A Feminist Analysis of the Narrative Structure Of

A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

ELIZABETH M. SORELLE, B.A.

A THESIS

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. At last we are reading the way we make love, hate, give birth, and get involved with politics. We are no longer only whores or virgin mothers. We are real human beings. We always were; we just never got to tell it. (142, as qtd. in Rivero)

Her attempt to write with a feminine voice sometimes confuses an ignorant reading audience. John Butt in The Times Literary Supplement reacted violently to the overtly sexual passages in The Stories of Eva Luna: "Isabel

Allende's numerous erotic passages are actually quite well dome. She might do better to write straight pornographic books without apologetic romantic adornments" (8 Feb 1991). Despite the negative criticism, Allende holds true to her writing as a woman. Even if she does not align herself in one camp or another of feminism, she believes women must express themselves as women and not as women speaking on behalf of a sexist society.

Thus, in all of her novels, Allende presents a feminist agenda: a desire to change the way women write and read literature. Her subject matter concerns the issues of women: rape, love, childbirth, motherhood, sexual enjoyment, and the feminist movement all weave themselves into her novels.

She writes descriptively, romantically, and even majestically, ignoring criticism that her stories wander or are disjointed. As I will explain, in The

Infinite Plan, she creates a narrative structure that, in the end, allows for the victory of the female approach to understanding life.

The story of The Infinite Plan involves the troubled life of Gregory

Reeves. He spends his entire adult life trying to escape his childhood memories of incest within his family and the brutal machismo of the barrio.

His inability to cope leads to unrequited love for women, resulting in unwanted and unloved children, and a painful tour in Vietnam. The novel, then, is a healing process for the adult Reeves, who is in his mid-fifties: he tells his story to Ming O'Brien, a psychiatrist, which enables him to tell the story to his lover (the unnamed female narrator), which enables her to reveal the story to us, the readers. Reeves moves from understanding the world from a male's perspective of sexism and controlling emotion to a female's perspective of both feeling emotion and openly expressing it. Guiding him into this realization is the female narrator and all of the feminist and female presences within the novel.

This thesis is divided into three main chapters. Chapter II concerns the narrative presences within the novel that inform the text and make it feminist. Narrative presences include the characters and factors that directly affect the narration. In The Infinite Plan, these include a female omniscient narrator; the feminist reality of the twentieth century; the paratext; and

Reeves' confessions to his psychiatrist and narrator. Chapter III analyzes the role of the omniscient female narrator, who is the most powerful figure in the novel. As the lover of Reeves, she has a vested interest in his well-being, but she is more than just a sympathetic character. She controls the text: she fictionalizes his past based on his confessions and allows him only limited space to voice his own story. Ultimately, she determines when he has fully recovered and when he can confidently reveal that new-found health to the reader. She controls the novels and guides Reeves' healing. Chapter IV examines Reeves' narrations, which expose him as a stereotypical male who struggles to escape the masculine realm of lust, power, and destruction. With the assistance of his lover and his psycliiatrist, he ultimately recognizes that in order to heal from his painful life, he must surrender to the feminine realm of emotion, love and compassion.

8 CHAPTER II

NARRATTVTS PRESENCES:

THE FOUNDATION OF THE FEMINIST TEXT

The Infinite Plan, more than any of Allende's other works, presents a fascinating narrative pattern that empowers the woman as the controller of the text and as the primary storyteller. Despite the fact that the protagonist,

Gregory Reeves, is a male, several narrative presences, or voices, inform the text and make it feminist. These presences include a female omniscient narrator; the feminist reality of the twentieth century; the paratext, primarily the epigraphs from Violeta Parra and Reeves himself; and Reeves' confessions to his psychiatrist and the narrator. The novel is a novel of growth for its protagonist, in which Reeves learns to cope with a painful past, a past that involves chauvinism, violence, rape, and war, all of which traditionally exist in the male's world. By the end of the novel. Reeves recognizes that in order to heal, he must learn to love, to be passionate, and to talk, all of which exist in the female realm. He must not only learn to value the opposite sex but he must feel as a woman. The narrative structure of the novel guides him in this process.

This chapter gives an overview of the narrative presences that exist in the novel. In order to visualize the framework, readers should see Figure 1 at the end of this chapter, which shows the narrative levels and their relation to the center of the novel. The following chapters explain in detail how the dual narrators, the female narrator and Reeves, uphold Allende's feminist theme.

The Infinite Plan contains many narrative presences, or narrative voices, as Gerard Genette explains in Narrative Discourse: "The subject... being not only the person who carries out or submits to the action, but also the person (the same one or another) who reports it, and, if need be, those people who participate, even though passively, in this narrating activity"

(213). Narrative presences also include anything that affects the narration.

Thus only two traditional narrators, per se, exist in this novel: an omniscient female narrator, who is also the lover of Reeves, and Reeves, the protagonist.

A series of narrative presences also inform and mold the novel, some that exist outside the text and some that exist within. Other narrative presences outside the text but important to the text are: the sexual reality of the twentieth century, including both the author's and reader's perceptions of it; the paratext, most importantly the epigraphs from Violeta Parra and Reeves; and Reeves' complete confessions to the narrator which she alludes to and chooses from for the novel but does not reveal in full. Important narrative presences within the text include: the presence of the character Ming

O'Brien, Reeves' psychiatrist; the omniscient narrator and lover of Reeves; and finally. Reeves as the narrator.

10 Surrounding the text and informing the text is the sexual reality of the twentieth century, specifically gender relationships and how they have changed because of the feminist movement. The novel concerns itself particularly with the positive change of the status of women that occurred from the 1940s and 1950s to the 1990s and the hopefulness of continued change. The awareness of this phenomenon occurs at both the writer's and reader's experience. Allende writes as a woman concerned with women's issues. Naturally, as the writer, she has initial control over what happens in the text, and she creates, for example, an omniscient female narrator who has a feminist agenda which she frequently interjects. The narrator comments:

Customs were changing drastically during those years, and mistakes like Carmen's became a daily occurrence; it seemed senseless to continue to punish her as if she were the spawn of Satan. Pregnancies outside marriage were a common theme in films, television serials, and novels, and in real life famous actresses were having children without identifying the father, feminists were advocating women's right to an abortion, and hippies were coupling in public parks in full view of anyone who wanted to watch. (212)

While the narrator exists independently from Allende, Allende has given her a feminist voice. As the premise for the entire thesis suggests, the narrative structure results because of Allende's predilection for feminism.

