Magic Realism and Isabel Allende: an Investigation of the Relationship Between
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MAGIC REALISM AND ISABEL ALLENDE: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN. NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE AND GENDER POLITICS
BEVERLEY GOLDMAN
Submitted in partial tultilrnent ot the requirements for the degree
MASTER OF ARTS in ENGLISH
in the
FACULTY OF ARTS at the RAND AFRIKAANS UNIVERSITY
Superi 'isor: Dr C. 11 ockett October 1995 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Cecilv Lockett for hN v1s10n and percipience, mv gratitude and admiration;
To my husband Dennis and our children, especially my daughter Nicki, whose faith in me was unwavering, r give this to you with love;
To my mother, in warm and affectionate memory.
II The main focus of study in this dissertation is the magic realism of Isabel Allende as it pertains to gender politics, specifically in the oppressive fascist regime of revolutionary Chile at the time at which her novels are set. Her narrative technique is identified and related to the environment of which she writes, with a view to associating it with the gender aspect of politics. The socio-political climate in Chile, certainly in the decades ot the 1960s and 1970s, incorporated elements of fascism, oppression and sexism: Allende successfully adapts most of her female characters to the revolution and its effects.
Three of Allende's works are studied: Jbe House of the Sp_irits, Of Love and Shadows and Eva Luna. Vv'hile she has produced more writings than these, the three works chosen for analysis are the ones most suited to an examination of whether her works can be defined as feminist - which the first and third can - and whether her use of the technique of magic realism, specifically in the first and third novels, but not in the second, advances the cause ot, or is detrimental to, gender politics in Latin America. Definitions of magic realism and its positive and affirmative effects on feminism in The House of� and Eva I una are included., but always with the cognisance that the perspective and the practice of tenunismin Latin r-\m.erica differ markedly from that in North America. 1l1e section dealing with Qf �fill.d_Sba..do� concentrates on social realism and concludes that as a technique for feminist fiction, it is less successful than that of magic realis1n both in its representation and in its depiction of feminism. Allende posits female bonding between mother and daughter ,md in the wider universal sense as the basis for female strength and as the solution to the heinous evils perpetrated by the dominant male patriarchy.
Ill CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ii
ABSTRACT ...... iii
CONTENTS ...... iv
INTRODUCTION: MAGIC REALISM, GENDER POLITICS AND TI-fE
WRITINGS OF ISABEL ALLENDE ...... 1
CHAPTER I : THE HOUSE OF SPIRlTS ...... 14
CHAPTER II: OF LOVE AND SHADOWS ...... 37
CHAPTER Ill: EVA LUNA ...... 55
CHAPTER IV : CONCLUSION ...... 72
BIBLIOCRAPI-lY ...... 76
IV lNIRODUCTION: MAGlC REALISM.. GE.ND.EJLEillJTI AND IHE WRIIINGSQF {SABET. AI.I.ENDE
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. (James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.)
All thy threads with magic art Have wound themselves about this heart. (William Cowper: TuMary. )
The literary term "magic realism" defines a category of fiction different from traditional naturalistic and realistic fiction, and from categories of fantastic writing which include fairy-tales, ghost stories and the gothic novel. The currency of this term is attributable in part to its continued use by the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, the author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though he was not the originator of the genre. From the early decades of the twentieth-century other Latin-American male authors adopted and employed this technique, among them Julio Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Borges, Juan Arreola and Miguel Asturias.
[n her analysis of their juxtaposition of the real and the supernatural, Patricia Hart has concluded that magic realism is ''based on a vital conflict between idealism and pragmatic reality' (1987: 21). It is only now, however, in the last two decades ot this century, as women writers strive for and receive some
1 recognition on the continent, that they are appropriating this narrative technique and altering it to analogise with the growing awareness and acceptance of feminist writing.
A working definition of magic realism, and the one most often used as a point of reference for this particular genre, is offered by Amaryll Chanady (1985: 8), for whori its tenacity and power to endure have eluded those prophesving its impending demise. Magic realism for Chanady is otten defined as the juxtaposition of two different nationalities - the [South American] Indian and the European - in a svncretic tictitious world-view based on the simultaneous existence •ot several entirely different cultures in Latin America.
The definitive Latin-American writers, both male and female, have taken cognisance of and perfected the art of magic realism: in their hands it has become an accepted and viable literary form. Its basis is 'actuality': retlecting something that once actually happened, it may then distort the happening in a fantastic observation. Anything that is believable may be included; and the many and varied techniques of the language used describe as most human that which is most marvellous. It encompasses historical, social, mythical, collective and individual reality: within its parameters the presaging of events otten replaces the objectivity of reality, and reality then becomes what is passed on in the narrative. Ilmaginative and inventive writing, and the blurring of boundaries between being and reality, share space with historical fabrication, with 'Bihlical myths, timeless myths and pagan allusions at the service of the narrative" (Chanadv 44). In order to be understood fully, the lyrical character of magic realism must he recognised, for it imprints upon the subject a heightened sense of reality as it combines realistic and tantastic Ii terature.
In magic realist novels there is a departure from the traditional and conventional categories of realism or romance. In their place the author 2 experiments with form, style, factors of time and subject matter. The commonplace, the mythical and the fantastic are fused in works that, while eminently believable, obscure the distinctions between what is trivial and comic with what is serious and tragic. Jatin-American prose fiction, according to Payne & Fitz (1993: xi), developed, as its centrepiece the enshrinement of ambiguity, a growing awareness that 'reality' is at least as niuch a fluid construct as it is a physical or socio-political entity to he imitated or reproduced ... It represents a realisation that at any given moment 'reality' is multi-dimensional and that language ... is volatile because it is itself inherently ambiguous.
When Latin-American literature began as a definitive movement in the early part of the century, there was inherent in this movement an acceptance of the "Amerindian concept of life which, when merged with the concerns of the new novel, developed into ... Magical Realism" (Brunton 1990: 16). Latin- American novels have almost always striven to use fiction as a means to social change or political reform. Patricia Hart (1987: 12) translates magic realism as a phrase in which, a fascinating conflict of both terms and literary traditions exists, with the attempt to truthfully mirror the workings of a quotidian world vying with an idealistic desire to use literature for change, or to find in it something that transcends the banal and the mundane.
Fantasy literature, says Rosanne Brunton (1991:1), opposes the tenets of realism by seeking to articulate that which is incomprehensible in rational terms ... Because it does not ground itself in the realistic, the fantastic defies the constraints of signification, floating freely as an expression of the human potential to create ... The fantastic ... is ideally suited to women's writing, for it nullifies hierarchical structures that reduce or threaten women's writing.
Different layers of reality are produced concurrently in magic realism; and it is the 'Amerindians' who are able to achieve this with such skill, for in their
,i) universe all living things are part of a unified whole. They eschew any separation between natural and supernatural, between material and spiritual, and between rational and implausible. They create fictional characters who are comfortable with their environment, but who by their very nature tend to startle the reader into adjusting her sense of what is nornial, expressing what has been repressed, and furthering what has been peripheral.
Largely a Catholic continent, Latin America has also seen strong religious influences wielded on its authors. For centuries the Catholic Church has promoted the image of the Virgin Mary as a model of submission and passive resistance. This in turn has resulted in women'splace traditionally being seen as in the home, with men promulgating inherent 'feminine purity' while highlighting women's lack of 'intellectual capacity' for public life. Doris Meyer (1988: 154) categorises modesty as the highest female virtue among these women, and contends that "deeply ingrained in the Hispanic psyche is the either/or image of woman as Virgin or slut, Mary or Eve." The Church view of woman is dichotomous, juxtaposing madonna and whore, the adoration of and simultaneous oppressive and contemptuous attitude to its female members, which stereotypes woman. Barbara Loach (1990) talks of the cultural constructs of md.chsmo and marianjrno which have conditioned the history of these women -. the glorification of the male's physical superiority as opposed to the female purity as imaged by the Virgin Mary. The notions of male dominance and female submissiveness, she says, have permeated every social institution ... and have insured a perpetual power imbalance, as men strive to assert their authority over women, and women resort to manipulative tactics in order to achieve their desires and goals. (48)
Although Isabel Allend&s writings are not in any sense religiously motivated, the dichotomous view of women can be perceived when she uses the technique of magic realism in at least two of her works. Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru; she spent most of her youth and young adulthood in Chile, and when exiled from there because of the 1973 revolution and overthrow of the government, lived for 13 years in Caracas, Venezuela, before moving to California. In her own mind she is firmly Chilean, with all but one of her works, the most recent, rooted in the terrible history of her country over the decades of the 60s and the 70s. She is the author of the novels The HseLihSpIrits (19&5), Of Love and hadw (1987), EmLuna (1989) and ThJnfinitefiau (1994); among other writings she has penned a book of short stories, The Stnrje'ofEyaLuna (1990); she has written a children's hook, La Gdde_Eoxc&ana (1983); and she has produced a compilation of satirical pieces on the war of the sexes, Ci vilice a suIng1othta (1974). This dissertation proposes to examine whether Allende's works can he defined as feminist, and wheth'r her use of the technique of magic realism in IhflouseoLthSpirits and EvaLuria., as opposed to the traditional realism she uses in QLLove_andShadows, advances the cause of, or is detrimental to, gender politics in Latin America. For the purposes of this study, therefore, only these three novels will he analysed in the light of magic realism and feminism. Her other novel. The InhnitePjan, is set in the United States and has a male protagonist, while the scope of this research does not allow for an expikation of short stories.
As a starting point for an analysis of Allende's work, it is important to note that there is a strong perception among those women writers who detv their dominant patriarchal background to produce feminist literature, that the reality of their lives prevents them from attaining a sense of self and forces them into imagining not only alternative selves but fantasy, dreams and memory. Nancy Walker (1990: 8) sees these novelists as then moving 'into the realm of speculative fiction, proposing utopian or dvstopian visions that serve as counterpoints to contemporary reality." Walker's prognosis leads her to believe that once treedom is constrained, the alternative route chosen is that of imagination which leads to movement "out of the socially constructed self or deeper entrapment within it" (131). Allende's novels do, indeed, have a measure of this spirited imaginative movement within them; but her basis and foundation, the solidarity she promulgates among her women to nurture and sustain them, allows theni to envisage an alternate reality that not only corrects but compensates for the present debacles. In this way Allende allows for the emergence of an ultimate empowering vision as a "response to the perceived absurdity of contemporary patriarciw" (Walker 147). Allende, says Hart (1987), uses the genre in a most credible way and concomitantly allows for the merging of two dilterent realities. By juxtaposing the real and the magic in characters who, like Clara and later Eva Lnna, strive for a measure of independence and female assertiveness, and who succeed in bringing about some change or promise of change in the social and political environment in which they exist, she recounts in minute and convincing detail what appears to be apparently impossible. This juxtaposition is at times narrated in a most prosaic and jejune style, challenging the conventional notions of time, matter, place and identity, and altering the reader's apprehension of reality. These magic events, too, become the literal expressions of figurative truths: this leads to the questining of the political and metaphysical definitions of the real by which people live. Normal consciousness is enhanced by the magic of tiction; the world outside consciousness, the external world, deals with multiple intersections, an rreducihle element that cannot be explained by logic, familiar knowledge or perceived belief. As mystery in magic realism grows, its participation in the sense of wonder imbuing the reader allows her to recognise equally both tact and fancy, dreani and waking. in a lecture delivered to the Book-of-the-Month Club (Zinsser 1989: 44), Allende herself vividly describes her own explicit process of magic realism: In a novel we can put all the interrogations, we can register the most extravagent, evil, obscene, incredible or magnificent facts - 6 which, in Latin America are not hyperbole, because that is the dimension of our reality, in a novel we can give an illusory order to chaos. We can find the key to the labyrinth of history. We can make excursions into the past, to try to understand the present and dream the future. In a novel we can use evething: testimony, chronicle, essay, fantasy, legend, poetry and other devices that might help us to decode the mysteries of our world and discover our true identity ... In Latin America we don't have to stretch our imaginations. [These things] are written in our history
In the magical world of Latin America, reality may at any moment he altered; times and places co-exist irrespective of their dates or geographical location; and spirits, in the most natural way, are illuminated, intensified and irradiated. Allende says of the magic in her writing (Zinsser 1989: 9) that, "stories are [nwj only hope of harnessing 'a land of crazy, illuminated people'... Revolutions made with machetes, bullets, poems and kisses ... are written in our history." She acknowledges that anything which is part of the human mind can be written in a novel to help its "discover our true identity." Allende posits women as the sites of the magical and ultimately, says P. Gahrielle Foreman (1992: 371), she allows political reality to replace magic realism, for she feminises generic codes to employ magical realism as a bridge to a tradition recoverable in political history, a history she ultiniatelv constitutes in her text as distinct from the rriagical.
Latin-American women writers have long considered themselves closer to the Amerindians than to male writers, because of their shared history of political and sexual oppression. With Allende in the forefront, therefore, they have thus adopted the technique of magic realism to "express the victimization of women and to show the weaknesses and injustices of male systems of government in Latin America" (Brunton 1990: 18). Out of the mainstream of male-dominated Western literature, Allende envisages merging the natural and the supernatural into a "wholeness of existence which does not go
7 together with the binary thinking and rigidity of European-oriented male culture" (33). She recogrises the force of the matrilineal development of the Amerindian culture while calling on fantasies associated with Catholicism and those indigenotis to the Arnerindian culture. There are strong elements of the fantastical in many of her landscapes: though her characters do not consciously focus on eliminating the patriarchal adversary, they tend to work together to combat oppression in a peaceful rather than a truculent marmer, for to quote Andre Lorde (1984), "the Master's tools will never dismantle the master's house". Her rhetoric calls not for violence against 'the Other' but rather for collective resistance against the state caused in part by visionary imaginings which overwhelm the souls of the women, and in parf by the realities of their passive rebellion. Women in Latin America have been thrust onto the periphery by their sex, their class and their economic status, if not by their race. With the increase in women's writing the past few years, their plight and possible resolutions and explications of it will enable them to intuit their creative identity and reclaim their sexual and feminist uniqueness.
