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 powerful family, the Trueba family, and details their history from the relative peace of the 1920s to the politically volatile 1970s. There is no doubt that this is a male-dominated family, with the patriarch, Esteban, being the force around which the women arrange themselves in a more or less accepting manner, depending on their personal attitudes and the tenor of the times. Esteban is a powerful figure, a man dedicated to success and to his image of family life a...