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A Feminist Analysis of the Narrative Structure Of A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF ISABEL ALLENDE'S THE INFINITE PLAN by ELIZABETH M. SORELLE, B.A. A THESIS IN ENGLISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Approved December, 1996 SOS «r-s ^^' "I 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS /\jo I 'I I would like to thank Professor Wendell Aycock and Professor David '•,> Leon Higdon for their advice and support during the writing of tliis thesis. I would also like to thank Paula Allen, M.A. for her help in finding feminist criticism and Lilianna Anglada, M.A. for her help in translating the Spanish epigraph from Violeta Parra. ]Much gratitude also goes to my husband, Jeffrey SoRelle, without whose patience and encouragement I would have never finished the project. And thanks also to my parents, who have believed in me all along. n TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii CHAPTER L INTRODUCTION 1 II. NARRATIVE PRESENCES: THE FOUNDATION OF THE FEMINIST TEXT 9 III. UNDERMINING THE TRADITIONAL MALE NARRATION: THE OMNISCIENT FEMALE NARRATOR'S CONTROL OF THE NOVEL 19 IV. THE NAl^RATIONS OF GREGORY REEVES: HIS GROWTH INTO THE FEJVIININE REALM 30 V. CONCLUSION 46 BIBLIOGRAPHY 48 in CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Isabel Allende is one of the most important female writers in modern Latin America. In a period of roughly ten years, she has produced six major works of literature: The House of Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, and Paula. Allende is a masterful storyteller who combines the wondrous of life ~ passion, magic, and childhood ~ with the reality of a war-torn, patriarchal South America. Her tales involve young women and/or misfits of society who search for Truth and Love and who meanwhile combat class conflicts and oppressive governments. Despite her delightful storytelling, Allende struggles to receive the critical acclaim of her male counterparts, and by-and-large, the literary community has ignored all but two of her novels: The House of Spirits and Eva Luna. Of her works of literature. The Infinite Plan has received the least amount of critical attention and has indeed garnered much negative attention from the press. Jean McNeal, a reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, writes: The theme and setting she has chosen in this novel seem to have neutralized her writerly abilities, which, while predictable to a degree, used to produce books imbued with a certain enchantment, and narrative drive, which this colourless novel sorely lacks. (9 July 1993) Ordy two scholars, Catherine Perricone and Myrian Yvonne Jehenson, have written extensive pieces on the novel. Thus, the question begs asking: is the novel worthy of serious attention and what, in particular, has turned readers and scholars from it? The Infinite Plan is different than Allende's other works: the protagonist, Gregory Reeves, is male and the setting is not in South America but in the United States. In addition, Allende attempts to cover broad historical time periods in the United States: the aftermath of World War II; the hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Berkeley, California; the Vietnam War; and the materialistic, yuppie age of the 1980s. Furthermore, the novel is told in retrospect, so the reader does not understand its meaning until the very end. The unusual circumstances of the novel certainly frustrate the typical Allende readers, as they expect a certain pattern and, at the very least, the usual setting. Despite its awkwardness, however. The Infinite Plan deserves serious critical attention and is indeed one of Allende's most fascinating experiments. In particular, the novel presents an extraordinary narrative pattern, one that by itself deserves attention and thus becomes the focus of this thesis. Complexity in narrative structure is by no means atypical of Allende's works of fiction. The House of Spirits has three narrators, the most important one being Alba, who recounts her family history based on what she has discovered in her grandmother's diary. Eva Luna, the female protagonist of Allende's third novel, Eva Luna, narrates The Stories of Eva Luna, and her collection of stories exists for and is dedicated to her lover, Rolf Carle. Critics have studied the intricate narrative patterns in Allende's worlcs and praised her for her ingenuity. The narrative structure of The Infinite Plan is equally as complex and challenging. The story has two official narrators: Gregory Reeves and his unnamed, female lover. Although Reeves is the protagonist, he narrates only thirteen brief sections within the novel, sections which range in length from three pages to ten. Thus, the female omniscient narrator is the primary narrator. The novel is told in retrospect, so that Reeves' story slowly unfolds. The narrator drops clues along the way, but she only reveals her relationship to Reeves in the last paragraph of the novel. In addition to the two formal narrators, a variety of narrative presences also inform the text, a concept explained in detail in Chapter II. The importance of the complex narrative structure goes beyond its mere existence: the novel, despite its male protagonist, supports a feminist agenda. Allende does not openly rally for political feminist causes, but her novels all concern women's issues. Her female characters are strong, independent women who defy the norms of their patriarchal societies. For example, Eva Luna the female protagonist and narrator of Eva Luna, overcomes a childhood of poverty and, by the end of the novel, succeeds in becoming a well-known writer of popular soap operas. Irene Baltran in Of Love and Shadows is an energetic journalist who alters the image of women as submissive and silent beings. In addition, Allende's writing seeks to identify its own female voice, the central struggle of the literary feminist movement of the twentieth century. Women have long attacked male dominance in society and in literature. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own that men have excluded women from the literary process and have taken it upon themselves to describe for women their female experiences. Woolf writes: If women had no existence save in fiction written by men, we would imagine her to be a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is women in fiction. (45) As Woolf projected early in the feminist movement, in order for women to be depicted fairly and accurately in novels, women must establish a room of their own in a male-dominated literary tradition. Thus, recent feminist criticism has moved from revealing patriarchal dominance and sexism in society and literature to studying women as writers, women writing for women and about women. Elaine Showalter in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" labels this type of study as gynocriticism. She writes Feminist criticism has gradually shifted its center from revisionary readings to a sustained investigation of literature by women. The second mode of feminist criticism engendered by this process is the study of women as writers, and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women. (55) Thus, critics have taken serious steps in looking at women as contributors to the field of literature, both in their subject matter and in their style and language. Inherent in the study of women's literature is the study of women's language, especially as it differs from men's. Woolf noted the difference in her essay "Women and Fiction": The very form of the sentence does not fit her [a female writer]. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman's use.... And this [a way of writing] a woman must make for herself, adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes a natural shape of her thought. (81) Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have related the difference in language to biological differences in the sexes. The way each sex relates to language corresponds directly to the way each relates to sexual fulfillment. Men have command over language, dominating and controlling it. In "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays," Cixous describes women's writing as it relates to female orgasm: Her rising: is not erection. But diffusion. Not the shaft. The vessel. Let her write! And her text knows in seeking itself that it is more than flesh and blood, dough kneading itself, rising, uprising openly with resounding, perfumed ingredients, a turbulent compound of flying colours, leafy spaces, and rivers flowing to the sea we feed. (Ill) Word choice, descriptions, paragraphs, dialogue, content and even narrative pattern do not have to follow a structured notion of logic and organization. Instead, women's writing is something different, something that exists in the very nature of being female. Feminists have not agreed upon or readily defined the female voice, and some are not ready to equate female writing with biology. However, many female writers, including Allende, are indeed ignoring traditional forms of writing and searching for an inner voice. Allende attempts to write her fiction from a woman's perspective and in so doing, creates her own female voice different from the patriarchal norms of language. She commented on her feminist views in an interview in 1987: Until very recently, female characters in Latin American literature by men have been little more than anthropomorphic vessels, frequently made to symbolize the political conditions of the country ~ women were narrated by men.. .. Finally, we are speaking ~ narrating ourselves to ourselves ~ with a feminine voice that identifies with lots of women every-where.
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