In the late 1960s and 1970s in Latin America, the repressed became increasingly aware of conditions in their countries. They began to experiment with socialist ideologies and agrarian reforms favouring workers. 1Tie climate on the continent was ripe for rebellion. A Marxist President and uncle of Isabel Allende, Salvador Allende, was elected in Chile, but in 1973 the military gained control of the country, and a reign of terror, torture and tear was unleashed in Chile as elsewhere on the sub-continent. In the feminist arena, working-class women had supported President Allende's programs which promised equal pay for equal work regardless of sex; pre school education for all children, irrespective of class; free health care; and increased family allowances for all. After the 1973 coup, however, women's hopes were dashed while a governance of tyranny, oppression and subjugation became the ruling force.
8 In the decades since the early 1970s, Latin America has provided two strongly contrasting life--styles for its citizens. It has undeniably entered the Post- modern world of mass communication, electronic media, air travel and economic and fiscal development; vet it has concomitantly surrounded its people with the political terror of extremist right- and left-wing forces. The systematic kidnapping, torture and murder of tens of thousands of people, the dehtiinanisation of the public and the fragmentation of society have all joined forces with a terrorism imposed by dictatorial rn.ilitary governments ruling in authoritarian and arbitrary ways. As so many, of her contemporary writers, Allende has transformed the pain of physical torture, the terrible reality of the repressive regimes and. the horrors of detention, into ii writing which exposes these evils. Allende writes of women 'confronting re- detinitions in their lives and thoughts" (Walker 1990: 4); her writings are political in the way they express the personal and individual experiences of all women. Her works promise hope, joy and change to women. What the dominant culture considers madness, says VValker (144), may .. he the obverse: an acceptable fantasy that reveals a franscendant reality ... The violence of metaphoric madness, like the sword of the woman warrior, niav provide the dislocation necessary for the ultimate empowering vision to emerge.
the only way women could cope with the terror and the subjugation was to write it in tictional form, thus breaking the rule of silence and questioning the world. Narrative, for Sally Robinson (1991: 17) is any discourse that is "mohilised by a desire to construct a history, an accounting of the limits and boundaries of gender. subjectivity and knowledge." She thus argues that contemporary women's fiction strategically engages with official narratives - of history, sexual difference, sub jectivitv - in order to deconstruct them and to forge new narratives."
Q Patriarchal institutions have prevailed throughout literary hiStory, striving to maintain a comfortable and convenient male status quo All the negative influences emanating From these aspects of society have combined to discourage women From writing. Yet Allende recognises and endorses that despite this, women writers of Latin America have engaged in the 'subversive' act of writing, consistently producing seditious texts criticising and condemning repressive institutions and thereby revealing the injustices of a system determined to isolate, alienate and subordinate these same women. With crystal clarity and blinding awareness Allende herself has chosen to puhhcise the political evils of the regime under which she lived. Marginalised and Frustrated for much of her life, she expresses in her texts the 'women's space' of which Julia Kristeva speaks so eloquently, the intimate and inviolable space allowing her creativity and the will to survive, the space for all women "of creating, [which] is the centre of things, and in being where they are, doing what they do, [which allows them] to define where the centre is" (Koski 1989: 154). She writes fmiin (written by a woman) as distinct From ii uline (by a man) novels "from a ... perspective that reveals her innermost frustrations and conflicts unique to her as a marginal being" (Shea 1987: 239); but she also writes fmiiüst (transForming and advocating change in the existing culture) rather than tminine (interpreting and describing) texts. In the Latin-American context, which differs from that of North America and Europe, this gender-political writing is striving to establish and validate a teminisnl ermane to that continent.
Ariel Dorfman (1991: xii) lists the repugnant "succession of inquisitorial fires" that have suppressed women in Latin Anierica over the centuries - hunger, unemployment, gender inequalities, censored texts, incompetent governnIen and the violation of basic human rights. Patriarchal abuse has been concentrated on both the Female body and the psyche, but has tailed to dissolve the potency arid strength of the Female bonding which arose in
10 defiance of it in order to combat patriarchal oppression. Latin-American women have been marginalised and trivialised throughout their political and literary history, but the undeniably positive steps taken by writers such as Allende have determined the path to be followed by current and successive governments. la tin--American feminism scarcely resembles that of middle-class North America, for in the former society the majority of women are struggling not yet for full economic and legal equality but rather simply for recognition as people to he taken seriously; thus it would he generally unfair to compare the two movements and the literature arising from them. Latin-American writers reject "the universalizing tendencies of Anglo-American feminists to speak on behalf of all women in all cultures" (Loach 1990: 70). They are, instead, Forging their own identity, using writing to try and alter the existing political and cultural domination and patriarchal oppression. At the same time they are creating empowered females who "present new possibilities of living for all women, based on a new self-knowledge and knowledge about the world, and a perception of teniinine qualities and networks as strengths" (Loach 273). In The House oLth ir and EyLuna Allende creates woman- centred worlds with visions of a future Utopia, where women with foresight, foreknowledge and prescience can transForm theritselves into a new state of existence. This process relates to that of Helene Cixous (1976: 88) who says, that 'a feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive, it is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there's no other way." Patricia \iVaugh (1989: 5) says of feminist writing that it retrieves and recuperates the marginal and the buried, undermines canonized forms and iniplicitiv fractures the universal liberal subject through the introduction of an awareness of the social construction of gender.
11 Allende writes unflinchingly of women's experiences, neither devaluing nor neglecting them, and thus presenting a feminism derived neither from Europe nor from North America but authentically Latin-American in its ferninocentrism. hi her world the female protagonists, who are twice the outsiders because they are female and colonised, confront the tormented patriarchal world of traditional Hispanic society, overcoming traditional Latin-American female stereotypes, blazoning their feminism in their request to be free and complete humans, depending only on themselves, and effecting change through the female values of nurturance and caring. These women slot neatly into the category of feminism which, says Tori! Moi (1985: 185), "is not simply about rejecting power, but about transforming the existing power structures - and, in the process, transforming the very concept of power itself."
In her Foreword to the LjitjuAmermiahurt Stomis edited by Celia de Zapata (1990: 5), Allende describes the literature of her continent as "a crude patriarchal myth reinforced by separation, mutual ignorance and machismo". Writing for Allende means empowering all women to control and conduct their own lives, to engage in activism, to live unconventionally, and to assume power because they write in a "culture that defines literary authority in patriarchal terms" (Greene 1991: 18). This, to quote Luce Irigarv, is because woman "has been denied access to language, except through recourse to 'masculine' systems of representation which disappropriate her from her relation to her selt and to other women." As a result, she destroys "the discursive mechanism" by inventing a peculiarly 'female language and transcript; simultaneously, though, she is granted "powers of imagination, intelligence, inventiveness that women have traditionally withheld from their protagonists" (17). Writing in Latin America which is not strictly feminist, conceals the tragedy of womens lack of tradition and its history of silence. But feminist writers are denouncing phallogocentric mechanisms in literature
12 and are pressing for the freedom of the repressed feminine in writing and the inscription of womanhood in culture, in order to constitute a liberated Female Subject. lITiev are also proscribing the patriarchal system that created the silent 'Other' of women while discovering the female identity and self- determination of that 'Other' .A woman's culture, says Berta Lopez Morales (Cunningham 1990: 125), shows "its own peculiar praxis and its own world view, inserted within a wholeness which is described in terms of a dominant language created by a phallogocentric svsteni." Language for Gisela Breitling (Ecker 1985: 163), "is the medium which contains our subjectivity, our identity: our discourse shapes our history." in Allende's books her women's discourse breaks with the male literary canon and creates a space in which the woman's being can be recognised and her world contextualised. Using Elaine Showalter's theory of gynocritics, which posits the construction of a "female framework for the analysis of women's literature" based on "the study of female experience rather than adapting male models and theories" (Showalter 1985: 131), Ahlende's works do incorporate a large measure of terninisni in their expression. Of the centuries-old silence of Chilean women (Moiitenegro
1991: 113), Allende says they are now it "choir of different but harmonic voices, feminine voices ... giving our own interpretation of the world on a big scale for the first time in many centuries."
The first of Allende's texts to he discussed under the rubric of magic realism, is EJjouse_of thiJpirlls. An attempt will also he made to define it in gender political terms as a feminist text, although there are aspects of feminist writing whih Allende at times overlooks in tavour of an occasional and somewhat stereotypical portrayal of women as traditional healers, lovers and nurturers.
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13 CliAP-1.FJs I : THE HOUSE._ill_S_rum_s
They left behind only that which they thought useless. They took away everything except the spirit, which they were incapable of seeing. From it life was reborn, a new path was opened up and the darkness became light for me. CT. Esquivel: I:.aLlble)
.... geography has been reduced to a few meters only with our eyes we can go far not with our feet But, inside of us, there grows another geography open boundless. (Lucia Fabri: Cana)
In an interview with Alexander Co leman in the New YorkJim.es_B._ook Eevie\.V (tvfay 1985), Allende confirmed that part of her aim in ,Nriting The fu.use of the Spiri� was to depict graphically and incontrovertibly some of the realities of Latin American countries. These would include the geography, histo1y, climate, social classes, urban and rural existence and the magical attributes of life particular to that part of the world. Nowhere in this novel is a country actually named; the socialist President and the internationally known Poet are conceived sirnply by those titles. Yet it is apparent to all that the country is Chile, the President Salvador Allende and the Poet the renowned and eminent Pablo Neruda.
Ahlende's own words about this her first novel were reported by David Montenegro in 1991 (231): In fiction you feel tree to interpret and pull out the emotion which, I think, is very much a part of reality. We are not reason only. Facts are never just what we see ... Sometimes fiction is more real than objective reporting.
Its very tirst sentence, ' Barrahas caine to us 1w sea', the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy" (Allende 1985: 11), sets the tone ot magic realism which pervades and penetrates at least the first two thirds of this novel. The central character Clara embodies this magic realism, as Allende's way of creating a female not vet fully feminist but approaching that state through alternative patterns of behaviour. She is a child of spiritual. other-worldly values, a child of a magic world that, however, no longer exists. Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life's inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not always apply. Clara spent this time wrapped in her fantasies, accompanied by the spirits of the air, the water, and the earth. (Allende 1985: 103)
Clara represents the principal site of the intuitive and the magical as the locus of the feminine psyche, and in opposition to the oppression of patriarchy which later in the novel surtaces in the figure of Estehan Trueba. Her grandmother says of her, "People are going to start lining up to look at her as if shewere a monster" (20). Clara is the link with and the emnbodunent of the spirit world - its inhabitants talk to her and bring her messages, and they are an extension of her own clear spirit and of her femininity: [Nivea] realised that the tension in the air increased Clara's mental powers and disturbed the spirits that were hovering around the child (94)
15 Clara the Clairvoyant could interpret dreams. It was an inborn talent .... (95) Dreams were not the only thing that Clara read. She could also predict the future and recognise people's intentions, abilities that she maintained throughout her life and that increased with time .... (96)
Clara personifies the ultimate power of testimony through her creative use of memory, and it is her journals which subsequently enable Aiha, her granddaughter, to transcend ignorance and repression and to enter the world of freedom through the liberating powers of being a woman. For periods in her life Clara lives in silence in her own self-created magical space in which she communes with spirits, practises clairvoyance, ignores the chronology of history in her journal writings and predicts a bright and beautitul future for her family, her home and her country. - Refusing to conforni in either dress or behaviour to the norm, she is an individual who defies society's violence and hypocrisy and who continually affirms and reaffirms, in her own space and world, her own values and beliefs. Although there is obvious female strength in Clara's character, Allende portrays also elements of the healer-cum- nurturer and a measure of passivity, which precludes her from initiating any positive action for change. It is thus evident, at times, that Allende uses Clara almost as a stereotypical image that recognises how 'sacred' the female is, and how complex, rich and nurturing the power of passive female energy is. While feminism generally condenms and eschews the use of stereotypes as a male construct, Allencle's portrayal of Clara strengthens the sense of an ever- developing feminist proclivity through the novel.
though Allende's characters are placed clearly within a political time-span, they relate strongly to the women described by Christine Downing in her seminal text The Gol s'olcJieseLtheI.onthiine (1981: 5): Women seek to nourish one another by sharing images and stories discovered through their researches in 'herstorv' and through attention to their dreams and other rumirious 16 experiences. The search for Her leads us to ourselves, to the women we know and love, the women we learn from and learn with, and to the ancient prepatriarchal traditions about the sacred power and varied shapes of feminine energy.
Clara's niagical world is the world of spirits, the life-affirming world, the bewitched world subverting the material world of patriarchal wealth and power. She is the Witch: The canvas shows a middle-aged woman dressed in white, with silvery hair and the sweet gaze of a trapeze artist, resting in a rocking chair that hangs suspended just above the floor, floating amidst flowered curtains, a vase flying upside down, and a fat black cat that observes the scene like an important gentlenlim. (Allende 306)
Her architectural machinations turn the mansion she lives in after her marriage into "an enchanted labyrinth .. of twisted staircases that led to empty spaces, of turrets, of small windows that could not be opened" (115), and into a "magic universe" (322). While the unopened windows may seem contradictory to the essence of teniinism, suggesting a closing ott of life instead of opening oneself to new eperierlces, they need to he seen as manifestations of the magical, through which the spirit passes, rather than feminist or political, for through this magic Allende allows Clara to celebrate the forces of life and the healing power of the spiriL
Clara is also a seer, sensitive to the fact that all life is part of the same organic web of being and experience: She becomes a repository for the pain and tear of all the women in her society; she holds the key to the spiritual survival skills which are passed on from woman to woman ... The men only build corporeal things. (Rouge 1994: 16)
Acutely perceptive and insightful, she sees with equal clarity the past, the present and the future, the overt and the hidden. She is distinctly aware of the future: 17 They had also grown accustomed to the youngest daughter's prophecies ... (Allende 18)
[Marcos and] Clara were utterly convincing, especially because the child had no need to look into the crystal hail to guess what her clients wanted to hear. (28)
But there is an ambivalence about the value of her prescience, for practically it has little it any eftect. Her magic powers are continually overlaid by her involvement with her uncle Marcos, his fantastical stories to her, her own innocence and juvenescence, and her imagination which is fed by her inveterate love of reading. Clara torsees a death but cannot name the victim as her sister Rosa; atter witnessing Rosa's autopv carried out in a bizarre and tantastical mode by Dr Cuevas and his assistant, the trauma makes her mute for nine years. Unable to bring about political and gender change through active means, Allende uses Clara's muteness as a silent protest', implying that the next most effective agency for improvement is a form of passive resistance.
