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Filippo Forni Maria Forni Professor Louis Agregn English 1A 8 December 2005
A Brief but concise analysis of the Novel "The House of the Spirits" through the Main Characters, and Allende's Sociological Aspects.
In The House of the Spirits, Isabella Allende chronicles the history of the fictional Trueba family, exploring three generations of a Chilean family -- grandparents and greatgrandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends. One of the main characters, Esteban Trueba, the patriarch of the family, is portrayed as a flawed and somewhat contemptible character. Esteban is obsessive, violent, and materialistic. He devotes his life to his business and political careers, determined first to become rich and then to become powerful. He owes much of his success to the labor of the peasants at Tres Marias, but he never treats them with respect or equality. From the time he becomes engaged to Clara through the end of his life, Esteban is passionately in love with her. His love for her is so strong it is like an obsession. It is not, however, enough to curb his temper, even toward her. Esteban achieves his material goals but is not able to be close to anyone except his granddaughter, Alba. One cannot but ask the question, why is Esteban treated so sympathetically? To answer this, we must first consider what the novel itself represents. While the story has
Forni 2 autobiographical roots, there are a number of other levels, some historical and some allegorical.
Although he is violent and selfish, Esteban is nonetheless treated sympathetically by the first and third person narrators who take turns telling the story. In the first paragraph of the novel, we learn that a first person narrator constructs the story fifty years after the first action in it takes place, based on the notebooks that Clara writes. The narration, however, quickly shifts to a third person omniscient point of view. More than halfway through the first chapter, another first person narrator reappears. This first-person narrator is Esteban Trueba. The entire novel is narrated in this fashion, with sections in the firstperson voice of Esteban Trueba and sections in an omniscient third person. In the epilogue, we are told that Alba, who is Esteban Trueba's granddaughter and Esteban Trueba are the co-narrators of the story. We can thus assume that the third person omniscient narrator is Alba.
On the highest, most obvious level, the character of Esteban is treated sympathetically by the narrators because the second first-person narrator, as is revealed in the Epilogue, can be assumed to be Alba, who in turn is Isabella Allende. Allende's grandparents had a profound influence on her, and she has said they served as the models for the characters of Esteban and Clara Trueba in The House of the Spirits: On January 8, 1981, I received a phone call that my grandfather was dying. And I decided to write a letter about all the things he told us when we were young. I was working two shifts, twelve
Forni 3 hours per day, and I wrote at night. I had five hundred pages by the end of the year. And it was The House of the Spirits. (1)
On the next level, The House of the Spirits is a symbolic history of Chile. Allende's magic realism is as rooted in the time and place of central Chile as is its recorded history, stretching back from Alba and her contemporaries through the European immigrations (primarily Spanish) and the earlier invasions of the northern Incans from Peru to the southern Araucanian Indian stock whose descendants farm Tres Maras. Esteban represents the rulers of the country who established the government, the house on the corner. Esteban builds a big house on the corner that on the surface is straightforward, if somewhat ostentatious. Isabel Allende says her first memory of Chile is of a house she never knew. The "large old house" on the Calle Cueto, where her mother was born and which her grandfather evoked so frequently that Isabel felt as if she had lived there.
The other characters represent the spirit of the people and various contending factions in Chile: revolutionaries, the Church, the natives. They are part of the tumultuous and violent history of the Chilean people. In The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende portrays the politics, myth, and magic of her homeland. The novel reveals the diversity of opinion among conservatives during the socialist regime in Chile. Many of the conservatives of the generation of Esteban Trueba, the protagonist's grandfather, were afraid of change and unable to support socialism on ideological grounds, but felt that when Salvador Allende fell, Chile would return to its democratic roots. When they saw what Pinochet's dictatorship brought, they were horrified. Outside Chile, there is a tendency to classify the opponents of socialism automatically as supporters of the dictatorship.