Allende depends upon her readers both being aware of and sympathizing with a feminist point of view. The contexts outside the text exist as grounds on which the reader and author negotiate, with the author

11 exploiting the situations, and the reader using them as contexts through which to view the text. Her reading audience, as she describes it, includes:

mainly young people, more women than men. ... There's an age in between ~ especially males, white males ~ who don't relate to my writing very well. I've discovered that because of the lecturing tours where I face an audience and can more or less see if there are more women or men, the age range, and how they look ~ lots of students, very yoimg people all the time. {Contemporary Literature 594)

Scholars, of course, have never determined the ratio of men to women who read her books, but in order for her novel to work, Allende needs and wants a female audience. Her ideal reader, she once commented, would be a twenty-year old Chilean girl named Alejandra Jorquera, who had memorized parts of Allende's novel by heart (Kenyon Review 118). Allende fully expects her readers to change, to take the concepts of the novel and grow from them.

She writes:

You find that there is someone who has read your book ... and how every reader writes the other half of the book. You only give them half, and they provide the rest with their own biography, with their experiences, their values. It's amazing; it's always a different book. {Contemporary Literature 599)

Not only must the reader be aware of feminist concerns in the twentieth century, then, but the way the reader interprets those concerns in the novel will affect the way in which the reader changes because of them. And, if the reader understands the feminist reality outside the text, then the reader is more likely to understand the importance of the change in Reeves.

12 The next levels outside the novel itself are the paratexts, most importantly the two epigraphs. One is from a Chilean folk song by Violeta

Parra, and the other is a direct quote from a section of the novel that Reeves narrates. The purpose of these particular quotes is to reveal the inconsistency in the way men and women perceive and cope with life. The first epigraph reads: "My thanks to life, for all it has given, for all the laughter and tears I have lived. . . . Violeta Parra, Chile." The second epigraph reads:

I am alone, at dawn, on the mountaintop. Below, through the milky mist, I see the bodies of my friends.... Stealthy shadows are climbing toward me. Silence. I wait. They approach. I fire against dark silhouettes in black pajamas, faceless ghosts. I feel the recoil of the machine gun.... The attackers have become transparent. .. they continue their implacable advance. I am surrounded.... Silence.... My own scream wakes me, and I keep screaming, screaming....

Both quotes suggest entirely different ways to cope with hardship. Parra's quote itself is short but full of emotion. It celebrates life, even for its capacity to provide both laughter and sorrow, and it suggests that the writer is comfortable in dealing with both emotions. Indeed, both laughter and emotion "live" and have been intricate parts of her existence. The few words are italicized, which softens them and suggests a whisper. Reeves' quote, in contrast, is long and harshly written. He is obviously uncomfortable with pain, pain from war, from an abusive father, and from unrequited love, and he allows it to overwhelm him. His outlet for pain is the machine gun, not laughter or tears. He cannot communicate his pain to others, and his silent

13 screams surround him. Ultimately, Reeves will have to learn to perceive life as Parra does, as a woman does, in order for him to heal from his painful past.

The next level outside the text, but essential to it, is Reeves' confessions to the narrator, presumably his lover. Throughout the novel, the narrator gives occasional glimpses of her relationship to him, and only at the end of the novel, does Reeves reveal his relationship to the narrator: "You know the rest, because we've lived it together. The night we met, you asked me to tell you my story. It's very long, I warned you. That's all right, I have a lot of time, you said, not suspecting what you were getting into when you walked into this infinite plan" (382). Thus, Reeves has confessed his life problems to the narrator, and she has filtered those problems and presented them to the reader. While the narrator herself is significant, what she chooses not to disclose about Reeves is equally as important. The confessionary structure of the novel makes the reader aware that the narrator has total control over Reeves' story and that she has carefully chosen what to reveal about him; consequently, the reader sees Reeves' weaknesses and dependence upon the female.

The confessionary construction exists within the novel itself in the character of Ming O'Brien. O'Brien is a minor character who never narrates, but her presence is important to the narration. She has heard Reeves'

•~\ confessions even before the narrator; thus, without her, the omniscient narration and novel could not exist. Because of her, the reader understands that Reeves has or is undergoing a psychological transformation and that the confessions will heal him. Important, too, is that the person who allows him to tell his tale to the narrator is a female psychiatrist. Thus, two women ultimately listen to his pain and comfort him. The confessionary structure emphasizes the novel as a novel of growth for the protagonist.

The most important level of the text, of course, is the actual narration.

The novel contains a female narrator who is both a heterodiegetic narrator

(omniscient and removed from the story, Genette 244-5) and a homodiegetic narrator (a character in the story, Genette 245). At times, the narrator is objective and removed from the text, as a traditional omniscient narrator, and knows facts about Reeves' life that she could not have known from simply listening to him recall his childhood: "That very day, the priest, who in his youth had been a belligerent peasant boy, shut himself in the courtyard of the sacristy with Gregory and began teaching him to box" (49), That the narrator knows the priest's history suggests her omnipotence. Often, though, the narrator inserts her opinions and her impression of Reeves' growth:

Gregory never accepted those standards and for the next thirty years relentlessly pursued the chimera of perfect love, stumbling more times than he could count, falling and picking himself up, running an interminable obstacle course, until he gave up the search and learned to live in solitude. Then, in one of life's ironic surprises, he found love when he least expected it. But that is another story. (113)

15 The quote illustrates that the narrator knows Reeves personally, but it also illustrates the narrator's bias toward him. She, in fact, alludes to her relationship with him, early in the novel when the reader cannot yet appreciate its significance. Thus the narrator is more than an objective, omniscient teller: she has a vested interest in helping Reeves recover.