But Clara cannot prevent earthquakes, she cannot dissolve her father's hernia and she is powerless before her stepfather's suicide: the reality of the disasters and the tragedies remains the same. 01 what ultimate value, then, is her magic ability? It is trivialised and made inconsequential; her powers are limited and impractical. But this, according to Patricia Hart (1987: 61), must happen: it is essential that this magic diminish gradually and finally be replaced by an element which enables Alba and her generation to accept responsibilitv for, and to try and change, the world they inhabit.
This means of change is Allende's formula whereby women, notably Alba (who builds on what Clara constructs) and those strongly united with her in prison, will he able consciously to precipitate change in the dominant
18 patriarchy and undermine the structures which have for so long oppressed, subjugated and humiliated them. In Hart's view Clara's pre--vision is "a synonym for that old myth of feminine intuition" (58). As the story unfolds Clara, true to lorni and character, becomes more conscious, and accepts more passively, that no human action of hers can change destiiiv - "since she has seen the future, there is no point in struggling against the inevitable" (55). It is her granddaughter who becomes the true feminist, at which point the reader is acutely conscious that Allende is rejecting the intuitive stereotype in favour of a stronger, more politicised woman as represented by Alba.
Allende, as writer, uses Clara's clairvoyance to apprise her audience of the political situation in Chile's revolutionary world Through Clara (and later Blanca and Alba) she predicts the future and simultaneously illustrates a world in which female solidarity and unity, acting in ways distinctive and representative of this kind of affiliation in the real world, are able to mould a more beautiful, equitable and conscionable future than the one existing or pre-ordained. Ultimately her use of magic, while not strictly feminist, "leans ever more strongly towards human solutions to mankind's problems" (Hart 237), and at the same time assures the reader that intuition or magical power is tar more part of woman's than of man's domain. This magic, Allende assures its, exists overtly only in the earlier passive generations of women so devoid of education and economic and social freedom that the' compensate for their lack of real power by "indirect manipulations [and] pretended intuitions" (62).
The juxtaposition of male violence and female maternalism in the book creates part of the fantastic. Rosa's early death and Clara's sileI(e .stress that "what is magical about a wonian is fragile, and can easily be extinguished or silenced by male dominance" (Brunton 1990: 44). Clara's magic is valuable only when channelled in a positive direction, and Allende allows her powers
19 to become indistinguishable from her sensitivity and perception. Clara's house "is the locus of her magic and the centre from which her magic regenerates itself" (48). Her consciousness is inscribed on the design of the house, the various elements, though whimsical, having no practical value whatsoever: "empty spaces ... hidden treasure" (Allencie 115). The house is the site of the tint Dnscious; the place of eccentric ideas and extravagant activities; the nurturing area in which food supplies endlessly provide for the needy; and the seat of creative sex and procreation. Clara's reality is "a kaleidoscope of jumbled mirrors where everything and anything could happen . in a magic world that no longer exists" (Allende 102), where the mirrors yield multiple meanings and detv objectivity with their confusion.
The magic in this book is almost exclusively female, confronting the horrors of patriarchy through the solidarity of female bonding. But what of the relationship in the book between magic realism and feminism, and how does Allende tise this narrative technique in dealing with the harsh political realities of her time? Gabrielle Foreman (1991: 380) says that Allende, uses the formula of the rnagical' to drive home her point, not the aJluring, sometimes magical tale [andj tumultuous story of love among three generations', but rather, a powerful fictive intervention in the historical construction of the Chilean coup.
Allende is both a storyteller and a recorder of history, keeping alive the memories of the past to he used as it foundation for the future. She transposes traditional magic realism into political activism through the later generations of the Del Valle women sharing a faniilv lineage. Allende understands that the oppression in her society is based not only on racial and class stereotypes hut on sexual inferiority as well: her means of combating injustice and achieving equity can he done only through female consensus. The text does not propose a strong case for equality between the sexes, a fact which argues against its feminist bias; instead it accentuates that women are inherently more intuitive than men, more cognisant of the power of magic. This 'insistence on the superiority of the female sex in a certain area, then, could more accurately be described as a sort of hcm rimo (inverse of machisin) than as feminism" (Hart 1987: 233). This issue relates to the point made earlier, that it is perhaps not justifiable to compare Latin-American with North- American liberal feminism; to do so is to deny the feminist partiality of the text.
Although magic realism is its own genre, it links strongly with the concept of utopian thinking which Frances Bartkowski (1989: 12) defines as 'crucial to teniinism., a movement that could only be produced and challenged by and in a patriarchal world." \Aomen in this genre share no pessimism; their utopias reject the specific naming of wl tere and when ... and stake their interests in the interplay of the varying 'here' of the writer and reader and the 'there' of the fiction. (12)
This fiction Incorporates science fiction, rimyth, history and theology. Jhe books disrupt linear time, abandon sequential piottng and dispose of rationale. What they do instead, though, is to pose questions about what constitutes 'reality' and where it stands in relation to magic realism, while the past is reclaimed as memory, and woman "is released, into a life beyond her conventional confinement- within the divisions and paradigms of patriarchal thinking" (Kaniinskv 1993: 130). The fantastic discourses ot these women enable theni, as they do Alba, to move from posi ions of powerlessness to those of empowerment, in other words to the feminist equivalent of male superiority. Through the medium ot magic realism these women "re-claim their Self before re-connecting with a universal whole" (Brim ton 1990: 25).
Of silence (Montenegro 1991: 231), Allende said: Silence can enrich you very much. Maya Angelou talks about a very long period in her childhood when she was silent, and
21 during those years she turned evil into action ... She reinterpreted the world, recrea ted reali tv.
Strong image s of silence saturate the book, giving 'voice' to the silence which has characterised the history of women's struggle for self-determination. This silence of Clara, of Pancha Garcia, of Alba - "when women realise that language, as a code of the patriarchy, is inadequate for the exprtssion of the irrational" (Brunton 1990: 62), is also fantastic. Clara, who knows with absolute certainty that the child she carries will he a daughter, needs to claim her unborn child, and so she retreats into silence to communicate with her. She is a free and independent thinker, a spirit unfettered by the hounds of earthly life, aware that passive resistance to the psychological torture she suffers at the hands of Esteban Trueha - which is Allende's political stance for those women not vet able to confront the patriarchy - is her greatest weapon. Through her silence she escapes the world of patriarchal authority, building up rich inner resources to sustain her in the years to collie. Her silence is positive for by adopting it she overcomes it: it is her refuge against her husband's anger, it is a world in which her spirit is set tree, and it is a place into which no man may enter. - The bond she shares with her unborn daughter Blanca through matrilineage is strengthened by the "prenatal relationship with the fetuses that prolongs itself after birth, developing a systeni of spiritual communication that continues to function alter death' (Shea 1987: 327). She responds to life's atrocities by regressing into silence and creating a woman's space, a move which Allende characterises as strongly political, and her magic is powerful in its repudiation of patriarchal confines. This is her refuge and rebellion, a coniplete denunciation of the male world of repression and torture. Debra Castillo (1992: 37) describes silence as a tactical move on the part of women reacting to the "pressures of the dominant social force." Silence, she says, is women's weapon to help them slip away; once freed, from the oppressive inasculinist-defined context of aestheticized distance and truth and confinement and lack, [it] can he
2') reinscribed as a subversive feminine realm. (40)
Womne's silence is no longer withdrawn; it is now a 'tactic for concealing a coded speech between the lines of the said and the unsaid" (Castillo 41). Silence is neither absence nor complicit acquiescence: it is neither consent nor weakness. Patriarchy has excluded women, and their silence in turn has become an unrelenting, unceasing roar demanding to be heard.
Allende's characters share traits enabling them to transcend the roles traditionally ascribed to them; instead they devise and shape their own destinies and define their contribution in the world. They claim recognition as individuals in the recording of their inner and outer experience. All the women have names symbolic of light which, in its turn, represents freedom and hope. The process of evolution they undergo, from Rosa - 'rosy' (the early rays of dawn) through Clara 'clarity', Blanca - 'white' and Alba - 'dawn', is a reflection of how women have evolved in politics and society. A similar evolution can he seen in Rosa's embroidery of monsters on her tapestry, evincing the unconscious world of dreams, and Alba's testimonial inn ral in the attic. McCalhister in Rojas & Rehbein (1-991: 21) writes: Since the only difference between the women's responses to socio-political conditions is due to their respective generations, they display a strong attiliation that is reinforced by their first nanies - lihe novel is a feminocentric vision of life in Latin America, confronting the heinous patriarchal world of traditional Hispanic society in which Trueba is the stern paternalistic father, and offering a narrative which focuses on the continuing evolution of feminine consciousness. The women through their actions and concerns acquire a sense of sell; and they choose freedom, fulfilment and independence to create a world in which the feinale (as opposed to feniinist) values of caring and nurturing are emphasised. Male power distorts familial and sexual relations: Allende's women struggle
23 against this traditional male power and strive for the ascendance of such values as peace, kindness and reconciliation. They seek and eventually find a matriarchal and inatrilineal community which ultiiriately jettisons the patriarchal values of public space. Their strength comes not only from their inner resources but from the evident networks of support and companionship that Form their social milieu. All in one way or another are empowered by Allende through their self-knowledge and their knowledge of the world, through their caring relationships and their ability to help others without diminishing themselves.
All the women are intensely creative, and their
firstborn daughters continue the tradit. 3fl of creating from their own intimate and inviolable space, in a room of their own which no being may disturb. This space is described by Julia Kristeva as the feminine centre (Shea 1987: 284)
Their solidarity defies their victimisation and sexual oppression as a corollary to class and race oppression. In the brutal and patriarchal world of Latin America, females are marginalised and ostracised, hut their bonding creates their strength and solidarity. Power relations destroy, hut sharing and understanding create positive relationships with the world and with other women, and place them within a historical continuum of those women who came before and who will come after them.
II
According to Maggie Hwnm (1991: 20), Helene Cixous in The Nw1yBorn Woman is concerned with the ritualistic ways in which women's experience of the world and of their bodies is characterised as alien, witch-like or hysterical by society in order For it to maintain the boundaries set by
24 patriarchal power. All writing, she says, is hierarchical and thus legitimises power relations. But for Nancy Walker (1990), women have taken the detinite step of questioning and revising old gender relationships, and challenging the stereotypes that have prescribed women's literature, women's lives and women's lack of power and authority. By so doing, she affirms, "they have insisted on the relativity and mutability of truth and reality" (Walker 186).
Allende adheres to and maintains the historical and political realism of which she writes. Her books abound with historical allusions: there are many Chilean political Figures, and there are graphic depictions of torture and atrocities perpetuated by the regime. As TheJilouse ofThSpirits progresses there is a distinct decline in the excesses of magic realism so prevalent at the start, For the reader, having been entranced by the spell, becomes aware that it is history and politics above all which are life's driving torces. The Mora sisters and their entourage recognise clearly and cogently the magical world of Nivea, Clara and Nana. When they die, however, the reality of politics overshadows the myth and the magic, and Allende's conclusion demands that a new political and social order be established in Chile, based on gender equality and human rights.
Clara's diaries liberate her From Estehan's violence; she is a writer by instinct who gives voice to the plight ot women artists and who believes implicitly that women's words will survive history. The element of magic realism is strongly toreg-rounded during the mass burning of hooks in the early days of the military dictatorship, for aniong the books destroyed are the male-centred medical texts of Jaime, Nico[as's treatise and Uncle Marcos's collection of niagical tales, but Clara's journals are untouched. In this way, Allende pays tribute to their power to change history by allowing them a miraculous escape from the tire - they cannot be silenced by dictatorial regimes: Smuggled out by certain friendly spirits, they miraculously escaped the infamous pyre in which so mnarw other family 75 papers perished. I have thein here at my feet, bound with coloured ril)bons, divided according to events and not in chronological order, just as she arranged them. before she left. Clara wrote theni so they would help inc now to reclaim [he past and overcome terrors of my own. (Allende 1985: 491)
Allende recognises that Latin-American women have their own vision of the world: they are not passive, accepting or resigned. So, too, the women in her novels - Clara's words, and Alba's, have the power to "reclaim the past". Despite the particular social and historical Latin-American reality that the book presents, it "reaffirms more freely a inatrilineal consciousness of life and history" (Schiminovich in Morgan & Hall 1991: 10.5), for it narrates the matriarchal lineage of the del Valle and Tnieha families. All the female characters challenge the patriarchal structures; all demand equal treatment as individuals; and all work to create a free and apposite society. Those women who are closest to the life forces possess the deepest powers; they are present in history; they are present in the cultural life; and they are definitive in the political actions happening around them. They are, in other words, involved in the process of rebirth of what has been lost in their lives, searching their memories and sitting through the darkness.