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According to Allende, "...the message at the end is reconciliation. Not forgetting, but...reconciliation, with the idea that a new country could be built - or the country could be restored - only on a foundation of national reconciliation. It just wasn't possible to go on proliferating hatred systematically forever and ever, on and on, because that way we would never end the violence. " (2) On this level, Isabelle Allende in the persons of the narrators forgives (himself or itself in the person of Esteban, and her grandfather or country, in the person of Alba) so that her beloved country may heal itself and recover.
On another level, the story is allegorical. In my opinion, Allende uses of magical realism to convey Clara's clairvoyance is an extreme example, but Rosa's beauty and Uncle Marcos's travels are also unusual. They introduce a world where the laws of what we may think of as realistic are not quite respected. However, all of the eccentricities lie just on the border of what is believable. Furthermore, the characters in the novel are aware of the strange qualities of their actions and beliefs, yet they take them in stride. This in turn makes them more believable. Magical Realism is characterized by a combination of actions and qualities that lie on the boundary of what we can accept as real. Rosa's green hair, yellow eyes, and transparent skin are magically real; they transform her beauty into something that is not quite real. [...] Even before she was born, Nivea had known she was not of this world, because she had already seen her in dreams. This was why she had not been surprised when the midwife screamed as the child emerged. At birth Rosa was white and smooth, without a wrinkle, like a porcelain doll, with green hair and yellow eyes the
Forni 5 most beautiful creature to be born on earth since the days of original sin, as the midwife put it, making the sign of the cross. (Isabelle Allende, The House of the Spirits, p. 4) (3)
All of the eccentric or magical elements of the story are described in simple sentences and vocabulary. The straightforward presentation adds to the believable, or real, quality of outlandish attributes or events.
This style is most appropriate for describing mythic or religious topics. For example, Uncle Marcos is Nivea's favorite brother, and Clara's favorite uncle. He is an explorer and inventor who stays with the del Valle family between trips, telling Clara stories and teaching her the customs of the far-off lands he visited. Uncle Marcos was also famous outside of the family because he had once assembled a flying contraption in which he had sailed off over the mountains. In the first chapter, after the del Valle family flees church, a group of men arrive carrying the body of Uncle Marcos, Nivea's brother. He had been taken for dead and was even buried, but then he reappeared. For this reason, Nivea has trouble believing that Marcos is actually dead this time. Marcos is truly dead, but accompanying his body is a puppy, Barrabs, which still is alive. Clara adopts the puppy. Uncle Marcos leaves his books and stories, which pass on to every del Valle-Trueba child. Uncle Marcos performs miracles, dies, and is resurrected. After his death he leaves behind gospels and parables to teach the ensuing generations. Obviously, Uncle Marcos is a Christ figure. This myth begins and ends the story: "Barrabs came to us by sea." While Barrabs is simply the caged and severely neglected dog shipped to Chile by Uncle Marcos, he is also the resident mythical beast of the novel, haunting the house in body
Forni 6 until he is murdered on Clara's wedding day and in spirit from then on, after his hide is made into a rug. In myth, Barabbs is associated with Christ's crucifixion.
Jesus and Barrabs (whose name was actually Jesus Barabbs) are both the Son of the Father chosen (elected) by the people (mob)? In this context, as master of Barrabs, Esteban becomes the Son of the Father who tries to change things in this world without the aid of religion or magic. One condemned to such a fate should surely be viewed sympathetically, even if he weren't your grandfather.
On another very basic level, The House of the Spirits is a view of the feminine in a patriarchal society. The protagonists of the novel are all women who work in different and subtle ways to assert their rights. Within the context of magical realism, The House of the Spirits can be seen as the flip side of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Where One Hundred years of Solitude describes three generations of men, with the women whom they love as important but secondary characters, The House of the Spirits does the opposite. Clara, Blanca, and Alba remain the focus of the story, while Esteban, Pedro Tercero, and Miguel enter the story because they are the men those women love or marry. Experiences particularly central to the lives of women dominate the minor as well as the major events in the story, such as the detailed descriptions of each childbirth and the abortion, as well as the presentation of physical and sexual violence against women.
