Kelly Winters is a freelance writer and has written for a wide variety of academic and educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses feminist themes in The House of the Spirits.
"Critics are terrible people," Allende told Farhat Iftekharuddin in Conversations with Isabel Allende. "They will label you no matter what, and you have to be classified. I don't want to be called a feminist writer, a political writer, a social writer, a magic realism writer, or a Latin American writer. I am just a writer; I am a storyteller.""All the women in my book [The House of the Spirits] are feminists in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be able to fulfill themselves, not to be dependent on men. Each one battles according to her own character and within the possibilities of the epoch in which she happens to be living."
Despite her objections to being categorized, Allende is a feminist, as she made clear in the same interview. She told Iftekharuddin, "Because I am a woman and because I am an intelligent women, excuse my arrogance, I have to be a feminist. I am aware of my gender; I am aware of the fact that being a woman is a handicap in most parts of the world...in any circumstance, a woman has to exert double the effort of any man to get half the recognition."
And, she told Marjorie Agosin in Conversations with Isabel Allende, "All the women in my book [The House of the Spirits] are feminists in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be able to fulfill themselves, not to be dependent on men. Each one battles according to her own character and within the possibilities of the epoch in which she happens to be living."
In The House of the Spirits, although Esteban Trueba is a central figure, women are the true main characters, and the main focus of the book is the bonds and interrelationships among the generations of mothers and daughters. Trueba is a traditional Latin-American man, with traditional ideas about honor, machismo, sexuality, and the roles of women--who should be quiet and under a man's control. The women in the book all defy these notions in very distinct ways. As characters, they are richly portrayed; all are uniquely talented, and all are influenced by the lives of their mothers and...