Clara has two especial gifts which she passes on To Blanca she gives languid passivity and to Alba intuitive sensitivity. Clara herself takes full responsibility and conscious accountability for her body and her actions Alba then breaks the mould of the irueba women to choose the man she loves, to eschew the stoicism and quiescence of the generations preceding her, and to act practically and directly. She pits her resources against that most oppressively patriarchal instrument, the phallocentric military force, using female bonding and female solidarity to create the necessaw strength.
01 all the women in the book. Blanca is the most corporeal and also one ot the most powerless- She cannot change society or alter perceptions of herself.
26 Her ignominious marriage and its dissolution force her home to her parents where she earns money giving ceramic classes. She ends her life in exile with Pedro Tercera: neither her creativity nor her defiance of convention are strong enough to exert a positive force on life or on herself: [Blanca] added imaginary animals, gluing halt an elephant to halt i crocodile, without realising that she was doing in clay what her Aunt Rosa, whom she never knew, had done with thread in her enormous tablecloth. Clara decided that if craziness can repeat itself in a family, then there must he a genetic memory that prevents it from being swallowed by oblivion. Blaiica's multitudinous creches became a tourist attraction. (Allende 204)
Yet Blanca's importance lies in her strong association as part of the moLher daughter relationship which establishes links with the female heritage and the female future. This bond satisfies the human need for continuity, for belonging and for being. Blanca tells her daughter Alba magical bedtime stories of her past, which enables Aiha to carry on the traditions of her great- grandmother Nivea who: shared her husband's parliamentary ambitions, hoping that if he won a seat in Congress she would finally secure the vote for women, for which she had fought for the past ten years, permitting none of her numerous pregnancies to get in her way. (Allende 13)
Nivea gives to Clara the wonder of a unique nexus, tor despite having given Ldrth to tifteen children, [she] treated Clara as if she were the only child, creating a tie so strong that it continued into succeeding generations as a tanñlv tradition. (Alleride 101)
So, too, does Blanca give Alba the closeness and security which allows her to tace the future with an indomitable spirit and to imiove towards empowernient throt.igh her writing, through her creativity and through self- knowledge.
27 III
Allende believes in the transforming powers of literature when applied to society, and uses her own imaginative and magical novels to work towards the construction of a fair and ethical society. In B_llujJsQLthSojrits the primary narrator is Alba who, together with her grandmother Clara, writes her life, her history and her future which enables her to identify with Clara and to find in her writing "a timeless mirror of female experience" (Meyer 1990: 361). At times I feel as if I had lived this all before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never got a chance to see the relationship between events. (Allende 1985: 490)
Female experience merges across the boundaries of time and space; the sense of female empowerment in Alba at the novel's close svrnholises female sell- awareness and growth on the eve of a legitimate and impartial era; and the novel, rejecting patriarchal oppression, celebrates rebirth and the creation of a new self in "feminocentric style" (Earle 1987: 552). In her book on mythological goddesses, Christine Downing (1981:23) writes at length of the dominance of patriarchy: l'atriarchv is active not just in the external social world but also in our unconscious - even among those of us who have tried to tree ourselves from patriarchy's values and assumptions ... Our thoughts, feelings and modes of response are informed by mythic prototypes of which we may have conscious cognisance They act as delimiting stereotypes. It is only as we recognise their presence .. that their power to open up new dimensions of feminine life is released.
It is the father, says Downing, whose power lies at the very heart of patriarchal culture, and who distorts and inhibits our creativity through 28 impeding our imagination. There is a "primIl dyad" between mother and daughter, the daughter serving as the mother's self--image and participating in "rebirth [which is] ... metamorphosis and transformed consciousness" (13).
Both Clara and Alba exude creativity through the agency of imaginative writing, treeing the mind from the restraints and hindrances of patriarchy and triumphing over the savagery and persecution. Silence precedes creativity: both Clara and Aiha proceed from complete silence to writing their notebook stories and the narrated text. Their imagination imposes order on chaos and bears testimony to the realities of the political situation.
More even than Clara's, however, Alba's transformation after her detention and her recognition of the unanimity among the women allow her to write the history of the text being read, gaining confidence "from the awareness that she is part of an infinite cycle of events, [with] the sense of being intimately linked to her grandmother outside of linear time" (Loach 1990: 156). The first of her family to explore public places and venture tar from home, Alba operates in "the 'unseen niargins' of power as she aids political refugees to reach asylum in numerous foreign embassies" (206). Clara's powerful and confident words transcend time and space and enable her spirit to conmiunicate with the imprisoned Alba, encouraging her to triumph over her agony: When she had nearly achieved her goal [of dying], her Grandmother Clara, whom she had invoked so many times to help her die, appeared with the novel idea that the point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle. (Allende 469)
Alba's act of writing differs from Clara's: it is a way of surmounting her own horror, of documenting the lives of her loved ones, and of recording the horrors of the past. Only in that way can she exorcise the torment and abuse she has suffered, and the "culniination of the horrors suffered by her mother, 29 her grandmother and all women at the hands of the patriarchy" (Shea 1987: 168). At the end of a terrifying political purge she is the onlymember of her family to survive, symbolising through her name a new beginning and hope for the future. She rnoves away from an unjust society perpetuated by patriarchy and towards egalitarianism. Allende describes her own writing: Maybe the most important reason for writing is to prevent the erosion of tinie, so that memories will riot be blown away by the wind. In a novel we can give an illusory order to chaos. (Zinsser 1989: 10)
In The House of_tie irjis she charts the evolution of feminine consciousness over the course of the novel from Clara to Alba who becomes a political activist and through whom history, replaces magic and tragedy replaces comedy. And Aiha's novel is subversive, for it expresses the energies that patriarchal cultures have repressed as feminine.
The teniinist stance recurrent throughout the novel reaches its zenith at the end when Atha, having been imprisoned, tortured and humiliated, realises that with the unifying spirit ol women as invincible and impenetrable, the days of patriarchal power are numbered as woman's political force becomes a reality: The guards would pound on the wall. 'Shut up, whores!' 'Make us it you can, bastards! Let's see it you dare!' And they sang even stronger but the guards did not come in, for they had learned that there is no way to avoid the unavoidable. (Allende 484)
Her personal drama, and those of the other subjugated women, tundions almost as an allegory of the inner workings of patriarchy and ot the gender conflict expressed Froimi a feminist point of view. Though there is no real 'victory' at the novel's close, the reader is aware that Ahlende is predicating the start of a new dispensation which will bring legitimacy and nemesis to
10 the country. There is a deep love of humanity and life in the pages, of poetry, humour and irony. Alba learns fortitude and heroism through her suffering, and her faith is strengthened by her experience. The final victory over patriarchy comes when 'each subsequent female generation rejects tiliation with its respective father in even greater degrees" (McCallister in Rojas & Rehhein 1991: 29). Alba's child is fathered not by one of the privileged class but 1w a peasant, thus loreteiling the rise of a new classless society of varied political affiliations. this is her heritage to the world.
The magical matrilineal is hardly Alba's inheritance at the end, despite the presence' of her grandmother Clara: Clara also brought the saving idea of writing in her mind, without paper or pencil, to keep her thoughts occupied and to escape from the doghouse and live. She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of horror ... (AUende 470)
It is rather only the memory of the magical that survives and helps her to endure the penetrating political patrilineage, the ultimate political cataclysm. She writes down for posterity the betrayal, abuse and deceit as a permanent memo ry. Alba's text, inscribed only in her imagination, would he her private retuge in a world of madness .. Silently and alone, Alba began to create her secret text of life and hope. (Meyer 1990: 362)
She uses the notebooks of her grandinother as a genesis for her own salvation: "1 would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own" (Allende 11). She recognises that, to break the pattern of hatred and reprisal, she must needs view life from a different perspective:
31 It would he very difficult for me to avenge all those who should he avenged., because my revenge would he just another part of the same inexorable rite. 1 have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life .... (Allende 490)
She will write out of forgiveness and. at the sanie time she understands the language of her oppressors and illuminates it for the necessity ot vicissitude and progress.
All 1:our mothers Nivea, Clara, Blanca and Alba know conclusively that they w ll bear girl-dildren, thus ushering in and keeping linked the next generation of del Valle women. The novel is brought lull circle as the vow'tg Alba creates the story of her family on the blank page in front of her and re- establishes the generational bond among the family women. As the link to the past, Alba nurtures, protects and teaches: I want to think ... that my mission ... is simply to fill these pages while I wait for better times to come, while I carry this child i.n my womb, the daughter of so many rapes or perhaps of Miguel, but above all, my own daughter. (Allende 490)
Alba sees the child she carries in an intensely positive light, as a continuity of the strong niatrilineal line she represents rather than as the offspring of shame and remorse. Through Alba's unequivocally accepting attitude, Allende vanquishes the patriarchal god and elevates the goddess, thus empowering women of Latin America through their teminine energies rather than through their equality with nien.
Atha writes not by instinct, as Clara did, but by the reality of circumstance, assuring her survival by denouncing the patriarchal terrorist regime which raped and tortured her. Her creativity finally demolishes the prison walls and heals both the body and the mind" (Martinez in Jones 1991: 287). She is uplifted by the experiences of Ana Diaz who undergoes a death and rebirth occurrence:
32 Aiia Diaz .. was an indomitable woman. She had withstood every form of cruelty. They had raped her in the presence of her lover and tortured them together, but she had not lost her capacity to smile or her hope. (Aliende 467)
Emerging victorious from prison, Alba validates resistance to male dominance and the threat of death. She truly testifies to the liberation of the modern latin-American woman in a patriarchal culture. In her darkest hour in prison, Alba discovers an inner source of power, a font of love and inspiration, which is immune to dictatorial horror. This inner source symbolises the pOwer of the spirit. (Martinez in Jones 1991: 290)
Throughout the novel, human integrity is violated and the cruel excesses of the totalitarian regime hold sway, giving foundation to the patriarchal order through the patriarch Estehan Trueha, and the government and military forces. The spirit of the women re-creates human experience and re-writes history, inspired by the innermost depths of their being. Alba's rape, says Martinez (1991: 291), symbolises the patriarchal desire to rule over the spirit, the fundamental ground of being." Aiha confronts death and her own inner spiritual power - this represents a descent into chaos and death, and a spiritual rebirth analogous with Allende's final positive vision for a new and glorious (Ihile. Aiha's novel reaffirms her wholeness and enables her to experience a revelation and an awareness of the world as a whole of which she, her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother are all integral parts. Her voice is not Clara's traditional magic voice hut rather the 'modern' magic that deties the patriarchy, that incites women to discontent and dissension, and that inspires them to use their inner spirits to heal and guide the world. Their desire is for life and joy, not death and sorrow. Alba's rebirth encapsulates all of time; she foretells a future in which the world is whole and free, and in which women have power. Bringing order out of chaos, she emerges victorious: Then she was able to bury herself so deeply in her story that she stopped eating, scratching herself, smelling herself, and 33 complaining, and overcame all her varied agonies. (Allende 470) and immune to her tormentor's cruelty:
She did not recognise [Colonel Garcia]. She was beyond his power. (471)
The example of each mother is carried in the daughter's memory and passed on to the granddaughter; the women are the backbone of the novel's niatriarchv, wielding moral power over those who wield authoritarian power. Once again Allende's powerful feminism is that of Latin America instead of the west, for by positing women as the source 0 moral superiority she tends to stereotype theni rather than to attihute to them the exigent elements of independence and strength. While not strictly theoretically teminist, this tactic of Allende's nonetheless empowers the women and enables them to bring about change in the only way open to theni.
Alba allows the reader to traze the "evolution of feminine consciousness throughout the various actions which translates into social concerns and actions" (Shea 1987: 283). She recognises further that the women must "weave a tapestry of sounds made from their voices blending together, voices froin the chorus" (285). Aiha's grandfather began a destructive cycle of blood and vengeance, thus actuating her destiny: only through reconciliation and forgiveness can Alba extirpate this cycle. And in the end she does make peace with her grandfather and co-writes with him the history of her family, thus reconciling herself with both her paternal and her maternal predecessors; for Alba is not only the child of Blanca and the revolutionary Pedro Tercero Garcia, bti t also the granddaughter of Clara and Esteban Tnieba - Elaine Showal ter (1985: 265) writes: It a man's text, as Bloom and Edward Said have maintained, is fathered, then a woman's text is not only mothered but parented; it confronts both paternal and maternal precursors 3-1 and must deal with the problems and advantages of both lines of inheritance ... Only male writers can forget or mute hail their parentage.
TheJ-iLthepIdts begins and ends with the same sen fence: "Barrabas came to us by sea." Between these two points more than a half a century has passed, and Chile has moved from a democracy to a dictatorship. The initial violence and rape presented symbolically through the image of the dog Barrahas, his size and strength, his murderous sex drive and his own eventual butchering, are a precursor of the torments and terrors to happen in Clara's country tinder a future military dictatorship. Barrahas is a tantastic figure who comes from Uncle Marcos's fantastic stories; he sets in motion the pattern ol male abuse which becomes political - the rape of animal, person and governrnenL Aiha's appropriation of Clara's journals at the end of the story denotes her progression towards self-awareness and a sensitivity that deals with the realistic: it blesses her with prescience which, however, has its feet planted firmly in the ground and allows her toproject a Utopian vision of the future.
Allende is one of the growing band of Latin American women writers who, through the medium of magic realism, expresses and signifies the victimisation of women on the continent, as well as the injustice, persecution and iniquity ot the governments. She uses literature to affirm women's strength and creativity, and words become a weapon:
The fan tastic which blurs the barriers of Self and Other, satisfies the feniale impulse for integration of the psyche as well as subverts the patriarchal discourse that is constructed on that separation. (Brunton 1990: 185)
Her unique contribution is the triumph of her empovered characters over the abusive ones; and her privileging of the female who derives power from her very marginality.