The temptation exists to equate the female narrator with the author, as

Perricone has suggested. Certainly, the novel hints at biographical references, and it is all too convenient that the narrator is a writer and that

Allende's present husband grew up in California, had a turbulent first fifty years, and is a lawyer, all of which Allende reveals in her newest autobiography of sorts, Paula. However, the narrator in The Infinite Plan exists independently of the author. Of course Allende has created her and has incorporated in her novel some references to her husband's life, but like all of her characters, the narrator develops on her own. Allende commented in an interview on her characters:

I have a feeling I don't invent them [characters]. I don't create them; they are there. They are somewhere in the shadows, and when I start writing .. . little by little they come out of their shadow into the light. But when they come out into the light, they are already people. They have their own personalities. ... I don't invent them; somehow they are there. {Points of Departure 119)

As the warning professes on the title page of the novel, "This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and events portrayed are the product of the

16 author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental." While references dot the novel, critics must stray from reading the novel biographically. Thematically, the important facts to remember about the narrator are that she is female, she loves Reeves, and she has an investment in his recovery.

Interspersed in the narrator's telling of Reeves life. Reeves himself makes an occasional entrance. As discussed in Chapter III, his stories unveil his struggles of being a man in a man's world. Often, his narrated sections reflect upon prior incidents that he or the narrator may have already mentioned. The narrations themselves are buried beneath the presence of a feminist world, the epigraphs, his own confessions to others, and a female narrator who knows more about his life than he does. But ultimately, they evidence his path to growth and maturity, which is the result of the females in the text, particularly O'Brien and the narrator. All of the narrative presences within the novel help structure the novel as a feminist text.

Feminism in the twentieth century and the paratext provide a frame. Reeves' confessions to the narrator and to O'Brien empower the woman as storyteller and as healer. Reeves must enter the world of woman: he must love, care, be passionate, cry, feel, and, most importantly, talk. The women in the novel,

O'Brien and the narrator, guide him to confess, to reveal, to expose his and pain and, consequently, to find himself.

17 Feminism in the twentieth centiny

Paratext: epigraph from Violeta Parra and from Gregory Reeves

Reeves' confessions to narrator

Presence of Ming O'Brien, the psychiatrist

Extradiegetic level: omniscient narrator

Intradiegetic level: narrator, lover of Reeves

Metadiegetic level: Reeves as narrator

Mimesis: dialogue between all characters

Figure 1: Narrative Levels of The Infinite Plan

18 CHAPTER III

UNDERMINING THE TRADITIONAL ]VIALE NARRATION:

THE OMNISCIENT FEMALE NARRATOR'S

CONTROL OF THE NOVEL

The Infinite Plan has two narrators: Gregory Reeves, who is also the protagonist of the novel, and his unnamed female lover, who is both homodiegetic (a character within the novel) and heterodiegetic or omniscient

(Genette 245). The story is one of enlightenment for the protagonist, who ultimately frees himself from the machismo of the barrio. Despite his central role. Reeves narrates his life story in only thirteen brief sections; the omniscient female narrator creates the rest of his past based on confessions that Reeves reveals to her. This narrator is the most powerful figure in the novel. She controls the text, creating a fictional past out of Reeves' confessions and allowing him only selected chances to voice his story. She likewise toys with her reader, carefully hiding her identity as Reeves' lover until he exposes the truth at the conclusion of the novel. Superficially, Reeves commands his own growth and healing, but the omniscient female narrator overwhelms the novel and guides his movement at her own will.

Reeves' lover as narrator is troubling because she is both a character and an omniscient voice; she also switches between the roles unexpectedly.

In both roles, she is far from objective and often inserts bold opinions:

19 "[Carmen's] fiery nature was at odds with the double standard that made prisoners of women but granted a hunting license to men" (136). Often, it is difficult to distinguish the narrator from the author or the implied author, which Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction defines as one "who stands behind the scenes, whether as stage manager, as puppeteer, or as an indifferent God .... This implied author is always distinct from the 'real man' ~ whatever we may take him to be ~ who creates a superior version of himself, a 'second self,' as he creates his work" (151). The confusion complicates itself, especially concerning the women's issues in the novel.

Within the novel are the following: Allende, the author, who always includes women's issues as a subject but who very carefully eludes the label

-I of feminist; an implied author who perhaps is more bold than Allende in establishing the feminist agenda in the text; and a narrator who voices the opinions of the implied author but who, as a character, also has a vested interest in the protagonist. Ultimately, because of the elaborate structure of the novel (especially the premise for its existence, i.e., the confessions of

See the following interviews and articles for Allende's views on feminism: Interview. Ed. Ines Dolz-Blackburn, George McMurray, Paul Rea, and Alfonso Rodriguez. Confluencia 6:1 i¥a\\ 1990): 93-104; Interview. "Isabel Allende Unveiled." Ed. Douglas Foster. Mother Jones (Dec. \98S): 43-46; Interview. Points of Departure. Ed. David Montenegro. Ann Arbor, Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1991. 110-26; and "Writing as an Act of Hope." In Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. Hd. William Zinsser, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

20 Reeves retold by his lover), the control reverts entirely to the omniscient female narrator.

Controlling female narrators and/or protagonists are common in

Allende's novels and short stories. Although The House of Spirits has three narrators, the story is told from the perspective of Alba, the granddaughter who has read her grandmother's diary. She recounts three generations of the

Trueba family and, as Flora Schiminovich suggests in her article, "Two

Modes of Writing the Female Self," the diary becomes a "feminist confession" for all the women in the Trueba family (107). In The Stories of Eva Luna, Eva

Luna, who is also the protagonist of the novel by the same name, writes the stories both to entertain and to teach her lover, Rolf Carle, the importance of love and communication. In the prologue to the collection of stories, Rolf speaks of Eva's talent as a writer and implores her to tell tales for him: "You think in words; for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it.... Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me" (4-5). Thus Eva produces all of her marvelous stories for her lover's benefit; ultimately, her stories help him to begin the long process of healing from a troubling history of family abuse and war.

The female omniscient narrator in The Infinite Plan likewise has a preestablished goal of helping Reeves recover from a painful past, an idea

21 which roots itself in the confessionary nature of the telling. The narrator is not the first person to whom Reeves reveals his traumatic past; his first confession is to Ming O'Brien, a psychiatrist. As will be discussed in detail in

Chapter IV, the reader understands that Reeves has or is undergoing a psychological transformation and that the confessions are a part of therapy.

