Isabel Allende's novel The House of the Spirits
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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 film version of the novel fails to translate the magic realism of the novel to the screen, and what emerges instead is a film epic without the heart of the traditional epic and with the character of the book miscast with stars who interact in different ways than do the characters in the novel.Isabel Allende portrays three strong women set against the history of Chile from the 1920s to the 1970s. The country in the novel is not named, but the work is thought to be autobiographical in some measure and to reflect the social, cultural, and political realities of Chilean life during the period covered. The story concerned one powe
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f the motion picture. This may be why the filmmakers have been seduced into shifting more to stock characters and situations than to delving into the more unique aspects of magic realism and the way it is used by Allende.
Works Cited
Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. New York: Bantam, 1985.
August, Bille. The House of the Spirits. Miramax, 1994.
Like Water for Chocolate as both novel and film is a feminist statement on the importance of women in their traditional roles, which might seem contradictory but which is a true celebration of the contribution of women, the longing of women, and the way in which women have used their traditional roles to express themselves in ways society has prevented them from doing outside the home.
The film is set on a ranch on the U.S. Mexican border, not far from Piedras Negras and San Antonio. The story is a romance which covers a period of history in a personal way, using the intimate story of a household of women to comment on the history of the period, on the collision of Anglo and Hispanic cultures, and on the machismo that has been so important in Hispanic culture. The story overs the period from the late nineteenth century to a climax during the rebellious years of
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2985
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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