35 IheEue_Lth5pirit, while not solely a feminist text, nonetheless uses magic realism as an introduction to define the modern female as ultimately formidable and triumphant in a patriarchal Latin-American culture. (A-Lo ve ndiadv, to be discussed in the next chapter, illustrates Allende's use of the techniques of traditional and/or social realism and its impact or not on the gender politics of this text.
'-'p CJ::IAPIERlL: OFLOVE b�D-5HADO.W.S
I seerned to rnove among a world of ghosts And feel myself the shadow of a dream. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Princess)
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow. (T.S. Eliot: TheHollow Men)
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. (Edgar Allen Poe: A Dream within a Dream)
Of love. and Shadows., Allende's second book, was published in 1987 but unlike Ib£ Ho..use of the.Spiri.ts makes little use of the narrative technique of magic realism. 1l1is chapter will attempt to illustrate how Qil.Qve an..d Shadows falls more into the realm of social (i.e. traditional) than of magic realism, and how this impacts upon the gender politics in the novel. ln discussing social realism, strongly contrasted with the magic realism already examined, Annette Kuhn, in Newton & Rosenfelt (1985: 275), detines it in Stalin's words of the 1930s as a "true and historically concrete depiction
37 of reality arid its revolutionary development". Such a statement, she adds, implies that social realism has two basic characteristics: first, an adherence . to some form of realism .. and second, that representations either deal directly with history or inscribe historical specificity in some other way.
It is the latter definition which she feels most pertinently describes social realism. While characters are fully-rounded personalities in their own rights, they simultaneously embody social and historical characteristics, thus operatilicy contemporaneously as individuals and as social types in a social- historical situation.
The term "social realism" has been used by various critics either to define the general emphasis on social concerns throughout history, or to "articulate a call for an unqualified supremacy of realism in fiction" (Foster 1986: 16). In its cultural manifestations and ideological derivations it has been said to have connections with the Russian revolution. Realism as a term has been debated for centuries by philosophers. (I. Hugh Holman (1972: 183) defines it as, simple fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature ... In the nineteenth century, realism ... defines a literary method, a philosophical and political attitude, and a particular kind of subject matter.
Social realism exists within a fictional world constituted as coherent and internally consistent. If these texts are credible, and it within them there are constructed specific characters for identification, and recognisable narratives, both of which appeal to the reader, then they can be said to he realistic. These fictional characters operate partially as "pes expressive of social groups or classes and historical configurations" (Kuhri in Newton & Rosentelt 1985: 276).
38 Kuhn discusses the heroic traits of the central characters of social realist texts. The reader, she says, identifies with these characters because they embody both positive and negative idiosyncrasies. At the same time these 'heroes' attain a certain degree of political consciousness as the narrative develops, for development is both personal and political, enabling theni to grow in strength and insight; they manage to surmount the problems of their own personal predicaments and those of their social ambience. Thus the narrative of social realism "involves resolution and closi.ire" (276), while the individuals therein confront and exemplify issues of marginalisation, alienation and the refutation of their humanity. Whether 01 Love and -Shadows conforms to all these manifestations of social realism is doubtful. However, a closer examination will reveal the extent to which Allende has created a feminist text using traditional realist methods, and its success or otherwise in relation to the other works under discussion.
In an interview with Crvstall, Kuhnheiin and Lavoun in 1992 (Contemporary Literature .558), Allende describes her passion and the emotion that motivated her to write this particular story as being "triggered by anger, anger and sadness, at the abuses of the dictatorship." In the same interview she talks of political revolution as, an act of love; it's a total commitment. You will sacrifice your life ... You're willing to fight, to lead a terrible life, because you think that you have to make changes, not br yourself but for other people. (.590)
Speaking of the long and repressive dictatorship, she says that realist fiction could not he written because "we are too close, too near; it's too soon." What could, instead, be published, were documentaries, testimonies, chronicles of what happened, and journalism. She concedes, however, that at the time she gave this particular interview perhaps the underground cultural movement, the one "dealing artistically with reality", was beginning to emerge, enabling her to write the horrors in almost graphic detail for the world to read. 39 is based largely on a true and melancholy event, tlie horrific discovery in 1973 of fifteen partially decomposed and unrecognisable bodies in a concealed grave near the Chilean town of Longuen. These bodies were later identified as'dissidents' who had been killed by the military in the purge. The main themes of the hook are clearly in the title glove' arid shadows'. Irene Beltran is a voting woman raised in privileged and special circumstances in a city (could it be Santiago? It, too, is unnamed, as are locations in her first novel) in Chile. Once again Allende's principal character is a woman, though in this novel there is no magic associated with her or her attenipts to alter her world. Instead she is portrayed as much as possible as it conventional young woman, having lived a sheltered life tinder the aegis of her manipulative mother. Through work conditions, happenstance and fortuity, Irene gradually becomes aware of the latent cormotations of tvramumy, subversion and rife political corruption beneath the placid and tranquil surface of her own existence. Her mentor in this process is Francisco Leal, son of Spanish Civil War exiles, who begins his association with her as a friend hut progresses to become her lover and in the process replaces her army- officer fiance in her affections. The prosaic portrayal of Irene falls tar short of Allende's skill in 'feminising' Clara and Alha, and leaves the reader in doubt as to the success ot the feminist representation in this novel.
While in Venezuela in 1978, and after reading of the political atrocity in the paper, Allende realised that these men represented the tragedy of all those who had disappeared in Latin America during the years of torture and repression. Her research and. her investigations, her use of her own mother's notebooks which brought hack to her memories of her exiled country (and memories of Alba and Clara's hooks), awoke in her an impotent feeling of fury about these crimes and about the realities in Chile and propelled her along ij road to writing a story not only of violence but also of love. In place of the magic realism evident in her first book there is a realism thinly covered by the existing narrative mode, and 'disguised' by the romantic love story of Irene and Francisco. The themes of power, repression and dictatorship are clearly enunciated in this unidentified country. Political and military corruption are rife, and there is a strong emphasis on the crucial role played by middle-class people who are socially and politically committed to gain victory over the authoritarian regime. The very real occurrences precipitating the novel's emergence generally preclude the use of magic realism, as Patricia Hart (1987: 219) says: What is fascinating about the use of magic in this book is the way it calls into question the entire concept of magical realism as a vehicle for discussing the problems of Latin America ... Allende has with this book issued a plea for more realistic novels to gain approval alongide their niagicallv-real cousins on the shelves of international bookstores dedicated to contemporary Latin-American fiction.
For Allende it is a factual story, a terrible, real story, and I did not have to make up much of it because the story itselt is so truculent and macabre that the final product was incredible. So you have fiction just by writing the truth. (Invernizzi 1989: 120)
In order to authenticate her belief that the power of love and hope will triumph over death and torture: "It's hard to accept in literature that love can be stronger than hatred, although it is so frequently in life" (Zinsser 1989:50), she describes her novel as one which, dares to be optimistic - to speak of love in opposition to pornography .. [It] searches the spiritual dimension of reality, accepts the unknown and the unexplainable, confusion and terror ... [It] doesn't invent history or try to explain the world solely with reason, but also seeks knowledge through feelings and imagination.
41 The magic that there is in QLL Sialows takes its format from the 'magical' events which are the catalyst causing the development of both the love story and the political exposure. In human form the catalyst is Evangelina Ranquileo, a young peasant girl who suffers from 'magical epilepsy' or seizures, as a result of which 'supernatural' and inexplicable events occur. Though this 'magical epilepsy' in no way resembles the magic that sustained Clara through her life, and though Evangelina plays no part other than that of a passive victim in the move to a new political dispensation, it is important to note that Allende has once again used a female figure as the agency for its operation. The 'miracles' which the adolescent Evangelina performs are the magic Allende uses as her narrative means of conveying some of the problems and torments of the Latin-American country. Outside, the dogs howled an interminable lamentation of catastrophe in accompaniment to the sounds of song and prayer. Tin utensils danced in the cupboard, and a strange clutter lashed the root tiles like a hailstorm of pebbles ... On the bed, Evangelina Ranquileo writhed and twisted, the victim of impenetrable hallucinations and mysterious urgencies. (Aliende 1987: 78)
An initial instance of what could pass as magic realism occurs with the Convention of the Frogs: Two hundred and twenty meters of road were covered with frogs so closely packed that they resembled a glistening carpet of moss ... After observing that gelatinous mass for a few moments, the Oriental concluded that there was no cause for alarm, this was merely a convention of frogs. (Allende 41)
Though this outbreak seems to have very little to do with the plot or even the narrative, it is followed by the seizure that Evangelina suffers immediately afterward s: They found Evarigelina on her back on the floor, weight on her heels and neck, arched backward like a bow, frothing at the mouth and surrounded by broken cups and plates ... She shook in shuddering convulsions, and the room was impregnated with anguish and the smell of excrement. The tension was so high 42 that the thick adobe walls seemed to vibrate as it a secret trembling were coursing through their entrails (Allende 42)
After Evangelina's attack, reports of small miracles are received: One of the interlopers tripped over a chair and accidentally leaned on the bed here the girl lay in her contortions. The following day, the warts spotting his hand had disappeared. Word of this marvel spread immediately. (Allende 67)
The girl inevitably attracts the attention of the law, who enter the picture, creating intense confusion and consternation, which seems startlingly reminiscent of the political confusion - in Ihe_ Hou L_ihe_Sirits In both cases, an unusual phenomenon provokes fear and confusion in the observers rather than an orderly attempt to seek the truth In this novel magical realism may he read as a delightful mode of expression that may not always be appropriate to describe a less than delightful world. (Hart 1987: 217)
Evangelina's supernatural powers, because inexplicable, are brutally repressed by a military unable to deal with anything that is not strictly 'real' (while Clara, in contrast, chooses to curtail hers through her voluntary silence). The peasants diagnose her trances as 'saintliness or demonic possession'; she becomes unnaturally strong when she loses control during one of her fits: Before anyone could have predicted it, Evangelina's fist flashed out and cracked against the officer's ruddy face, striking him in the nose with such force that he tumbled backward to the floor. (Allende 81)
In the end she pays for her outburst with torture, rape and death, which clearly signals that, if not used carefully, her supernatural powers will be destructive and cataclysmic.
Using Evangelina as the instrument, Allende describes seemingly impossible magical events and then undercuts them by minimising and trivialising their importance and consigning them to oblivion. The magic, such as it is, is 43 therefore negligible and inconsequential in the face of such pervasive reality. Right through this novel the magic is secondary to the reality in which it deals; ultimately "the magic in this book does not serve to make any special feminist points either, SQ the phrase 'magical realism' probably ought to he discarded" (Hart 1987: 218). What feminism there is in the novel is centred in the rather sober figure of Irene, who though she manages at the end to escape the horrors of the country with Francisco, nonetheless holds the promise of return and the determination to bring about change in the only way she knows how, by speech and protest.
It is only in the Ranquileo home that the element of magic and the realm of the spirit world 'intrude' upon the action. Nonetheless both Irene and Francisco are caught up in it, and it precipitates occurrences from which they cannot extricate themselves. Ambrose Gordon (1987: 538) puts forward the notion that Evangelina is the repository for all the repressions and pressures happening in the country. There is a coalescence of the inexplicable and the extraordinary with the savagely realistic, giving rise to the supposition that something powerful is happening both within and outside of the young teenager. Positing her as the centre of action in the novel, Gordon says that she "has become the vortex of forces too long held in check, which seemingly nothing can withstand once they are released, not even the military ...." Gordon's implication is that Allende is categorising woman as a repressed centre in this violent world. The conclusion is that, unlike the other victims of the military who disappear forever, Evangelina too disappears but her body, ravaged and violated, reappears later through the agony Irene endures when the body is uncovered - not magical, yet not strictly rational either.
By Allende's own adiriission, the most powerful emotion in her lite is love which she believes can conquer all and solve everything, but which could make uneasy bedfellows with her feminism (though feminism per se is not opposed to heterosexual love, the inter ence is that if those involved do not share equal roles, there could he oppression and imbalance in the relationship, boding ill as a precursor for equality in the society). This text makes use of both love and shadows, for despite the great evil pervading the country, Allende says, there is a great force that can he opposed to that evil: love ... I think that this love, this understanding, is the only possibility we have to build up a different world, a more gentle world ... a more merciful society. (Montenegro 1991: 121)
The young woman and man in the story are drawn together in love during the seasonal course of the year. At the same time they tall increasingly under the shadow of hideous happenings in the police state (which is undeniably (--hile under the reign of the hated General Pinochet). I\Jotwithstanding this, Allende is demonstrating that love can survive despite the horrors perpetrated; that it can endure physical agony and the threat of death; that is grows even in the shadows surrounding it, the shadows cast over life by the dictatorship. There is a romantic, almost childlike quality to her heliet that love will conquer all' and annihilate the evil in the world. This could stem from her Catholic background, or her heightened need for romance in a cruel and sadistic world, but as a result it envelops the reader in an aura of unrealistic expectation, and paints a picture of a woman - and a man - not tully conversant with or discerning of the truths of life, and. thus not very convincing.