The omniscient female narrator exists secondarily to the psychiatrist because, without her initial prodding. Reeves would never have been strong enough to speak with a stranger about his pain. Reeves recalls the first time he visited Ming O'Brien's office: "After a great deal of hesitation, I overcame the notion that men don't talk about their weaknesses or their problems, a prejudice instilled during my youth in the barrio, where that premise is one of the basic tenets of manhood" (345). Finally, Reeves deals with the sexual and gender issues that have plagued him and imparts them to the narrator, as the reader discovers at the end of the novel. The narrator moves one step beyond just listening, however, when she recounts his life in the novel itself.

This process of listening and telling is similar to the structure of The Stories of

Eva Luna. Rolf listens to Eva tell stories, but Eva's stories often mirror problems in Rolf's life. Likewise, in The Infinite Plan, Reeves tells his lover stories of his past but the lover becomes the final storyteller, as she records the stories in the novel.

22 In the process of retelling, the omniscient female narrator gives his life thematic importance; that is, she suggests that his problems relate to his manhood: his sexuality, his lack of compassion for women, his machismo, his natural instinct for war, and his inability to feel. While these do form the heart of his problem, she, as the controller of the text, structures his entire life around them. She brings to attention certain subject matter of her own that directly contrasts with Reeves' behavior or that explains the environment in which he was raised; for example, the narrator highlights issues such as sex before marriage and abortion. The narrator comments on the sexual urges of

Ernestina Pereda, one of Reeves' teenage lovers:

The social climate that would view sex as a healthful exercise without risk of pregnancy or obstacle of guilt had not yet appeared on the horizon. Ernestina Pereda was one of those beings destined to explore the abyss of the senses, and it was her fate to have been born fifteen years too soon, at a time when women had to choose between decency and pleasure ~ and Ernestina lacked the courage to renounce either. (Ill)

This passage suggests that Ernestina is a victim of a culture that does not allow women to experiment with their sexual pleasures. The narrator also criticizes the danger of cultural restrictions on sex, especially in terms of

Carmen's unwanted pregnancy and consequent abortion: "Like Gregory,

Carmen had fallen in love at the drop of a hat, always with breathtaking passion, but unlike him she was bound by the patriarchal traditions of her family and society" (136). Patriarchal ties are even stronger in the barrio.

23 when Carmen is forced to have an illegal abortion because she cannot face her family or survive in the community as a unmarried mother:

This was her hour of truth, and she must face it alone; it was one thing to talk a big game, making vaguely feminist statements, but something quite different to be an unmarried mother in her corner of the world. She knew that her family would never speak to her again; they would throw her out of the house, out of her clan, even out of the barrio. Her father and her brothers would die of shame; she would have to bring up the baby all by herself, support it and look after it alone, and find some kind of work to survive. Women would repudiate her, and men would treat her like a prostitute. (139)

The narrator emphasizes the double standard in the community: men like

Reeves can and are encouraged to freely have sex, while women like Carmen must refrain and beware of the grave consequences of testing the boundaries.

Reeves is part of this double standard, but his problems, according to the structure of the text, stem from his placement in the "male" category. The narrator emphasizes the problem on the very first page of the novel:

Forty-some years later, during a long confession in which he reviewed his life and drew up an accounting of his errors and achievements, Gregory Reeves told me of his earliest memory: a boy of four, himself, urinating on a hilltop at sunset, the horizon stained red and amber by the last rays of the sun; at his back were the sharp peaks of the hills, and, below, a plain stretched farther than the eye could see. The warm liquid flows like some essence of body and spirit, each drop, as it sinks into the dirt, marking the territory with its signature. He prolongs the pleasure, playing with the stream, tracing a topaz-colored circle on the dust. (5)

Urination as a pivotal point is not uncommon in modern and postmodern literature; the epiphany in James Joyce's Ulysses, for example, is the

24 simultaneous urination of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (702). In The

Infinite Plan, although the memory is Reeves' first, the narrator has chosen it to expose Reeves' struggle with the cultural expectations for his gender. In this early stage in his life. Reeves is at peace with himself, as the beauty of the landscape indicates and as the narrator comments: "All is well; for the first time he is aware of happiness; it is a moment he will never forget" (6). But the quote shows the early stages of a knowledge of power associated to masculinity: like a male dog exerting his sexual prowess in the neighborhood. Reeves' urine marks his territory. The inherently masculine action is his "body and spirit," an inescapable but tormenting facet of his life.

Thus, the narrator establishes early in the novel that gender and sexual identity are at the core of his problems.

Being in control of the text, the narrator also chooses when Reeves speaks and the subject matter of that speech. This act is especially significant, when one considers that the protagonist of the story is Reeves, and thus the narration should technically belong to him. But Reeves only narrates thirteen brief times. Since the omniscient female narrator has heard his story, she decides what should come directly from Reeves and what she should retell.

Both her narration and Reeves' narration focus primarily on his sexual problems, including but not limited to Reeves' witnessing of a rape. Reeves' first sexual experience with Olga, Reeves' experience as a rape victim, his

25 father's public masturbation, and his sister's rape at the hands of her own father. Reeves grows up and lives as an adult in a perverse world and hence he cannot decide for himself what constitutes normal sexual relationships, a problem the narrator highlights.

The narrator also assumes control over the novel by switching into an omniscient narrator, revealing things about Gregory's world and the characters in it that Reeves could not know. Parts of the novel exist beyond

Reeves' existence, even though the narrator freely comments on them.

Carmen, for example, spends eleven weeks in Vietnam, adopting her dead brother's son. The narrator reveals the entire affair, although, according to the framework of the novel, the narrator should only know what Reeves has told her. The narrator also knows details about Reeves' college roommate,

Timothy Duane, details that Reeves may have alluded to but certainly did not dwell on in one evening of intimate conversation:

Timothy Duane never forgave his father for having brought him into this world, nor for continuing to thwart his heart's desires with his good health and bad humor. To defy him, Duane committed every known atrocity, always making sure his father knew about it, and so wasted fifty years in a festering hatred that cost him his peace and well-being. (283)

To some degree, the narrator has fictionalized Reeves' past in her retelling of it, an act that is inherent in autobiography. As Barrett Mandel suggests in

"The Past in Autobiography," the recollection of past is not fixed, and the autobiographer's memory of that past is always in flux:

26 The memory speaks unequivocally. Here is a paradox: I create my past. I possess it now. And yet I would have to be crazy to deny that it possesses me too. My past has sought me out down the long corridor of the years; it has obliterated present time and space with the sprung force of its persuasiveness and the charm of its possessiveness. Very little in life claims one's allegiance as much as one's past.... It can change, but it is I who changes it. As I change it, it changes me. (84)

So retelling Reeves' life on the female lover's terms, based on her details and word choices and thematic structure, creates something beyond verisimilitude: it creates a fiction that the reader, in turn, interprets in light of his or her own experiences.

