Magical Realism in The House of the Spirits Analysis

Magical Realism in The House of the Spirits

The term magical realism has been considered the best way to represent the Latin American world. With it, the intention was to reveal that reality in Hispanic society is inherently magical. It incorporated the reality and the collective subconscious of diverse cultures, such as myths.

Magical realism has been defined as a way of seeing and telling reality, which consists of providing wonderful, unreal, and exaggerated dimensions to daily life so that both characters and the reader move from reality to magic with little notice.

Comparison with One Hundred Years of Solitude

The magical realism in The House of the Spirits served some authors and scholars to emphasize similarities with Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, to such a point that Allende was accused of plagiarism.

The two works share many elements, such as:

• The house as a central setting.
• Time and space without chronological order.
• A family saga.
• The world of dreams and premonitions.

However, there are differences, such as the treatment of women in each work.

Allende's Use of the Style

Isabel Allende uses magical realism, especially in the first part of her novel, which seems to belong to the merely wonderful to emphasize the weight of reality, thus giving equal value to objective reality as it does to subjective reality.

The Significance of the Title

The title of the work refers to "the big house on the corner," which is the main stage of the work, where spirits appear, as Clara is clairvoyant and has powers to see and talk to them. Thus, the novel falls within 'magical realism' as fictitious events and phenomena are taken as belonging to the characters' reality.

Social and Political Reflections in The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits has a testimonial character. Memory and writing go together both in fiction and in reality, because in fiction, the novel's origins are narrated before the epilogue.

Testimony and Chilean Reality

The narrative meets the testimony. The stages of Esteban Trueba's life reflect the reality of Chile (although the country's name never appears). The novel features amazing stories of people who read magic books taken from trunks with delight.

In the second part, the social process determines the configuration of the story:

• The presidential election.
• The workers' struggle.

Also notable is the presence of real people, such as the Poet, identified with the singer Victor Jara. Furthermore, the work echoes the chaos and shortages, support for the conservative right-wing coup, and the new era of military censorship.

Authorial Intent

The author's intention is to use memory to surpass limits and to question historical reality. This is made possible through the history of the Trueba-del-Valle family, representing the prototypical middle-class Latin American family. Besides this, the work is also a story of love, hate, blood, violence, and tenderness.