Having been gunned down in the street, Irene is taken to the hospital where she recuperates slowly and then, with her lover Francisco, escapes finally into freedom and exile. The two young lovers take with them their love, their memories of the past, and their conviction that one day they will return, to a world not of pain but of peace, quietude and impartiality, where they will put aside the shadows and embrace the love:
15 They felt dwarfed, alone vulnerable, two desolate sailors adrift on a sea of mountain peaks and clouds amid a lunar silence, but they also felt their love had taken on a new and awe-inspiring dimension, and that it would be the source of their strength in exile. In the golden light of dawn they stopped to look for the last tin.ie at their native soil. 'Will we he back?' whispered Irene. 'We will return', Francisco replied. And in the years that followed these words would point the way to their destinies: we will return, we will return (Allende 298)
The shadows proliferate throughout the book. There are shadows of separation: When the older boys moved away, the Leals felt as if the house were too big; they saw shadows in the corners and heard echoes in the hallways, but then the grandchildren were born and the habitual hubbub returned. (Allende 29) shadows of fear: He had been born and raised in a gray town where the dust from the mines coated everything with an impalpable and deadly patina of ugliness and choked the lungs of the inhabitants, turning them into shadows of themselves. (Allende 89) and shadows of death: The air stank of formaldehyde and dankness; shadows filled the large filthy rooms; the walls were mildewed and stained. (Allende 121)
[Javier] moved like a shadow. He ceased to feel he was a man as he watched his home collapsing about him and the light of love dying in his wife's eyes ... He lost his desire to live, and decided to seek his death. (Allende 130)
Yet these shadows later become the positive life-giving shadows ot safety and resistance. Both Irene and Francisco resist the oppression, and at the same
Irl time Irene as an empowered character hecoiries more involved in public affairs. Though she is engaged to Custavo Morante, an army officer, their relationship is passive, forcing her finally to refute its traditional social standing in favour of entering into a free relationship of her own choice. Building on her strength of will and self-confidence, she manifests the capacity to survive the horrors of the military patriarchy that are torturing and humiliating her. Her determination enables her to emphasise "the struggle of marginalised groups in society, and the capacities of women to overcorrie adversity" (Loach 1990: 264). Irene has a place in society from which she can be heard; through her knowledge, her caring and her relationships she can help others while still retaining her identity and her being. For Allende, although Irene has not the feminist power nor force of Alba, she provides a partial model of an "empowered woman who uses [her] inherent strengths to overcome the conventional power embodied in force and coercion" (282).
Romantic love has long portrayed woman in the traditional role of the stereotvpicallv passive, submissive and helpless temale under the sway and guidance of the aggressive, potent and autonomous male. In Allende's social context and in her novels, she draws the reader's attention to the myriad of courageous and resolute women who, despite the abuses they have suffered at the hands either of one man or of a military junta, continue to struggle against and denounce a society which creates and accepts this stereotype: There was no other women for the Captain. Long ago, he had marked her for his companion, investing her with every virtue It was Morante's custom to refer to women as ladies, clearly establishing the difference between these ethereal characters and the rough masculine world. (Allende 106)
The social system of which Allende writes, and in which she herself lived for so long, is unjust and prejudiced, discriminating on the basis of sex, class and race Her women therefore, in order to he independent, must operate from an
,I '7 El inner perspective that reveals their hidden frustrations and the conflicts they suffer as marginal beings. Although Irene is not abused in her two relationships, it is the patriarchy that does so to her; yet the positive upshot is that it enables her ultimately to transcend her aloneness and see her path more clearly. Francisco allows her the freedom to make her own choices: She seldom thought about love; she never questioned her long relationship, hut accepted it as a natural condition inscribed in her fate from the time she was a little girl. She had heard so often that Gustavo Morante was her ideal mate that she had come to believe it, without ever examining her feelings. (Allende 71)
Francisco is her constant companion in her move towards knowledg and awareness of the patriarchy: She looked pale and ill as her icy figure glided through room after room as if in an unending nightmare, so dazed she felt as it she were adrift in a pestilent tog. She could not absorb this hellish vision, and not even her wildest imagination could have measured the extent of such horrors. (Allende 121)
Until she visited the morgue Irene lived in ignorance, 'because ignorance was the norm in her situation" (Allende 123). Allende explains how she grew and developed, how she chose to emerge from the protective cocoon in which she had for so long been ensconced, until 'she was no longer the same: something had shattered in her soul" (124). The shock and disillusionment she feels, produced by suspicion of the authoritarian power which she has till then accepted unquestioningly, lends credence to the occasionally strong feminist stance taken by Allende for whom, pleasure may arise in the process of identifying with a strong and independent female character who is able to control the process of the narrative and its fictional events in such a way as to bring about a resolution in which she wins in some way. (Kuhn in Newton & Rosentelt 1985:. 270)
40 The horrors of military repression. underground resistance and social marginality are given clear amid articulate voice in the book. For Conde & Hart (1991: 108), 'the personal drama functions as an allegory of the inner workings of patriarclw and of gender conflict expressed from a feminist point of view." As Francisco does, so too does Irene acquire a consciousness of her self and her society after the ghastly discovery of the bodies in the mine: it was as if in sealing the mine they could erase its contents from their minds and turn time back to the moment before they had known the truth: as it they could again live innocently in a radiant reali tv. (Allende 197)
Having been marginalised in a traditional role as an oppressed woman for so long, as a result of circumstance and her relationship with an army officer, Irene begins to question what she had previously accepted as truth. Only through her love for Francisco and her subsequent freedom and exile, do the shadows of repression and violence begin to he banished. Allende's moral commitment, to secure freedom and justice for women, though understated in the novel, is nonetheless the vehicle she uses to fight and subjugate the dominant male patriarchy. The dictatorship fragments society and isolates people, says Allende; as long as women are not united, they are silent and have no common voice. This issue is clearly raised in The_Heijeofjhe pirilis, hut somehow is hut briefly glossed over in QLLuy nd_Shadows in tavour of the development of one individual woman who, together with her lover, attempts to rewrite historv, to reinterpret the world and to recreate reality. The story must thus he read simultaneously as a journey of female self-discovery and an attempt, whether unsuccessful or not, to repudiate tyrannical military regimes and their enduring mentality.
QLtnyeand_Shadows therefore does have elements, albeit not that many, of a feminist tract in which women are the main and forceful protagonists; in it, the concepts of love and shadows are foregrounded. Allende focuses
19 primarily on Irene and then on her mother Beatriz, Evangelina and on Hilda Leal, female characters who experience a certain bonding process, not as overtly as in Allende's earlier work but who can nonetheless supply Irene, with her increased knowledge and experience, and with inner fortitude, with at least a residual network of support and companionship. Allende's choice of the realist rather than the magic realist format is largely dictated by the subject matter of the book; but while Irene fails to display the idiosyncrasies of a 'hero', especially in her final action, Allende attempts to make her thereby more 'real' and identifiable by the reader whose reaction to the torturous situation will often approximate hers.
Not all the female characters are accorded equal treatment, however. Beatriz, Irene's mother, most resistantly refuses to face reality. She can neither accept truth as it confronts her, nor can she empathise with women in a similar condition to hers, for social status is the raison d'etre in her life: During the moments she did think of herself she was stunned by the irony of her fate. She had become the wile of a desaparecid.o. She had often said that no-one disappeared in their country, and that such stories were anti-patriotic lies. When she saw the distraught women marching every Thursday she had said they were in the pay of Moscow. (Allende 48) Allende has painted a picture of a sell-indulgent kind of Latin American female, acculturated to conform to an image of femininity within a given social order the exile of her womanhood is compounded by the self-exile of her social vanity. (Meyer 1988: 155)
Beatriz is neither intuitively wise nor infinitely loving, but rather a manipulator who tries to wield power, and for whom the maintenance of wealth and status is the compelling force behind her. She chooses to ignore the suffering and injustice in her country in favour of her own self- aggrandisement. Allende's motive in characterising her thus is that by comparison, Irene's single-minded and indomitable search for truth takes on a 50 greater sgniticance, stressing both the feminist and the humanist elements. Irene is the one who testifies against wrongs which have been buried by official propaganda, highlighting the evolving role of women in society and Allende's belief in pqsitive means of challenging authoritarianism, the reign of visceral terror and the uprooting of her familiar world. of Beatriz, Hilda and I)igna Ranquileo, in fact of all the women save Irene, Doris Meyer (1988: 154) says: ..they are all, in one way or another, exiles from the male- dominated world that controls their destiny ... They are relegated to a domestic space where they are oblivious of or. powerless against the ruling male authority ... They do not escape into a world of imagination ... [Thevj are resourceful and often independent, but uncuestioning of the world as it is.
Beatriz's systematic denial of the concrete violent reality opposes the awakening of Irene's social consciousness and her search for the truth. Beatriz lives a split life: in her elegant, decorous and beautiful first-floor honie, she is able to forget the ground floc nursing-home inhabited by the eccentric and elderly wealthy who have retreated from the pains of reality to inhabit a world of imagination, denial and hope She travels the route of refutation and skepticism until, [she] was incapable of dealing with the truth: Irene's mother lived in an unreal world where any difficulty was annulled by decree ... [An] egotistical, unfeeling woman who found refuge in the elegance of ritual and formalities, iii the hermetically sealed living- room where no whisper of discontent was allowed to enter .. I3eatriz lived divorced from reality; she had lost her place in the world. (Allende 277)
Stronger than Beatriz but not as strong as Irene is Hilda Leal, mother of Francisco, an exile who lives very much by her memories. By attempting to 'pray' the dictator out of power, for Hilda believes implicitly in the
51 hegemony of prayer, she acknowledges her innocent belief in the supernatural. She is the stereotypical earth mother, the wise, tranquil and supportive helpmate and mentor, the pure woman whose unceasing prayer "illustrates the persistent tradition of the church as a refuge for the Hispanic- Catholic woman" (Meyer 1988: 155). Yet she, too, is aware of the horrors of the world which have been eternalised by the patriarchy in her own country. After the Civil War in which she and her baby son nearly died, her muteness and silence much as Clara's in ThHouse of the Spitil - and her refusal to speak of the gruesomeness and execration, stand as a sign of ... her own rejection of those cataclysmic events, and offer a means of healing the wounds they had caused ... [Her] external silence stands as a metaphoric signifier of the thought processes happening within, which bring healing and acceptance of what cannot be changed. (Perricone in Rojas & Rehbein 1991: 90)
Of Love andShadw is thus realistic far more than it is magically realist, not least because the latter technique is not easily employed in contemporary urban reality which forms the setting of the novel, in a recognised time and space, in a recognisahie city. Realistic literature ... uses the imagination to validate rational coherence, while fantasy literature challenges the rational because it finds it lacking. (Brunton 1990: 23)
But this realism, says Brunton, can he periJous. Because Irene and Francisco have unearthed the atrocities and publicised them, they are forced to flee the country and the military to avoid almost certain death. Instead of using magic in this text, Allende has used the word as a weapon and the power of language to "express the realistic world, demonstrating ... that its power is its creativity" (Brunton 19). Here Allende envisages merging the natural and the supernatural into a wholeness of existence, to show the world the reality that was Chile. Through her writing she evolves and presents a self, possibly her
52 own self, which is no longer rnarginalised and which expresses the values of percipience, insightfulness and sensitivity. Fear, hatred and revulsion are the responses to those who wield authoritarian patriarchal power in the novel. Irene seeks out an encounter with the shadows of violence and evil alter her first experience with death: She had suspected from the beginning that she held the end of a long thread in her hands that when tugged would unravel an unending snarl of horrors ... She had peered into a bottomless well and had not been able to resist the temptation of the abyss. (Allende 131)
in losing her innncence, she is condemned to exile. She must leave the 'paradise' she once knew, the paradise which is in reality , a prison, a charneihouse for women, and a hell in which tyrants rule by violence and intimidation. Only the awakening of women will blazon out a new social order, a new gender-equal humanity, and "eradicate the serpent of militaristic evil" (Meyer 1988: 157).
Some 2 500 years ago, Confucius said: An oppressive government is more to he teared than a tiger
The military figures in the book, the ruling General and Lieutenant Raniirez, exercise their power through brute physical force and total and compassionless disregard for others. More clearly than in `111e House of the Slirits, Allende in Qf_Love and_Shadows has enumerated the horrors, the atrocities and the heinous abominations of the ruling military junta; and the insidious denial of true autonomy to women and the lower classes. In her book ThSecouSx, Sirnone de Beauvoir (1949: 159) SayS of men that, since the earliest days of the patriarc1ite they have thought best to keep woman in a state of dependence ... and thus she has been definitely established as the Other.
53 In consciously transposing this attitude, Allende attempts to write as a female
prophesving a new humanist society in which women's creativity and self-- - knowledge will lend theni the wherewithal to exist, to survive and to discover their inner beings but which therefore precludes them from being truly feminist in that they are outcasts from the male-dominated world that dictates their lot in life. The magic realism in this novel is incidental, but Allende's belief in the power of the feminine rather than feminist centre, of the female figure as a primordial element, offers "the organs for the circulation of repressed, alternative histories to the official stories circulated by government officials" (Castillo 1992: 23). The fact, I feel, that QLLyedShaIws fails to comply with the hypotheses of true feminist politics as posited by the feminist theorists, is due largely to the absence of magic realism and the
resultant somewhat tedious and platitudinous way in which it has been written.
54 CJ::IAPIERIII ; Ev ALU__&
He ha th awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions,. keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, J\.nd in mad trance,. strike with our spir,t's knife Invulnerable(Percy Bysshe nothings. Shelley: Adonais)
My story being done1 She gave me for my pains a world of signs: She swore,. in faith,. 'twas strange,. "twas passing strange: 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful: (William Shakespeare: QtheilQ)
So, if I dream I have you, I have you, For all our joys are but fantastical. (J olm Donne: Ihf_Dream)
An analysis of Allende's third novel, Eva Luna. which differs rather rnarkedJy from Of Loye and Shadows. both in its conception and its de but, points clearly to the fact that the magic realism within this story is neither as obtrusive nor as overt as in The.J:l.oJJ.se_.QUb.r..-5.pirits. It is, however, the means whereby Eva, the protagonist, acquires knowledge ot the world, her own inference of the world through which she denotes wha � reality is to her; and it also represents Allende's oft-stated recognition of the passive power of the female in the political arena. While this book is not, and does not purport to be,
55 Allende's autobiography, the figure of Eva Luna more than any other of her characters reflects much of who she is and who she would like to be. To Alberto Mangue! in 1992 (625), she says: I am Eva. Eva is the woman I want to he. We are so different, in every way but one: we both tell stories. But she is my drearnselt; [her story] looks upon the wonders of the world ... as a magical place.