The narrator also manipulates the reader because she hides her relationship to Reeves. She introduces herself on the first page of the novel:

"Forty-some years later, during a long confession in which he reviewed his life and drew up an accounting of his errors and achievements, Gregory

Reeves told me of his earliest memory" (5). Although she reveals that she is basing this recounting of his life on confessions he has made to her, she hides her role as his lover. Throughout the body of the novel, the narrator only gives occasional glimpses of her relationship to Reeves:

27 This passage comes fairly early in the novel, and it only alludes to their love interest. The narrator suggests, rather egotistically, that she is the lover he ultimately finds. Quickly, however, she reverts the conversation to "but that is another story." In other words, the narrator keeps the reader in suspense

(and the careless reader, in ignorance), waiting to discover the truth, which

Reeves reveals on the last page of the novel. Also, his final words reflect a new-found confidence in self, in talking, that the machismo of the barrio once barred from his life. The narrator allows Reeves to present the final evidence of their affair, superficially granting him control of his own story. Despite the fact that he has the final words, these words reflect the narrator's key role in his life.

The final question in looking at this female narrator is to understand her purpose in manipulating the text, not simply explaining that she does.

Critics have noted Allende's powerful storytellers and/or narrators, especially concerning her first novel. The House of Spirits. Maureen Shea in

"A Growing Awareness of Sexual Oppression in the Novel of Contemporary

Latin American Writers" writes that "the perspective of the female narrator brings to light similar patterns that are emerging in Latin American works written by women, especially the concentration on patriarchal abuse of the female body and psyche" (53). Linda Gould Levine in "A Passage to

Androgyny: Isabel Allende's La casa de los espfritus" suggests that, at least in

28 The House of Spirits, the female narrator. Alba, stifles the voice of Esteban.

Levine writes that the normal structure of the dual-narrator novel is

the 'double-voiced discourse'... a discourse in which the 'dominant' voice is male and the 'muted' story, female. In Allende's novel, the dominant voice is Alba's, a discourse composed of her own voice, Clara's, and many other's, while the secondary voice, certainly not as resonant, is Esteban's. (169- 70)

In the case of The Infinite Plan, the female narrator is not only dominant but manipulative and controlling. The effect of her manipulation is that she reverses gender roles with Reeves. Throughout the novel. Reeves attempts to free himself from the rigid definition of "male" ~ lack of compassion for women, brute sexuality, natural instinct for war, and an inability to feel and to communicate. By the end, he learns to find the "female" side of himself ~ compassion, love, and communication. While female presences in the text guide his recovery, as discussed in Chapter II, the omniscient female narrator assumes a traditional male role and dominates his life story. Her control of the text plays in well with the shifting of gender roles throughout the text, especially Reeves' need to suffer as a woman in order to ultimately "feel" as a woman, and it certainly undermines a traditional male narrative.

29 CHAPTER IV

THE NARRATIONS OF GREGORY REEVES:

HIS GROWTH INTO THE FEMININE REALM

While two narrators exist within The Infinite Plan, Gregory Reeves and his unnamed female lover, the omruscient female narrator is the primary narrator, as she recounts the past that Reeves has told her in confidence. But

Reeves' own narration represents his growth and change in character: he changes from a man tormented by the sexual perversions of his family and the extreme sexism of the barrio into a man comfortable with his need to be heard, to be loved, and to be cared for by a loving partner. He narrates thirteen brief sections in the novel, sections which occur sporadically throughout the entire novel. The sections increase from brief passages of two to three pages to the final ten pages of the novel, when Reeves confidently reveals the progress he has made in therapy with his psychiatrist, Ming

O'Brien. All of his passages concern sexual issues, from gender roles to molestation and rape. Reeves' narrations reveal him to be a man who is struggling to escape the traditional masculine realm of lust, power and destruction. His survival depends on his ability to surrender to the feminine realm of emotion, love and compassion. The text suggests that masculine behavior is perverse and destructive; that Reeves' primary goal is to escape

30 this behavior; and that Reeves heals because of his ability to experience life from the feminine perspective.

The entire novel revolves around the concept that a person's gender defines his or her place in society, a concept Julia Kristeva explains thus:

Sexual difference ~ which is at once biological, physiological, and relative to production ~ is translated by and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language and meaning. (81-82, as qtd. in The Feminist Reader)

In western culture, patriarchal society dominates and hinders the progress of women. The structure depends upon men being dominant, lustful, and unemotional and upon women being submissive, emotional and compassionate. In this novel in particular, the machismo of the barrio compounds an already existent sexist culture in the United States. The men and women within the novel are products of gender assumptions. Carmen, for example, will not attend college because it contradicts expected norms for women. The omniscient female narrator writes:

[Carmen'sl father never publicly acknowledged her worth; that would have been a surrender of his macho principles. He sent his two daughters to school because that was the law, and although it was not his intention to keep them in ignorance, neither did he expect them to take their studies seriously; instead, they were to learn domestic skills, help their mother, and guard their virginity until the day they were married ~ the only ambition for a decent girl. (73)

31 The men within the novel, including Reeves' best friend in college, Timothy

Duane, typify stereotypical images of the playboy, men who cannot make commitments or be involved in meaningful relationships. Duane remarks that women "are black widow spiders; if you don't stay free of them you can never be yourself and will exist only to please them" (254). Duane spends the majority of the novel pursuing unfullfilling, sexual romances. Hence, the novel juxtaposes the stereotypes of men and women in a sexist society and suggests that the world in which Reeves lives is a world structured around these gender expectations. Although this patriarchal society forms Reeves' view of life, he struggles to free himself from his expected role as a macho man, an inner struggle that his narrations reveal.

Reeves challenges patriarchal norms by virtue of the fact that he discusses his problems with both a female psychiatrist and with a female lover. The very act of confession violates norms within the male world, particularly in the barrio, where masculine prowess defines life for everyone.

