Academic Portfolio

I chose to take this class because I wanted to challenge myself to learn about a genre that was not a favorite and to learn about the genre’s history in a global context. While magical realism still is not my favorite genre, this class gave me a deeper appreciation for it, helped me to understand what authors were trying to achieve by using it to tell hard truths, and I learned a lot about its history and origins. This paper I wrote for this class reflects how I believe the lens of magical realism can be used to present difficult subjects in a way that keeps the story honest but also provides some bit of relief for the reader.

Gina Ruiz

Dr. Sadowski-Smith  

ENG 560

1 May 2022

Truth Magic: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits

Allende’s novel, The House of the Spirits, is a novel about an odd family living in Chile, who experience strange and magical occurrences, along with the mundane. The oldest daughter, Rosa, resembles a mermaid. She has green hair and an ethereal quality from the time she is born, while the younger daughter, Clara, is a clairvoyant. The story spans four generations and describes the patriarchal environment, religious and political views, and a changing country as it moves from democracy to dictatorship. The novel also highlights corruption, the power of wealthy men who take what they want without consequence, while the poor and women have virtually no recourse. The House of the Spirits can be described as a work of magical realism as it has those key elements of the genre: the sense of dreaminess and surrealism, the magical or strange incorporated into the narrative as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, and a sense of isolation. While the story is told through the points of view of several characters, in each one, the sense of isolation is strong.

However, Allende’s novel has another component in it-that of unflinching truth, told through the lens of magical realism using the literary tools of non-linear time and women’s narrative. In the novel, the women of the story tell their truths about patriarchy and the way they combat it with a kind of silent but strong feminism, the types of violence done to women by men, as well as the truth about the desaparecidos in Chile and human rights abuses. Using the lens of magical realism, Allende confronts the reader with these painful, hard truths and reveals the lies about how women have been treated in a patriarchal society and culture, and the struggle to be a feminist in such a culture. Allende also shines a light on the lies that the Chilean government told regarding the human rights violations taken against the people of Chile during the upheaval that led to dictatorship.

Early in Allende’s novel, through the lens of magical realism, the reader learns the truth about how women are objectified, exoticized, and blamed for their beauty in a patriarchal society through the male point of view of Esteban Trueba. Trueba writes, “I can still remember the exact moment when Rosa the Beautiful entered my life like a distracted angel who stole my soul as she went by” (Allende 1986, p. 34). Trueba goes on to talk about how he stalked Rosa, followed her home, references her “fairy-tale manner” and that he was “bewitched” (35). Trueba “stands guard” outside her home every day, sending gifts and stalking her until, finally she agrees to marry him. That her family did not send him packing or call the police illustrates how different the culture was in Chile at that time and how it was perfectly normal for a man to stalk a woman, kidnap, rape her, keep her locked up, blame her looks, and yet not be thrown in jail for it. Women still face such blame when they are subject to violence or rape. Beauty, sexuality, the way a woman dresses are still used as defenses in courts for rapists and abusers.

Further, even Rosa’s mother believes that her daughter’s beauty is at fault or to blame for the attention she gets from men. Trueba learns from Nivea that Rosa has no other suitors because no one wanted to “protect her from other men’s desires” (36-37). Rosa is just an object of desire, not a person in her own right. When she dies, the doctor’s assistant kisses her genitals and breasts after he and Dr. Cuevas prepare her body for burial. Even in death, her beauty is something that makes men have no control over themselves, enacting a form of necrophilia light upon her corpse. Rosa’s death drives Trueba to almost madness and he reflects that if he had known she would die soon, he would have “kidnapped her and locked her up” (51). This is said matter-of-factly because, in the patriarchal society of which Trueba is a part, this would have been no big deal. Rosa, dead and in the ground, is to blame for his actions. When he moves to Tres Marias, Trueba is a savage, raping women at will and the women have no choice but to submit and bear his bastards because that is the way of the world. Women do not have a voice in that world.

Rosa never had a voice or power. She was an object in a world of men in power. However, through the lens of magical realism, her strange mermaid-like beauty, the reader can see how she is objectified, used, and her dead body touched and kissed in a way that is a violation. Rosa cannot even have a peaceful death. Instead, her death becomes a scandal as it is learned the poison she ingested was intended for her father, as a political assassination. Voiceless Rosa, herself an object of magical realism, gives power and voice to her younger sister Clara, who, by her very silence, injects her feminism into the novel and uses it to control the patriarchal world she is forced to live in.

Clara, a clairvoyant, who remains mute for several years after seeing the horrors of her sister’s body prepared for burial, is also blamed by the men in the novel. Her father complains that his political chances will take a hit if people learn about his “bewitched child” (20) as she interprets dreams, predicts the future, and can move objects with her mind. She, in her silence, has power. She made a business of predicting people’s future and writing them on her blackboard. However, Clara remains silent. Allende uses this silence as a “subversive alternative” and by “articulating the silences of culturally muted women” Allende “subverts patriarchal society and literary scripts.” (Jenkins 1994). Jenkins, argues that Allende uses the power to “script history” by acknowledging the voices of culturally muted women in a patriarchal society. By using Clara’s silences and magical elements of clairvoyance, Allende is able to resist the obfuscation of history, in particular, women’s history and the violence and abuses heaped on them by men in a patriarchal society.

In The House of the Spirits, Clara, Alba, and Blanca, all tell their truths through their writing, their memories, and in the case of Clara, her silences. Allende uses non-linear time to do this. Jenkins argues that non-linear time is used in women’s narratives as opposed to “linear, temporal histories recorded by Western, patriarchal narratives, this monumental time measures cyclical experience” (Jenkins 1994). Within the circular narrative of the women in The House of the Spirits, the linear, violent interjections by Trueba about his rapes and abuses at Tres Marias and to his family, are particularly jarring.  Alba writes of the desaparecidos, of being imprisoned, and of her many rapes, as well as of the rapes of other women in the prison and how they defy the soldiers by singing as loud as they can. Each of the women in The House of the Spirits, through the lens of magical realism, tells their stories, particularly of the violence and death of war. The Chilean government tried to cover up the stories of the desaparecidos, but Alba, in writing her narrative, is able to reveal the truth of it within a magical realist story. Clara’s notebooks provide the truth about Rosa, her own life, and how she combatted Trueba’s violence with silence. By using “the language of the supernatural to articulate the discrepancy in facts” (Hart 2021), Allende, through her characters is able to shed light on the violence, rape, and murder done by the dictatorship of Chile. Using magical realism, Allende is able to give competing points of view, but the truth shines through. By using non-linear time within the narrative, Allende is able to give the reader both the sense of unreality and reality-a temporal dichotomy, which imparts an almost surreal view of hard truths regarding violence, murder, torture, rape, and mass graves of the dead.  

Allende’s novel of unflinching truth, told through the lens of magical realism using the literary tools of non-linear time and women’s narrative gives the reader an honest history of patriarchal culture and how women have, through time, found their own ways to find power, tell the truth, and subvert that oppression. Allende also uses magical realism to shine a light on the lies that the Chilean government told regarding the human rights violations taken against the people of Chile during the upheaval that led to the dictatorship.

Works Cited

Allende, I. (1986). The House of the Spirits. London: Black Swan.

Jenkins, R. Y. (1994). Authorizing female voice and experience: Ghosts and spirits in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Allende’s The House of the Spirits. MELUS, 19(3), 61.

Stephen Malcom Hart, J. H. (2021). Magical Realism is the language of the emergent Post-Truth world. ORBIS Litterarum, 76, 158-168.