Allende says that writing has "magical powers, it can stop time, extend. it to infinity, make it go in circles or repeat itself again and again" (Rohies 1994: 55). Her conviction of the power exerted by language is strongly expressed: I firmly believe that our life is only a short stage in the long journey of the spirit ... Eva Luna goes about inventing reality and reinventing people so she can have cheerful memories of them.
For a long time Allencie believed - mistakenly - in the goodness both of the world and of the human race. Thrust unceremoniously into the violence and horror, the abyss of post-coup Chile, she was forced to recognise and acknowledge the "enormous potential for evil in human beings ... niiserv and torments ... and treasons against humanity" (Robles 5.5), Out of this revelation was born IhHueofthSpiills, then OLL ±iind.hiJows and later LyaLwii, all three bearing testimony to the change in her perceptions of reality and mankind. But she never allows this pain to overwhelm her soul or her fighting spirit. She constantly imbues her characters with positive attitudes and with unswerving optimism for the future. Generosity and candour work closely together within them to help defeat the odds of a fate which could be worse than death; meanwhile the characters search constantly for truth, repudiating oppression, risking their lives courageously and establishing themselves as forces to he reckoned with in society. Allende's women, particularly Eva and Clara, create their own reality through enunciating the text and through telling stories. Only in this way can they 56 repudiate the female images propounded by the male patriarchy and the masculine norm in literature which has always existed as part of the male canon. Yet as characters Eva and Clara are not strictly feminist, in the North- American sense of the definition, in that they have separated themselves from the 'mainstreani' of lite and literature as Allende has portrayed them, her point of reference being the political system within which she as a Latin American woman has had to operate all her life.
A significant stake in women's conflict with patriarchal authority has always been, and forever will he, their right to tell stories, to 'verbal creation'. Walter Benjamin in his classic essay on Leskov, Me St o -nr_bell er, (Montefiore 1994: 40), denoted storytelling as the communication of experience "which passes from mouth to mouth [and] is the source from which all storytellers have drawn." His essay is detailed and thorough in all aspects but one: he conspicuously excludes women as part of the storytelling canon. Jan Montefiore, however, refines his ideas, affirming and maintaining that, direct speech and storytelling are, after all, characteristic activities in the women's movement, an important aspect of feminist politics being the insistence we place on the importance of women articulating their own experiences, breaking a stifling or barren silence by telling their own authentic stories. (42)
For Clarissa Pinkola Estes (1992: 15), the act of storytelling specifically for women, and the stories that define it,
are medicine ... They do not require that we do, he, act anything - we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.
Estes' cognisance of the importance and significance of storytelling led her 1.0 produce her singular and influential dissertation in which she pronounces stories as the ingredient comprising "a woman's soul drama" (14); through them women can understand to a greater extent the "complexities of life" (16);
57 they "set the inner life into motion' (20); and they "present the knife of insight, the flame of the passionate life, the breath to speak what one knows, the courage to stand what one sees without looking away" (21). The stories in her book are offered "asfortification for those on their way, including those who toil in and for the world", allowing their souls "to grow in their natural ways and to their natural depths" (21). They are essential to the nurtureinent of women; they define the feminist ideal of, the liberating, empowering appeal of language; they strengthen the individual and the community; and through them, women can "return to their instinctive lives, their deepest knowing" (21). Isabel Allende herself recognises that storytelling has the power to confer upon women autonomous self-clef inition; for in her sequel to Eyaj,tina, The rieso.fEvaLiina Roif Cane says to Eva, "You think in words; for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it" (1990: 3). The female struggle for identity is dramatised through the oral narrative; though Allende's women are feminist primarily in the rigorous context of Latin-American politics, they are nonetheless independent and empowered enough to be able to bring about change for the better for their compatriots -
Allende accords veracity to all these theories with her portrayal of the figure of Eva Luna who is a teller of stories. Beginning as a small child, Eva develops and refines this art throughout her life; she narrates the text of her own life as she lives,'speaking characters into being, weaving in spider- fashion the construct of history, 'her/story' " (Rivero in Cunningham 1990: 144). Books, quiet during the day, opened by night so their characters could come out and wander through the rooms and live their adventures ... Space expanded and contracted according to my will: the cubby beneath the stairs contained an entire planetary system, but the sky seen through the attic skylight was nothing more than a pale circle of glass. One word from me and abracadabra! reality was transformed. (Allende 1987: 24)
58 In The House o.LthSpirits Clara used her language to enter into a world of magic and mysticism. In much the same way, though perhaps not as frequently, Eva's words liberate her; like Scherezade she weaves magic spells through her tales for sh& observes reality and transforms it. Consuelo, her mother, who is herself a teller of tales, teaches her early on that strange happenings occur in the realm of the imagination, resulting in a dissolution of the concrete and brick walls of reality: She sowed in my head the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and colour it to make our journey through life less trying. (Allende 21)
Consuelo also teaches Eva of the incredible power of language and its ability to transpose reality into a tangibleness enhanced by imagination. In turn Eva appropriates this language and through it constructs her own reality. The story she tells herself in order to create her own being becomes her. Allende says, "Eva Luna has the teeling that by writing things down and narrating them she makes them real, that they then exist' (Montenegro 1991: 123). This is Allende's defence against the real world of harsh political and patriarchal terror, for the reality Eva constructs defies the reality of the world. In the beginning she is the silent, the voiceless, the one with no being; but having captured and made language her own, she embodies a woman's self through a feminine discourse.
Eva's parents are both taciturn, reserved, almost invisible people in the outside world. Of Consuelo, Eliana Rivero says, Before being given words, this female embodied the paradigm of silence, deprivation and disenfranchisement which marks the lot of the majority of females in the contemporary world. (146)
Silence, occasional or extended, is a forceful characteristic of Allende's women, as was seen in the portraits of Clara, Blanca and Alba. Consuelo in 59 her turn is silent everywhere but in 'the privacy of the room we shared [where], however, she was transformed" (Allende 21). She bequeaths to Eva her gift of storytelling; when the child becomes the possessor of language and assumes her mother's mantle after her mother's death, her life takes a different path. Consuelo's dyirg words remain with Eva always: "There is no death, daughter. People only die when we forget them," my mother explained shortly before she left me. "If you can remember me, I will he with you always." (Allende 40) and Eva uses her as a vehicle to liberate herself from certain incarceration, which is indicative of women's existence in Latin America at the time at which Allende wrote. she slipped away without any fuss, just as she had lived. I was at her side, and I have never forgotten that moment, because from that day I have had to sharpen my perception in order not to lose her among the shadows-of-no-return where disembodied spirits go to rest. (Allende 40)
Eya Luni, said Allende, is a very joyful and extravagant tale ... It's a story of a storyteller who saves her life by telling stories ... It's not my biography but somehow she was inside nie, as if I were a glove and she were the hand inside the glove. By writing the hand got out of me and existed by itself. (Monteriegro 1991: 119)
By telling her own story, Eva creates her own being and thus engenders her own subjectivity. Her existence and her presence originate and are viable through the power of self-language. Not content with silence, she brings her own perspectives into telling the story of her life, she emphasises the making of her own fate, and she exhibits "an indomitable will to recreate reality by the power of her own language" (Rivero 151). Near the end of the story Eva confirms this in her own words: Perhaps we had the good fortune to stumble into an exceptional love, a love I did not have to invent, only clothe in all its glory 60 so it could endure in memory 7 in keeping with the principle that we can construct reality in the image of our desires. (Allende 271)
In the mansion of death in which she lives as a child, Eva manages to survive only by fantasising and telling infantile stories, and making the house into something extravagant and whimsical. She discovers a magic dimension behind the surface of reality, which allows her to escape the almost certain domestic servitude that was the lot of her mother and of millions of other Latin-American women. In a country of patriarchy and militarv dictatorship, Eva's rebellion against domestication and her escape through storytelling and fantasy "form the background of her story, the rock-bottom which connects [Allende's] novel to the social and political realities of Latin America" (Karrer in Rojas & Rehbein 1991: 151). Through the use of storvtelling language, Allende gives the reader the concept of a protean and adjustable reality which can he transformed into a life-saving device and a survival technique. The magic power evident in Eva's stories nudges her in the direction of a lovelier world, albeit of dreams, imagination or memories, but away from the harshness of the patriarchal militaristic reality in which she is imprisoned. Through this technique Allende demonstrates that "the act and the art of narrating consist of the skill and talent to change language in order to achieve the desired textual 'reality' " (Rehbein in Rojas & Rehbein 1991: 188). As narrator Eva controls, sculpts and defines reality to suit her purposes. She does this to gain the freedom desired by the 'invisible warriors' of the continent, the women of Latin America. Eva records the past and fashions it as she desires; her characters leave the imaginary world they inhabit and seep into her consciousness, enabling her to bring order into the chaos of the world and to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction.
61 Eyji_Luna reflects the inlluence of Venezuela, Allende's adopted home. The negative male figures who feature so prominently, including the Chief of State, the mysterious 'Hombre de le Gardinia', Colonel Rodriguez, Huberto Naranjo and the hated Lukas Cane, are dictatorial, patriarchal and authoritarian, provoking fear, revulsion and abhorrence in the women and the peasants of the lower classes. The contliJ between the individual and the oppressive regime is strongly delineated, and stresses the themes of dictatorship and power. As in the two earlier hooks, so in La U na is there overwhelming evidence of political and military corruption. Victory over authoritarianism is gained at a price, but comes through both the verbal empowerment of Eva and the protestations of socially and politically conunitted middle-class people. Eva as narrator "reverses the consequences of subordination ... through ... self language" (Loach 1990: 246). This is Allende's contribution towards the creation of clear and unambiguous directions for female characters created by Latin American women writers; empowering them through language will empower them politically, even if it does not make of them true feminists.
EaLnna is a magical hook which weaves spells of fantasy and enchantment through its tales of magic and caprice. In ThJiou of the Spirits Allend.e made a strong and generally favourable case for the importance of magic realism as a means of emphasising gender politics in Latin America. She eschewed this technique in 01 Loyeansj Shadows, which resulted in a hook less convincing than its predecessor. In LYiL Lt a, however, while magic realism, per se, is not the overriding technique Allende uses, the magic coming instead primarily through the imaginary stories Eva recounts, the book makes a strong case for the power and ability of women to conquer the entrenched oppressed confronting them, and through various means to express the power of life and the radiance of essential femininity - though at the same time they make of themselves another 'Other' grouping. In their
62 Introduction, Sonia Rojas & Edna Rehhein (1991: 4) acknowledge that in this book Allende has accepted the indissoluble bond that exists between femininity and the power of writing which is the feminine discourse: the power of the mother as the creator of the protagonist's life is metaphorically related to Eva's progressive dominion of language as she breaks into new areas of expression and knowledge.
II
Within the male-dominated society which is Latin America, Allende's feminist vision privileges the female point of view and simultaneously strives to attain for women an integrated and cohesive whole being capable of challenging, provoking and ultimately defying a world previously barred to them. The political vagaries and horrors of Chilean society are clearly delineated; there is honour among thieves, dishonour among government officials, chaos and imbroglio in the ruling ranks while 'the residents of the red-light district had organised as a matter of survival" (Allende 116). Over and over again it is Allende's female characters who create order out of confusion, who commune with and recognise their inner selves, and who project a new consciousness within the male society. It is the males, by contrast, who, despite their official positions, degrade and demean themselves: The General -. believed that history hallows audacious leaders, and that people consider honesty to he an undesirable trait in a real man, something befitting priests and women. He was convinced that learned men exist for the purpose of being honoured with statues. (Allende 121)
Eva's fantasies, taking on erotic connotations, are liberated as she approaches adolescence. With Elvira the cook, she becomes addicted to soap operas on the radio, learning that "the long-suffering always triumphed and the evil 63 received their due" (Allende 65). Yet she herself rejects the perfect - "only rarely did I respect the standard happy ending" (65). She dreams, she wishes and she desires a life different from reality: At night I gazed at the sky and imagined that I could make myself as wispy as smoke and slip between the bars of the locked gate. I pretended that when a moonbeani touched my back I sprouted wings like a bird's, two huge feathered wings for flight. (Allende 64)
Her introduction to sexuality comes through Riad Halahi who provides her with romantic novels and the tales of iefhousand and One Nights: I submersed myself [in thern] so deeply I completely lost sight of reality. Eroticism and fantasy blew into my life with the force of a typhoon, erasing all limitations and ttirning the known order of things upside down. (Allende 137)
The final culmination of her amorous and lustful fantasies comes when she is witness to the 'inflammatory seduction' of Kamal, Riad's cousin, by his wife Zulerna: She swung astride him, sniothering him with her voluptuousness and the wealth of her hair, completely obliterating him, hsorhing him in her quicksands, devouring him, draining him, and leading him to the gardens of Allah where he was celebrated by all the odalisques of the Prophet. (Allende 147)
It is at this point, more than at any other in the hook, that "desire, niagic transformation of reality, and erotic fantasy come together for the first time in Eva's narrative discourse" (Karrer in Rojas & Rehhein 1991: 153). Like Clara, Blanca, Aiha and even to an extent Irene, Eva uses love as her salvation from the harshness of life, love intertwined with fantasy, desire and the words that re-create the reality nd transform it into something of breathtaking splendour for her: the smell of desire had drifted through the house, impregnating the walls, the clothing, and the furniture, filling rooms, sifting into cracks, affecting flowers and living creatures, warming subterranean rivers, saturating the very sky of Agua 64 Santa; it was as visible as a beacon and would he impossible to hide. (Allende 148)
Though not as marked as in fliHust of the Spirits, but more so than in Of LyejmdSh.adows, female solidarity in Eva surfaces as a means whereby women react positively to the pressures of the dominant social force Eva's mother "did not want to frighten me, so she dieci without tear" (Allende 40); the madrina who took her on as a responsibility cares for Eva, teaches her the ways of the world as she knows them, and prepares her for the pain of living in a male-dominated society: She believed that men had it best; even the lowest good-for-- nothing had a wife to boss around ... For her, the boundaries between good and evil were very precise, and she was ready to save me from sin if she had to beat me to do it. (Allende 42)
Elvira, the cook in the home of the brother and sister for whoin Eva works frorn the age of seven, nurtures and nourishes her and advises her on life: That's good, little bird," Elvira would say approvingly. "You have to tight back. No one tries anything with mad dogs, but tame dogs they kick. Life's a dogfight." it was the best advice I ever received. (Allende 62)
When forced to part after three years together, they have by then formed "an enduring friendship that protected us from loneliness and the harshness of a servant's lite" (96). The final gift Elvira gets from Eva is "a long story to last till the next visit" (96). Eva's strength and sustenance come in part from Elvira - vet another example of female solidarity confronting the 'impenetrable' hierarchy - who encourages her to take on her own autonomous existence in the socio-economic world, rejecting the patriarchal system in tavour of establishing and securing an independent position of power.