Despite the fact that Reeves is Anglo and has been transplanted into the

Hispanic culture, machismo greatly influences his behavior. Reeves comes to understand the significance late in the novel, when he faces O'Brien in her office: "After a great deal of hesitation, I overcame the notion that men don't talk about their weaknesses or their problems, a prejudice instilled during my youth in the barrio, where that premise is one of the basic tenents of

32 manhood" (343). But the fact that Reeves can acknowledge his attitude suggests that he is willing to change the shape of his life.

Revealing his deepest thoughts to a female psychiatrist compounds the difficulty of confession. When Reeves first meets O'Brien, he has difficulty coping with his sexist attitude:

What I need is a Freud in skirts, I thought, but after an overly long pause ... it occurred to me to tell the dream about the mountain. I know I began in an ironic tone, sitting with my legs up, evaluating my interrogator with an eye trained to judge women; I've seen plenty, and in those days I was still assigning them a grade on a scale of one to ten. The doc's not bad, I decided; she rates a seven, give or take a little. (344)

His visit to O'Brien's office constitutes gender role reversal and thus threatens Reeves' masculinity: Reeves assumes the role of submissive client, while O'Brien assumes the role of dominator. Being a client lends itself to exposing one's vulnerability, emotion, desires, and dreams, an act which directly contradicts male norms of composure and silence. Feminist theorist

Helene Cixous suggests that this fear of exposure is inherent in all men:

But at the same time, man has been given the grotesque and unenviable fate of being reduced to a single idol with clay balls. And terrified of homosexuality, as Freud and his followers remark. Why does a man fear being a woman? Why this refusal (Ablehnung) of femininity? {Sorties 104)

Thus, Reeves' willingness to open himself up for analysis suggests a willingness to overcome traditional male norms and to recognize himself in the role of female.

33 Also important is the reversal of sexual power, which immediately challenges the male. It is curious that Allende makes direct comparisons between O'Brien and Freud and that Reeves directly calls O'Brien a "Freud in skirts" (344). Although Freud openly discussed sexual repression and relationships, feminists have labeled him a gynophobic, or one who is fearful of the female. Toril Moi states in her analysis of Freud's Dora that "Freud's epistemology is clearly phallocentric. The male is the bearer of knowledge: he alone has the power to penetrate woman and text; woman's role is to let herself be penetrated by such truth" (398). Thus, the male psychiatrist alone has the key to manufacture the female client's sexual identity. Allende has reversed the power construct, giving a female psychiatrist control over a male client's identity of self, including his gender and sexual self.

Sexual power identifies itself as the key conflict in Reeves' life.

Indeed, the text suggests that at the core of being male is an oxymoronic play between causing pleasure and causing pain. The very first page of the novel presents this underlying theme, as the narrator reveals Reeves' first memory of urinating on top of a mountain. As Chapter III suggests, the act of urination emphasizes power associated to masculinity: his urine marks his territory, and thus he identifies pleasure with territorial control. Later the theme reemerges in Reeves' experience in Vietnam, where the worst battle

34 occurs not on a hilltop but on a mountaintop. Reeves explains the guilt- ridden secret of man's desire for war:

It's something more than the primordial instinct to do battle, more than blood lust: pleasure. I discovered that on the mountain. I don't dare say the word aloud, it would bring bad luck, but I repeat it over and over to myself: pleasure, pleasure. The most intense pleasure you can experience, much more intense than sex: thirst satiated, first love, requited, divine revelation, say those who know what it is. (223)

Throughout the novel, both Reeves and the omniscient female narrator emphasize this theme. Reeves, for example, compares his sexual experiences to war: "During that stage of my life, sex was like the violence of the war; it was a malignant form of contact that in the end left me with a terrible emptiness" (255). Directly related to man's sexuality, then, is the desire to control, to destroy and to kill.

Allende identifies the sexual behavior of males as not only violent, but also as a perverse illness, an idea that exemplifies itself in Reeves' father,

Charles Reeves. Reeves reveals to us in his second narration that, as a child, he discovers that his father has molested his sister Judy. Charles Reeves' sexual behavior is symbolized in the deterioration of his body; as the cancer consumes him, so worsens his sexual perversion. Reeves describes his father's final moments:

At that moment I was struck by a strong blast of the odor of almonds, and a squalid old man appeared in the doorway of the room; he was standing very straight, clad only in an undershirt, and was barefoot; his remaining hair was ruffled, his eyes burning with the madness of fever, and a thread of

35 saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth. With his left hand, he supported himself against the wall; with his right he was masturbating. (64)

The scene itself is nauseating, as the illness and medications coalesce in the smell of almonds. Even in a feverish state, his natural impulse is not to die quietly and honorably, but to self-indulge. His illness is not only symbolized as death and decay but as something purely evil. Reeves recalls his impression of his dying father: "In my dreams I saw my father as a creaking skeleton in a dark suit, with a huge snake coiled around his ankles, and awake I remembered him shrunken to skin and bones" (53). His illness, an illness of sexual perversion and evil, has literally destroyed him.

The ultimate result of the perverse sexual behavior is death and destruction, which identifies itself in the war but which also identifies itself in the plight of the women in the novel. Male behavior completely destroys the life of Judy, for example, who, as a direct result of her father, learns to hate all men. Male behavior also destroys Carmen, who is forced to have an abortion in part because her lover, Tom Clayton, is unwilling to take responsibility for his unborn child. Allende directly links Carmen's decision to have an abortion with the patriarchal barrio around her:

36 In essence, then, it is not Clayton who forces her to have the abortion, but the barrio itself. The onmiscient female narrator describes the scene:

Bound by wrists and ankles to the kitchen table, a rag stuffed in her mouth to prevent her screams from being heard outside, she bore the pain until she could stand no more and made signs that she would prefer anything to this torture After it was over. Carmen, with an ice pack on her belly, lay weeping imcontrollably.. .. Thirty hours later, when she still had not awakened but seemed to be wandering in the delirium of a different world, while a thread of blood, thin but constant, was staining the sheets red, Olga knew that for once her lucky star had failed her. (140-41)

Man's sexual pleasure results in death ~ be it on the battlefield or in the tortuous pain of a back-alley abortion. Michel Foucault in his History of

Sexuality suggests that before this century, man's power rested in bloodletting and that this century, "we . . . are in a society of 'sex,' or rather a society 'with a sexuality': the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used" (147). But

Allende's novel suggests that man's desire for bloodshed connects itself to man's sexual urges, that the two coexist.

