Alba mirrors the scapegoat experience of Rosa, but survives. At this level, Alba can finally dissolve the guilt, violence, and hate that Rosa's death could only augment in the family. Consequently, she can say: "It would be very difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite." She can indeed become an instrument of mediation by appropriating—a repetitive process—both the masked evils that terrorize her soul and the mirrored integrity of existence: "I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply to fill these pages while I wait for Miguel, while I bury my grandfather, whose body lies beside me in this room, while I wait for better times to come, while I carry this child in my womb, the daughter of so many rapes or perhaps of Miguel, but above all, my own daughter." Alba thus recognizes the process of appropriation in the generations of the past and the future. Her integration includes the all-important task of communicating her memories and those of her family.

The reconciliation begun by Allende's women results from their being able somehow to see the integrated whole in its masked/mirrored manifestations of reality: distorted, gruesome, secret, magic, hidden. The process of writing, that is, mirroring, bearing "witness to life," allows an acceptance of responsibility for life, provides reverence for life, and finally brings reconciliation of all disruptive, excessive emotions. Justice ultimately comes from a blurring of the details that cause hate, revenge, jealousy. In engendering peace and forgiveness, acceptance of both mask and mirror recreates an integrated wholeness and regenerates that integrity in the world as justice.

Fiorenza notes that through the praxis of agape the women disciples of Jesus could exemplify true discipleship, a discipleship that indicts hate and the death-dealing powers of the world. This "discipleship of equals," one of service and love, is "continually recreated," for "[t]he true spiritual person is according to Paul one who walks in the Spirit, she who brings about this new world and family of God over and against the resistance and pull of all oppressive powers of this world's enslaving patriarchal structures." In The House of the Spirits Allende recreates in a way that integrates the totality for which justice strives. Her women recognize (intuitively if not cognitively) that in the end a personal experience of conversion (a literal "turning toward") is the key to true peace and justice. They learn that they must transcend suffering on the personal level before they can hope to apply this skill, sensitivity, and knowledge to the level of politics and society. In this sense and in the literal sense that she inhabits the world of her family memories—the spiritual reality of Rosa, Clara, and Blanca—Alba can be said to "walk in the Spirit." Her acts of gathering and communicating her memories in the form of the story preserving her "roots" reflect the identical process Allende herself goes through in writing The House of the Spirits and make her a kind of prophet promoting justice on the deepest levels. Fiorenza reminds us that the Gospel requires ekklesia, "a dynamic reality of Christian community. It is not a local or static term, it is not even a religious expression; it means the actual gathering of people." Can a work of fiction provide such a gathering? As it witnesses to an exploration of possibilities, a process of self-appropriation, a concrete reconstitution of memories, it can move toward Fiorenza's requirement of commitment, accountability, and solidarity in community that she finds to be "the hallmarks of our calling and struggle."

The concept of social class, especially, becomes insignificant in this feminine process of mosaic mediation reflecting a kaleidoscopic reality that engenders true reconciliation, a conversion that "converges" mask and mirror. Ironically, Esteban García does not realize that the woman he is torturing is his own cousin, through not only the patrón but also through the son of his grandmother's brother. Likewise, Alba's ignorance of the paternity of her unborn daughter—the result of multiple rapes—loses importance. Thus no longer do guilt, hate, or revenge control the interplay of relationships that knit human beings and their creator. Instead, redemption comes to Zion through a kaleidoscopic mirroring, a re-imagining and re-creation of integrity and justice.