Isabel Allende's novel The House of the Spirits depicts the lives of three generations of women in one Chilean family and relates their story to the social, cultural, and political life of Chile. The author in this way displays her own feminist views and brings her critical faculties to bear on her society. She uses the Latin American literary style known as "magic realism" in shaping this story, told from a woman's point of view, a point of view that infuses every element of the novel.
The women portrayed in this novel by Allende are strong women, a fact that emerges clearly from the pages and that makes the women stand out in relation to the males in their society, yet these are also women who exist in a society that restrains them and limits their aspirations, forcing those aspirations to be lived primarily through the males of the family. The House of the Spirits was Allende's first novel, and Robert Antoni sees the novel as an inadvertent reflection of the magical realism that infuses the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Antoni says that Allende uses Garcia Marquez's language as a medium to speak through that language and to discover her own language, which she then substitutes for Garcia Marquez's:
In other words, we would have trouble isolating a representing discourse which is simultaneously present, and at odds with the represented discourse: there is no obvious wink at the reader (Antoni 16).
Antoni wonders whether he is finding a case of imitation, a case of parody, or is simply comparing a first-time novelist with a master and finding a process that may not be as strong as he believes. In fact, one of the things he is finding is the different way the feminist uses the language of magical realism and creates a truly feminine fictional voice, building on the prevailing male voice in the fiction of her time.
In The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende portrays three strong women set against the history of Chi...