Rather than harp on the evil nature of the masculine sexual domain, the novel guides its protagonist in healing, in recognizing his sexual conflicts and in allowing him to feel, to love, to be compassionate ~ in short, to experience the feminine realm. In order to completely heal, he must cope with the difficult memories of his past, a process that is painstakingly slow.

37 He recalls these memories not as a person who has recovered from old wounds, but as a person who still suffers from the trauma of the suppressed event. His narratives that deal with the most difficult memories, including a rape he witnessed as a young boy and a rape he suffers at the hands of a schoolmate, read as confessions made under hypnosis. The scene in which he tells of his witnessing a rape begins thus:

The heat is unrelenting, the ground is parched; it has not rained since the beginning of time, and the world seems to be covered with a fine reddish powder. A harsh light distorts the outlines of things; the horizon is lost in a haze of dust. It is one of those nameless towns like so many others. (24)

Reeves discloses the incident in the present tense, and the short, choppy clauses suggest that he is under hypnosis and telling the story as it is happening. The dream-like details, including the haziness and the distortion of the light, suggest that Reeves is uncovering something deep within his subconscious. Later details in this passage support the notion that Reeves has never disclosed the event before: "I can't breathe," he screams, "I try to call my father, I open my mouth but nothing comes out; I swallow fire, a scream fills me inside, I am choking" (24). These are details of the event as it happened in the past, but they may also be expressions of his state of mind during the hypnosis, particularly since he recalls the event in present tense.

Other parts of his narrations suggest that he cannot always remember the traumatic events of his childhood and that he suffers from denial.

38 Although Judy often reminds him of his father's perverse behavior. Reeves cannot remember:

We [Judy and Reeves] have talked ... and do not agree about either events or people, as if we had been protagonists in different stories. We lived together in the same house at the same time; her memory, nevertheless, did not register what mine did. My sister cannot understand why I cling to the image of a wise father.... She swears that things were never like that, that the violence of our family was always there.... She accuses me of having blocked out the past. (61)

Unlike the passages in which he directly recalls difficult memories, this passage reveals a Reeves who simply cannot or does not allow himself to suffer the pain of his youth. Reeves fully controls his emotions, and he recalls the past but does not retell it as if it were happening in the present.

Reeves' own narrations contradict his memory of a perfect father; in fact, in this same narrated section. Reeves describes his father's perverse illness. His healing, then, is a gradual process and one full of inconsistencies in thought; only toward the end of the novel does any evidence of change exist. In retrospect, the reader can, of course, distinguish pivotal events, but Reeves himself is not aware fully of his changes until the end of the novel.

The primary evidence of growth exists in the fact that Reeves openly discusses his problems. As stated earlier. Reeves challenges patriarchal norms in the very act of telling his tale, particularly to a female, a process which allows him to begin feeling and exposing his vulnerabilities. Also

39 important is that the novel forces him to experience life from a woman's perspective. He experiences the humiliation and pain of rape:

That was how Martinez took me, from behind. I still feel the knife blade against my throat, but I don't think I'm bleeding anymore. If you move I'll kill you, you fucking sonofabitch gringo, and I had no way to defend myself, all I could do was cry and curse while he was doing it to me. (82)

Reeves also endures the loss of a child. Symbolically, Reeves suffers as

Carmen suffers from her abortion. Reeves' children are complete failures, and Margaret, his daughter and eldest child, is destined to destroy herself with drugs and alcohol. Reeves describes the pain of his loss, when he discovers that Margaret has escaped from the hospital:

I had lost Margaret ~ since that day I have seen her only in jail or in a hospital bed ~ I just didn't know it yet. It took me nine years to let her go, nine years of frustrated hopes, useless searching, phony regrets, endless thefts, betrayals, vulgarity, suspicion, and humiliation, until finally I admitted in my heart of hearts that I couldn't help her. (309)

Rape and abortion represent extreme violence against women, particularly in this novel. That Reeves suffers from both ~ rape literally and abortion figuratively ~ suggests that he has undergone the deepest pains of being a woman.

Ultimately, Reeves also begins to recognize his own perverse and brutal male sexuality. Reeves recalls a rape he witnessed as a young child:

I see two men. . .. They are wearing work overalls; they are sweating, their shirts and hair are soaking wet. The fat one has cornered a young black girl; she must be no more than ten or twelve. . .. Now I can't see the girl; she is crushed between the

40 heavy bodies of the rapists. I want to turn; I am terrified, but I also want to watch. I know that something fundamental and forbidden is happening, I am a participant in a violent secret. (24)

The rape is a pivotal image for Reeves, one that both intrigues him and haunts him and one that returns to him later in life, as he himself violates a young Vietnamese girl:

Suddenly I remembered something I'd seen in a dusty southern town when I was five years old: two men raping a young Negro girl, two giants crushing a terrified little girl between them, a girl as small and fragile as the one I was with, and I felt like one of them, huge and satanic, and my desire flowed from me, and my erection with it. (195)

The horror and violence of the first rape triggers emotions of guilt in Reeves and the acknowledgment of guilt removes his sexual desire. Although the realization does not immediately change his behavior, he is beginning to confront repressed feelings.

In the last ten pages of the novel. Reeves sums up his life and calculates for the reader his accomplishments in therapy with O'Brien. This section is the longest of his narrated sections, and it is the culmination of the novel itself; the section illustrates Reeves' growth: his freedom from the machismo of the barrio and his ability to feel the joy of talking, feeling, and loving. For the entire novel, the onmiscient female narrator and the narrative presences have stifled his voice. For the first time. Reeves comfortably exposes himself and "chats" to both the reader and his lover about the

41 lessons of his life. Not only is he more talkative than he has ever been, he reveals his healthy companionship with a woman. Instead of facing his past alone. Reeves returns to the barrio with his lover:

Carmen had given me your second novel, and I read it during that vacation, never suspecting that one day I would meet you and make this long confession. How could I suspect then that together we'd go back to the barrio where I grew up? In more than four decades, it had never crossed my mind to go back. (379)

She has helped him to confront his painful past, to talk about his problems, and to depend upon her for guidance: "And now, just when I had stopped looking for a companion, you appeared and compelled me to plant rosebushes in solid ground" (381). Thus, his female lover has successfully guided him to a path of recovery.

