Class struggle and politics are at the center of Isabel Allende’s multi-generational novel The House of the Spirits. The book examines the social and political changes of an unnamed South American country as it transitions from a class-based oligarchy—a political system in which a small group of very wealthy people hold most of the power—to a full-blown Marxist revolution. Much of the story unfolds at Tres Marías, a country hacienda (estate) owned by Esteban Trueba, an extremely wealthy senator from the capital. Many peasants live and work on the hacienda, just as they have for generations, and Esteban prides himself on being the only landowner to provide peasant workers with solid brick homes. Despite this perceived luxury, the peasants have few rights, and they are constantly subjected to Esteban’s explosive temper and abusive treatment. The peasants’ discontent is mirrored in that of the working-class citizens in the cities, and whispers of social justice and equality soon spread across the nation. Through The House of the Spirits, Allende highlights the struggles faced by the lower classes in 20th-century Latin America and points to political corruption as a direct source of society’s injustices and inequalities.
The nation described in The House of the Spirits is rife with corrupt politicians and government practices, all of which are aimed at keeping the wealthy in power and the lower classes in poverty. During elections, Esteban and the other landowners—known in the novel as patrones—coerce the peasants to vote for conservative candidates. The patrones promise the peasants bonuses if the conservative candidates win, and they threaten to fire the peasants if their candidates lose. While the peasants technically have the right to vote, their right to freely choose a candidate is constrained by threats and intimidation. Additionally, the patrones bribe the police, fix the ballot boxes, and transport the peasants to vote “under careful observation.” Through the corrupt practices of the patrones, the conservative candidates are all but guaranteed the peasant vote, which also guarantees that the patrones will maintain power over the peasants. After a massive earthquake rocks the nation, leaving 10,000 dead and the country in ruins, the people never see the aid sent by foreign countries: “[S]hiploads of medicine, blankets, food, and building material arrived, all of which disappeared in the mysterious labyrinths of various bureaucracies, and were still available for purchase years later.” Instead of distributing the supplies to the suffering and dying people, the nation’s corrupt government intercepts the supplies and sells them for profit.
Resistance to such corruption and oppression—by both the peasant and upper classes—is present within the novel. This resistance is shaped largely by communism (a political and economic theory that promotes class war, publicly owned property, and work and wages based on need and ability) and socialism (a political and economic theory seen as the transitional state between capitalism and communism), ideologies that seek social equality and justice. Early in the novel, as Esteban is establishing himself as a powerful patrón, the country is “waking up,” and the “wave of discontent” that is stirring the people begins to “strike at the heart of that oligarchic society.” There is talk of unions and the minimum wage, and as communism and socialism begin to take hold, the peasants think of revolution and a chance for freedom and equality. At Esteban’s hacienda, a young peasant named Pedro Tercero García begins “talking about justice in Tres Marías.” He befriends outspoken communists and union leaders, and he spreads socialist propaganda around the hacienda through subversive pamphlets and coded songs written on his guitar. Like the rising resistance, Pedro Tercero seeks social justice and equality. Even Esteban’s own son, Jaime, joins the resistance—instead of becoming a conservative politician and landowner like his father, Jaime becomes a doctor who tirelessly serves the poor and talks “of justice, of equality, of the peasant movement and of Socialism.” Despite being of the upper class, Jaime, too, fights for the justice and equality of the lower classes.
Marxist ideas gather strength and popularity, and after several years of resistance, the country’s first Socialist president is elected; however, the corrupt far-right—including Senator Esteban Trueba—engineers a military coup d’état to seize power from the Socialists and return it to the Conservative Party. The Socialist president is murdered, and the military never relinquishes power to the Conservatives. At the conclusion of the novel, the de facto power of the corrupt and violent military continues, and there is no end in sight. As Esteban’s father-in-law, Severo del Valle, notes, politics is “a trade for butchers and bandits,” and corrupt politics are indeed to blame for many of the injustices and inequalities that occur throughout The House of the Spirits.
