ISABEL ALLENDE'S THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS: MAGICAL REALISM AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

This episode will focus on the relationship between class consciousness and magical realism in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Allende’s novel centers on an inter-generational family saga, this time of the Trueba family. But unlike Marquez’s novel there are extraordinary cycles of political violence from outside the family as well as personal violence inside of it. The novel reflects the historically violent political history of Allende’s own country in Chile. As we shall see, the principle of violence threatens to upend one of the core principles of magical realism, namely, the scrupulous equivalence between the fantastic and the real. This is because the violence in the novel is tied to the unfolding of class war, such that the magical realist elements in the novel must be judged according to their relationship to different historical classes and thus, to questions of equity and justice. The careful navigation of this problematic of violence and class war is central to the novel’s success, and it achieves this partly by structuring many fantastic incidents and events around well-rounded and admirable magical realist characters such as Rosa, Clara, and Alba, as well as the furry Barrabás, a cross between a sheep, a dog, and a mythical being.

Suggested Reading
John Rodden, ed., Critical Insights: Isabel Allende, Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2011. Karen Wooley Martin, Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits Trilogy: Narrative Geographies, Rochester, NY: Tamesis Press, 2010.
Karen Castelucci Cox, Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.