All of the women in The House of the Spirits are strong women who do not bow to mistreatment. A key example can be located on chapter four when Esteban, coming back
Forni 7 from Tres Marias, found his sister Ferula sleeping with his wife Clara. Esteban and Ferula at this point have an argument which it will end with Ferula saying very hard words to Esteban. "I set my course on you, Esteban! [...] You will always be alone! [...] You'll die like a dog!" (Allende, The House of the Spirits, p.132) (4)
In my opinion, in the novel female characters choose subtle responses the situations, though, instead of outright revolt. In the novel, language itself is masculine or feminine, spiritual or temporal. English and Spanish share European origins, but their cultural homes also create linguistic differences. Allende uses language to represent ideological differences between Clara and her husband Esteban. He prefers English and considers Spanish "a second-rate language, appropriate for domestic matters and magic, for unbridled passions and useless undertakings, but thoroughly inadequate for the world of science and technology." This helps identify those functions assigned by the patriarch Esteban to women as well as to the language of his own country. Clara, on the other hand, receives psychic messages that a pendulum spells out "in Spanish and Esperanto, which proved that these, and not English, were the only languages of interest to beings from other dimensions." This very method of resistance can be seen as a particularly feminine one. If violence and activity are traits male while gentleness and passivity are female ones, The House of the Spirits shows that this does not mean that men accomplish things and change things while women do not. On the contrary, the women in The House of the Spirits produce more long-lasting and drastic changes than do any of the men. While the men lead revolutions that overthrow governments, those revolutions are themselves quickly toppled. The women's subtler methods of teaching literacy and basic
Forni 8 health care, setting curses, and refusing to speak are far more effective in exacting permanent change.
Throughout the novel, with women as their medium, spirits intrude into the realistic world defined by Esteban and a patriarchal informed culture: Clara's spirits are at "odds with religion and good manners" (5) "Not only did her powers make her marriage and domestic duties more difficult" (6), but Esteban also realizes that "Clara did not belong to him...if she continued living in a world of apparitions, three-legged tables that moved of their own volition, and cards that spelled out the future,...[and] he wanted to control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him." (7)
Allende emphasizes that women are in a position to effect change because they have a natural sense of common identity. Women must interpret family history from bits and pieces of incomplete histories and propose a new, more inclusive definition of family to promote unity and heal the wounds of the past. In order to promote this healing, it is necessary to forgive, which accounts for the sympathetic treatment of Esteban by the second narrator.
The House of the Spirits is not so much an accounting or recording of sins or a reckoning as it is a means of coming to terms with the past. Alba and Allende write because "memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in
Forni 9 her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory." (8) Allende compiles the documents of this representative human family on her grandmother Clara's table so that Alba too can see with clarity--can see more than that clairvoyant grandmother who regularly entertained spirits and was now in spirit entertaining us. The story had to wait for Alba, the third generation, to complete it: "That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory." (8) That story is not one of a new order but of change within the context of a patriarchal society symbolized by Esteban.
Notes____________ (1)Foster, 2004, 81. (2)Mujica, 1995, 37. (3)Allende, 1986,4. (4)Allende, 1986,132. (5)Allende, 1986,126. (6)Ibid., 88. (7)Ibid., 96. (8)Ibid., 432.
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References Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. Magda Bogin, tr. New York. Bantam. 1986 . Delrosso, Jeana. "The Convent as Colonist: Catholicism in the Works of Contemporary Women Writers of the Americas." MELUS 26.3 (2001): 183+. Foster, Douglas. "Isabel Allende Unveiled." IN Rodden, John. Conversations with Isabel Allende: Revised Edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, pp.81+. Jenkins, Ruth Y. "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 (1994): 61+. Mujica, Barbara. "The Life Force of Language." Americas (English Edition) Nov.-Dec. 1995: 36+. Roof, Mara. "Maryse Cond and Isabel Allende: Family Saga Novels." World Literature Today 70.2 (1996): 283-288. Shinn, Thelma J. Women Shapeshifters: Transforming the Contemporary Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Tayko, Gail. "Teaching Isabel Allende's La Casa De Los Espritus (The House of the Spirits)." College Literature 20.1 (1993): 228+.