Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy: Narrative Geographies (review)

Given a series of narrations that represents of 130 years of history in which characters that are English, Chilean, and Chinese traverse three continents, Karen Wooley Martin’s choice of a spatial reading of Allende’s trilogy seems most appropriate. Standing the test of time and having been submitted to every imaginable critical approach, the sophistication of Allende’s work is again revealed through a geographical analysis of place, space, and borders in Karen Wooley Martin’s monograph. Reworking her doctoral thesis, Challenging Borders: The Demarcation of Space In Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy, Professor Martin confidently guides the reader through the labyrinthine terrain of spatial l theory to demonstrate a unifying vision and aesthetic in the three novels under consideration: La casa de los espiritus, Hija de la fortuna, and Retrato en sepia. Grounding her study on the work of Michel Foucault, for whom “the history of space [is] . . . the history of power,” Martin asserts in her introduction that a geographical reading reveals how “Isabel Allende’s fiction subverts masculinist and authoritarian domination of political, ethnic, sexual, and even textual spaces as it converts these sites into contact zones to be contested, renegotiated, usurped or appropriated by marginalized groups” (ix). She puts forth a convincing and imaginative argument that puts to rest claims than Allende’s fiction is naïve or lacks literary merit.

Chapter one, “Roots and Routes to Utopia: Imagined Geographies in Isabel Allende’s Fictional Universe,” situates the author’s life and work in the larger social, political, and cultural context. Martin notes parallels between the author’s life and fictional patterns in her own movement from the center as a privileged person in Chile, to the margin as an exile in Venezuela, and then back to the center as a highly successful author with global concerns. Speculating that machismo and politics caused the virulent backlash against the success of her novels in Chile, Martin argues that the highly referential and accessible nature of Allende’s fiction does not preclude an ambitious intent to undermine and replace hegemonic power structures. She chronologically traces the three part saga of family upheaval in the context of geographical spaces and border crossings to demonstrate a consistent pattern of changing power between elites and marginalized majorities as well as a growing sophistication and sensitivity with regard to social codes, especially homosexuality.

In chapter two, “Literary Geographies, Borderlands, and the Boundaries of Identity,” Martin establishes her theoretical framework, constructing a convincing argument that setting is a “dynamic player in the development or stagnation of plotted events and characters’ navigation of textual hurdles” (25). She frames her analysis with seminal studies in which spatial and feminist theory converge. From Shirley Ardener comes a social mapping of patriarchy that restricts movement and accessibility along gender lines. From Susan Friedman and Gloria Anzaldúa come notions of borders or contact zones as areas of negotiation and possible transgression. Michel Foucault advances the concept of border spaces as regions of heterotopia, in which unlike elements are juxtaposed without being unified or homogenized. Yi-Fu Tuan introduces the consideration of age, career, race, gender, and class as markers of stratification, as well as the central role of body as space, extended to the home and the nation. Martin credits Edward Soja’s work as influential with a tripartite concept of spatial practice: the first as empirical and representable space, the second as ideas and conceptions of space, and “thirdspace,” which combines the influence of the first two as a zone of destabilization through interchange and contradiction. Based on these sources, Martin alleges that a subversive pattern of fluidity can be traced in the trilogy in which subjugated or marginalized individuals and groups are able to transcend barriers, penetrate privileged spaces, and redefine identity.

In chapter three, “Mapping Ethnicity: Race Class, and Mobility in the Trilogy’s New Narratives,” Martin looks at the delineation and contestation of traditional concepts of race and ethnicity in the two later works...