Not only has Reeves openly shared his emotions with his lover and hence with the reader, he shows evidence of having freed himself from the sexism and violence inherent in manhood. He has left the sexist world of his life behind him: "My little black book with its list of ladies got lost in the back of some drawer, and I've never come across it since" (374). For the first time in the novel, he admits to the imperfections of a man's world. He comments: "I questioned the validity of life with a sword in one hand, eating myself up with meaningless combativeness. I still ask myself that question but have no answer; I suppose I can't imagine life without a struggle" (378). The most important part of recovery is admitting the

42 problem with the self: Reeves has acknowledged the futility of his pent-up anger, even as he admits he will always struggle to suppress his natural

" combativeness."

Reeves' entire perception of life has changed, a change that he poignantly illustrates in the recollection of his first memory:

I regressed to my first memory of happiness, myself at four, urinating on a hilltop beneath the orange-streaked dome of a magnificent sky at dusk. To measure the infinite vastness of the space I had regained, I shouted my name there beside the lake, and the echo from the mountains returned it to me, purified. (379)

This memory actually exists on the very first page of the novel:

Gregory Reeves told me of his earliest memory: a boy of four . . . urinating on a hilltop at sunset, the horizon stained red and amber by the last rays of the sun; at his back were the sharp peaks of the hills, and, below, a plain stretched farther than the eye could see. The warm liquid flows like some essence of body and spirit, each drop, as it sinks into the dirt, making the territory with its signature. He prolongs the pleasure, playing with the stream, tracing a topaz-colored circle on the dust. (5)

Chapter III discusses in detail the importance of the memory in relation to

Reeves' sexual problems. Although the two passages relate to the same memory, the first account is self-centered, as it focuses on the urination, specifically urination related to power and pleasure, rather than on the beauty of the surrounding landscape. The omniscient female narrator also reveals this first memory, in order to establish the theme of Reeves' problems with male behavior and sexuality. Reeves gives the second accoimt of his

43 own memory and the focus does not emphasize power and masculinity; instead, the memory is a purification, a cleansing of the mind spoiled by sexism and sexual perversion.

Reeves' final narration ends the novel; he has discovered the value of simply talking and of openly discussing his feelings and his imperfections.

Reeves describes his new-found emotional health:

At the moment my world caved in on me, when I had nothing left, I discovered I didn't feel depressed, I felt free. I realized that the most important thing was not, as I had imagined, to survive or be successful; the most important thing was the search for my soul, which I had left in the quicksand of my childhood. When I found it, I learned that the power I had wasted such desperate energy to gain had always been inside me. I was reconciled with myself, I accepted myself with a touch of kindness, and then, and only then, was rewarded with my first glimpse of peace. I think that was the precise instant I became aware of who I truly am, and at last felt in control of my destiny. (381)

The key here, in terms of the text's feminist agenda, is that Reeves discovers feeling is more important than power, and only with that acknowledgment, can he reward himself with peace.

Allende's purpose in establishing her feminist theme is to expose man's violence against women, to suggest that male sexual behavior is controlling, perverse and destructive, perhaps inherently so but also as a result of a patriarchal society. That Reeves can abandon that behavior and experience life from a woman's perspective suggests that change is possible.

Other Allende critics have indicated that in Allende's novels in which two or

44 more narrators exist, the male and female voices reconcile. Levine in "A

Passage to Androgyny" suggests that House of Spirits "is not only a mirror in which tales are retold and female characters struggle against patriarchal oppression; it is also a forum in which male and female are joined together in a 'spirit of reconciliation with the sexes' " (165). While Reeves in The Infinite

Plan has reconciled with himself, he has done so only because he can free himself from the barrio and from the sexual perversion and violence inherent in a man's world. His ability to even accomplish this growth is dependent upon a woman; his lover nurtures him and teaches him the value of feeling and expressing feeling.

45 CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Despite the fact that The Infinite Plan has received little attention from scholars and negative attention from the press, it presents itself as a challenging novel for Allende scholars. Its narrative structure is complex and is by far the most experimental structure that Allende has attempted.

Complexity in narrative structure exists in Allende's other works as well. The

House of Spirits has three narrators, the most important one of whom is Alba, and The Stories of Eva Luna exists for and is dedicated to the storyteller's lover, Rolf Carle, a character who exists in another of Allende's novels, Eva

Luna. While The Stories of Eva Luna and The House of Spirits present complicated narrative structures, they do not approach the difficulty of the number of layers of narrative voices in The Infinite Plan. Thus, even if the novel strays from Allende's typical novel, it evidences her growth as a post modern writer. Her novel demands that readers play an active role. Allende requires her reader to pay attention and to perhaps re-read the novel in order to follow the process of the narration. For example, Allende carefully withholds the identity of the primary story teller until the end of the novel, but upon re-reading, one finds clues of who she is. A careless reader might disregard the complexity of the novel and merely toss it aside as being too difficult. Perhaps the challenging structure of the novel, along with the

46 difference in setting and protagonist from Allende's other novels, makes it too frustrating to be enjoyable to an avid reader of Allende. However, serious Allende scholars should examine the novel again, particularly in light of its experimental nature.

The Infinite Plan also evidences Allende's growth as a feminist, or at least as a writer concerned about women. She holds true to her intention of breaking the norms of patriarchal language. All of the narrative presences support her feminist theme; these presences include a female omniscient narrator, the feminist reality of the twentieth century, the paratext, and

Reeves' confessions to his psychiatrist and narrator. The female omniscient narrator controls the novel and undermines the traditional power of a male protagonist and male narrator. Both the narrative presences and the female omniscient narrator guide Reeves on his journey of recovery. Ultimately,

Reeves recovers because he discards his sexist behavior, understands the inherent perversion of male sexuality, and learns to value life from a female's perspective. The success of Allende's complicated narration, particularly as it presents its feminist theme, forgives the problems of the readability of the text.

47 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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