Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits Trilogy: Narrative Geographies

By Karen Wooley Martin

The source of the narrative energy that creates such absorbing stories.

Allende's very popular novels have attracted both critical approval and opprobrium, often at the expense of genuine analysis. This sophisticated study explores the narrative architecture of Allende's House of the Spirits 1982], Daughter of Fortune 1999], and Portrait in Sepia 2000] as a trilogy, proposing that the places created in these novels subvert the patriarchal norms that have governed politics, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Rooted in the Foucauldian premise that the history of space is essentially the history of power, and supported by Susan Stanford Friedman's cultural geographies of encounter as well as Gloria Anzald a's study of borderlands, this study shows that, by rejecting traditional spatial hierarchies, Allende's trilogy systematically deterritorializes the elite while shifting the previously marginalized to the physical and thematic centers of her works. This movement provides the narrative energy which draws the reader into Allende's universe, and sustains the 'good story' for which she has been universally acclaimed.

KAREN WOOLEY MARTIN is Associate Professor of Spanish at Union University, Jackson, Tennessee.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1855662000
• ISBN13: 9781855662001
• Release Date: June 2010
• Publisher: Tamesis Books
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.3" x 6.3"