65 In a scene strongly reminiscent of the one in which Alba conjures up Clara in order to transcend ignorance and repression, and where she identifies with her grandmother who provides her with "a timeless mirror of female experience", Eva, in her moment of greatest tear and torment, summoned my mother; almost immediately I was aware of the scent of clean starched cotton. Then she was before me, long hair rolled in a bun at her neck, smoke-coloured eyes shining in her freckled face, telling me that I was not to blame for all this pandemonium and there was no reason to he afraid: I should forget my fear and we would walk along together. I stood up and took her hand. (Allende 119)
Once again Allende has given her readers a strong mother-daughter relationship, functioning as a link between generations, between their past and between their future. There is a thread of continuity, albeit a thin one, which runs through and links the publicly silent but privately garrulous Consuelo with Eva who throughout her life, could take that gelatin and mould it to create anything I wanted; not a parody of reality ... but a world of my own populated with living people, a world where I imposed the rules and could change them at will. In the motionless sands where my stories germinated, every birth, death and happening depended on me. (Allende 168)
Only when her life becomes secure and ordered, and when she feels confident enough to understand her need for a real and tangible past, does Eva actively search for Consuelo for the first time; and finally she finds her mother in the picture of a delicate and smiling young girl in a garden of climbing roses, dressed in lace and protected by a parasol ... I always knew in my heart that [Consuelo] was like the exquisite lady of the parasol, because that was what she became when we were alone in the maids' quarters and that is how I wanted to preserve her in my memory. (Allende 200)
66 The reinforcement of this bond between the two generations stresses the female solidarity which for Ailende implies a political stance and which she first emphasised in ThHunof the Spirit , enabling her to denounce the cruelties of patriarchy and to write a new future of hope and promise in which women would no longer be marginalised but would instead take their rightful places as members of a just and equitable society. Eva Luna encompasses in her glorious stories what Downing (1981: 13) so clearly explicates: The goddesses of [stories] are the goddesses of the realm of the soul. [Stories] and the unconscious are analogues. The goddess nurtures not only physical life but the life of the soul. Rebirth is metamorphosis, transformed consciousness ... The goddess is the giver of dreams and omens, of the understanding of the hidden. She is the source of vision.
Through Eva's stories - in much the same way as Eva drew support from Consuelo's stories, and Alba from Clara's - characters can avoid or endure the hostility of the real world, the world of political torture and. patriarchal subjugation. Eva later allows a female soap opera writer to tell her own life story; and she lives and breathes that instant, that moment, when little by little, the past was transformed into the present, and the future was also mine; the dead came alive with an illusion of eternity; those who had been separated were reunited, and all that had been lost in oblivion regained precise dimensions. (Allende 224)
Desperate to clutch onto reality, to portray it as the basis and the foundation for a new life and a new beginning, Eva, like Clara and to a lesser extent Aiha after her, writes and keeps writing in an attempt to re-create and then vanquish the world of masculine subjugation and patriarchal torture: I was ... totally inmiersed in the world I was creating with the all-encompassing power of words, transformed into a multi- faceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. (Allende 262)
67 Eva acquires her own notion of the world which demythifies masculine visions and reveals patterns of love and death, of politics and human life.
III
Eva lives a totally unconventional life. Unlike the del Valle women and Irene Beltran, she is early on thrust into the harshness of the real world; she is able to celebrate her femininity, even to recognise it, only much later than Allende's other protagonists, the significance of this being that eventual recognition of her 'femaleness' will be more valued and cherished oie she has comprehended and ascertained the world she is forced to inhabit. The patterns of her life follow those more usually adopted by males: she lives on the streets with Huberto Naranjo for a time, she manages the general store belonging to Riad Halahi, she works in a factory, she earns money writing a monumental television script, and she aids and abets the escape of certain of Huherto's terrorist companions from a jungle prison. By placing her within these masculine parameters, yet giving her the skill of enchantment whereby she can metamorphose reality by means of her language into magic and allurement, Allende recognises the power of her 'femaleness' that comes from knowledge and experience. Eva, though not a teminist, draws strength from her inner resources and from the peripheral network of companionship surrounding her.
A significant element in EaLimi is the challenging of gender and the transgression of gender roles, which goes hand in hand with the magic transformation of reality. The transsexual Melecia is the character through whom all of this occurs. S/he is victimised, humiliated, rejected and physically and emotionally abused by an intolerant father and by society at large. As a transvestite who dresses in female clothing, s/he escapes the straitjacket of gender to transform reality in yet another way, challenging the 68 ' traditional view of gender till s/he can initiate the sex-change process which transforms him into the actress Mimi. Melecio/Mimi's androgyny, and Eva's acceptance of and support for him / her (Ioach 1990: 213), 'simultaneously rejects the dichotomies of masculine discourse and embraces a synthetic female alternative', and represents a synthesis of oppositions which has become a central component of neoterninist literature.
The magic dimension of reality preserved in the story of Eva Luna is often evident. In addition to the happenings clouding Eva's existence, her harsh introduction into independence, her pain of unrequited love, the ecstasy following her initiation into love by Riad Halabi, and her agony at having to leave him, there are "intangible, unexplainable and unquestioned occurrences [which] coexist with the hard facts of every experience" (Rotella in Rojas & Rehbein 1991: 125). Eva's time with Riad Halabi in his small village is one of peace and safety in a town "drowsing in the doldrums of the provinces, washed by rain, radiant in the incredible tropical light" (Allende 123). Here in this place time and geography remain magically suspended; life takes on the appearance of a novel; and the novel, in its turn, questions and transcends the limitations of the particular time and place in which it is set. Here, too, Eva recognises her own sexuality and establishes her own identity; and she discovers the power of her body and the power of words: I could plant anything I wanted in those sands; I had only to speak the right words to give it life. At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me. (Allende 169)
She grows in self-assurance and self-determination; she develops the potential to record her innermost thoughts; and she learns to use words to overcome injustice and to speak out on behalf of others. In the midst of the turmoil, the chaos and the frenetic upheaval of political revolution, she meets with Mimi
69 (originally Melesio); and she moves in with her, "becoming a woman and for the first time steering [her] own course" (Allende 188). Thus she joins Alba and Irene and other Allende characters "who embody an alternate form of power which responds to the needs of others, without diminishing them or oneseW' (Loach 1990: 163). In this way, says Loach (165), Allende uses her writing "to challenge the boundaries of accepted literary authority, and to establish subjectivity through her themes and narrative techniques." She empowers women and allows the world to see them as independent persons capable of bringing about change and improvement in intolerable conditions in life.
Barbara Loach (1990: 256) says of the language in Evaluna that
Allende appropriates the conventional, dominant discourse in order to more directly convey [her] ideas. [She] speaks with more openness, more realism, and ventures into areas normally reserved for 'masculine' discourse, such as the use of profanity and sexual themes.
More outspoken and certainly more perceptive about real life than Clara and Irene, Eva creates her own reality as she acquires words and stories and then shapes them to her own design, recognising that "the nurture for telling stories comes from those who have gone before" (Montefiore 1994: 19). As she moves from being oral story-teller to writer of tales, she is increasingly able to control her own life, and "the better opportunity [she] has to apprehend and evoke [her] soulwork" (Montefiore 17). Thus, according to Loach (1990: 267), "masculine centrality is displaced by a feminist marginality that appropriates narrative discourse for itself." Conventional power, especially in the male-dominated Latin-American regimes, is codified in violence and compulsion. Eva, through her self-knowledge and the prudent nature she brings to her relationships, "provides [a] model of [an] empowered woman who uses [her] inherent strength to overcome the conventional
70 power" (282). Like all Latin-American women she is struggling to enter the male-dominated arena of business and politics; her stories are the key to empower her. Woman's voice, till now marginalised, distorted or silenced by the patriarchal discourse, emerges with its own perspective of events, transtigured by the power of language, with an awakened self- and social consciousness.
The 'magic' that ELuna preserves is 'the power of life itself coupled with the radiance of essential and mysterious femininity symbolised by the moon" (Rotella in Rojas & Rehbein 1991: 125). Through these magic stories, the characters simultaneously circunivent or withstand the rancorous social and political configurations around them. The types and stereotypes in Eva Luna's stories, the 'play of infinite possibilities' that she discovers in the Arabian Nights, are firmly rooted in archetype and myth. The archetypal code underlying Eva's story ... provides friendly helpers and magical gifts, and leads to her magical transtormation from domestic prisoner to liberator of prisoners. (Karrer in Rojas & Rehbein 1991: 156)
Eva may not be a feminist as Elaine Showalter or Dale Spender would characterise her, but her coalescence of the powers by which Allende feels she could alter the paradigms of society, gives her a strength and independence which is truly Latin-American.
71 CHAPTER IV : CQNCLUSION
Human kind Cannot bear very much reality. (T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets)
Heaven and earth are ruthless and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs. (Lao Tzu: Tao te Ching)
The world is still deceived with ornament In law/ what plea so tainted and corrupt But/ being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? (WiJJjam ShakespeMe: The Merry\,Vjyes of \Vindsor)
In her book Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the postmodern (1989: 13), Patricia Waugh writes: vVhile feminists have come to recognise acutely the impersonal social and historical determinants of women's oppression, that experience has itself developed in them strongly 'humanist' or 'personal' qualities: co-operativeness, nurturance/ an awareness of self-in-relationship and of the relativity of fields of knowledge and totalising systems which attempt to systematize individual and concrete hum.an actions.
The essence of Latin America in comparison with the West is different and 'other', compelling its female authors to "mediate an alternate reality'' (Koski
72 1989: 125). From a feminist perspective, and with Latin-American femiuiisrn differing appreciably from that of the West, Allende's works cannot justifiably be seen or analysed unless in the context of this feminism of which she is so integral a part. Two of the three books which have been studied, and to a lesser extent the third, are teriiiriocentric family and/or female sagas which valorise and articulate women's experiences through the generations, allowing the reader to draw closer to the figures portrayed, to develop a 'kindred spirit' with the women who defy the conventions of archetypes and stereotypes to illustrate the values of hunian culture.
While the feminism of the North-American woman is generally anti-male, anti-family, and even in certain instances anti-feminine, that of her Latin- American counterpart stresses instead "the importance and dignity of bearing children and caring for the home" (Loach 1990: 65), with considerably less overt dislike for and distrust of the patriarchy. Allende has always had to define herself, and her novels, in the context of a Latin-American feminism, in an environment in which the circumstance of her writing and its subsequent publication, and her struggle against and success in 'storming the bastions' of a male-centred and male-dominant patriarchal society, must he seen as acts of courage and of strong feminist conviction. And in those of her books which synthesise magic realism with feminist characteristics, the successful portrayal of feminist women cannot but he recognised.
VVhat this thesis has shown, therefore, is that the magic realism combined with the gender politics that Allende brings to hear in Ihe_House of the Spiritsand in Evauna, I allows Clara, Alba and Eva to achieve a measure of power and an ability to 'chart the future' in the 'machismo' society in which they live. Alba, though she inhabits an 'alternate reality', and exists more in the corporeal world, stands as Alleride's most forcefully feminist character; yet she too draws her sustenance from the past, from the magical stories of
73 her grandmother Clara and from the strong bond of solidarity with her mother and grandmother which reorganises and defies the patriarchal culture in ways consciously political that move to empower women. These three characters are consciousiç feminist and fully cognisant of their responsibilities towards their female counterparts outside of their domestic confines. The realism in QfLye_and5hadows, though, because it eschews the magic of the other two hooks, manifests Irene as the rather wooden heroine who is unlikely to effect changes in a society which is dominated by the traditional patriarchy, and which accords women little if any status or identity.
Thus by her use of magic realism, Allende achieves for her female protagonists a measure of independence and an ability to use human resolutions, specifically the strong bonding and solidarity between generations, the link with the past through the imagination and the deep understanding of their inner psyche that enables them to he either silent or tilled with stories needing to be told, for the problems of mankind.
Speech and the written text are the tools which Eatin-Arnerican women writers use to affirm their strength and creativity and to empower their female characters. When Allende does this and combines it with magic realism to produce individuals like Clara, Alba and Eva, and when it is done in clear defiance of women always having been seen as the Other', the expression of women's concerns and their empowerment pays homage to and acclaims the value of interpreting human identity and temale independence in terms of relationships and concurrence. In these relationships, universal female bonding is promulgated as the basis for temale strength and a solution to the evils of the patriarchal world and the dominant culture which defines it-
74 Allende manages with skill and dexterity to locate Clara, Alba and Eva, but not Irene, in a space of consciousness and knowledge commenusrate with the inirneasurable, uncirctimscrihed and definitive realms of hi.iman experience that pertain to women.
To tell the stories was her work. It was like spinning gathering thin air to the singlest strongest thread. Night in she'd have us waiting held / breath, for the ending we knew by heart. LzLochiedJhe Storvteller
75 BIBI.IQGEAEHY
BOOKS AND CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
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