The House of the Spirits

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 o

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while Esteban is a conservative who looks to the past and who is interested only in preserving that past and the privileges that came with it. Their daughter is Bianca, a young woman who lives out the rebelliousness that is inherent in Clara's communion with the spirits and in her sense of foresight and looking to the future. The father becomes a strong force in the right-wing government, while the daughter falls in love with a revolutionary, a figure of the left, and a symbol of her own rebellious spirit and need for self-expression. Allende here combines the personal life and fortunes of the Trueba family with criticism of the political struggles of this century in Chile. In the novel, the three women in the family are set against the patriarchal male. Clara and Bianca are joined by Esteban's spinster sister Ferula in holding Esteban in contempt for his autocratic nature and his dedication to the rigidity of the class structure. Isabel Allende has stated her intention in this novel and the reason why she used this family story as an attempt to embody the history of her country: Some people can sing; others can run; I can tell stories. Storytelling is a way of preserving the memory of the past and keeping alive legends, my
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Isabel Allende, House Spirits, Garcia Marquez, Clara Esteban, Garcia Marquez's, Latin American, Robert Antoni, Clara Bianca, magical realism, house spirits, Report November, Hispanic October, language magical realism, language magical, latin american literary, isabel allende, woman's view, foehr 14, strong women, american literary, clara's granddaughter, ability speak spirits, social cultural political, latin american,
Approximate Word count = 1452
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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