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Class, Politics, and Corruption Quotes in The House of the Spirits
In vain, Pedro Segundo García and the old priest from the nuns’ hospital tried to suggest to him that it was not little brick houses or pints of milk that made a man a good employer or an honest Christian, but rather giving his workers a decent salary instead of slips of pink paper, a workload that did not grind their bones to dust, and a little respect and dignity. Trueba would not listen to this sort of thing: it smacked, he said, of Communism.
At times Clara would accompany her mother and two or three of her suffragette friends on their visits to factories, where they would stand on soapboxes and make speeches to the women who worked there while the foremen and bosses, snickering and hostile, observed them from a prudent distance. Despite her tender age and complete ignorance of matters of this world, Clara grasped the absurdity of the situation and wrote in her notebook about the contrast of her mother and her friends, in their fur coats and suede boots, speaking of oppression, equality, and rights to a sad, resigned group of hard-working women in denim aprons, their hands red with chilblains.
His house would be the reflection of himself, his family, and the prestige he planned to give the surname that his father had stained. […] He could hardly guess that that solemn, cubic, dense, pompous house, which sat like a hat amid its green and geometric surroundings, would end up full of protuberances and incrustations, of twisted staircases that led to empty spaces, of turrets, of small windows that could not be opened, doors hanging in midair, crooked hallways, and portholes that linked the living quarters so that people could communicate during the siesta, all of which were Clara’s inspiration. Every time a new guest arrived, she would have another room built in another part of the house, and if the spirits told her that there was a hidden treasure or an unburied body in the foundation, she would have a wall knocked down, until the mansion was transformed into an enchanted labyrinth that was impossible to clean and that defied any number of state and city laws.
He was the son of Esteban García, the only bastard offspring of the patrón named for him. No one knew his origin, or the reason he had that name, except himself, because his grandmother, Pancha García, had managed before she died to poison his childhood with the story that if only his father had been born in place of Blanca, Jaime, or Nicolás, he would have inherited Tres Marías, and could even have been President of the Republic if he wanted. In that part of the country, which was littered with illegitimate children and even legitimate ones who had never met their fathers, he was probably the only one to grow up hating his last name. He hated Esteban Trueba, his seduced grandmother, his bastard father, and his own inexorable peasant fate.
It was Pedro Tercero García, who hadn’t wanted to miss his grandfather’s funeral and took advantage of the borrowed cassock to harangue the workers house by house, explaining that the coming elections were their chance to shake off the yoke under which they had always lived. They listened in surprise and confusion. For them, time was measured in seasons, and thought by generations. They were slow and cautious. Only the very young ones, those who had radios and listened to the news, those who sometimes went to town and talked with the union men, were able to follow his train of thought. The others listened to him because he was the hero the owners were after, but they were convinced that he was talking nonsense.
In Trueba’s opinion, the time had arrived for him to come out in defense of the national interest and of the Conservative Party, since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared, adding that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and not only that, had created jobs and a decent life for all his workers and owned the only hacienda with little brick houses. He respected the law, the nation, and tradition, and no one could accuse him of any greater offense than tax evasion.
“You’re a hopeless loser, son,” Trueba would say, sighing. “You have no sense of reality. You’ve never taken stock of how the world really is. You put your faith in utopian values that don’t even exist.”
“Helping one’s neighbor is a value that exists.”
“No. Charity, like Socialism, is an invention of the weak to exploit the strong and bring them to their knees.”
“We’re not interested in a military coup, General,” the head of Embassy intelligence replied in studied Spanish. “We want Marxism to be a colossal failure and for it to fall alone, so we can erase it from the people’s minds throughout the continent. You understand? We’re going to solve this problem with money. We can still buy a few members of Congress so they won’t confirm him as President. It’s in your Constitution: he didn’t get an absolute majority, and Congress has to make the final choice.”
“Get that idea out of your head, mister!” Trueba exclaimed. “You’re not going to bribe anyone around here! The Congress and the armed forces are above corruption. It would be better if we used the money to buy the mass media. That would give us a way to manipulate public opinion, which is the only thing that really counts.”
At first his long democratic experience impeded his ability to set traps for the new government, but he soon gave up the idea of obstructing it by legal means and came to accept the fact that the only way to unseat it was by using illegal ones. He was the first to declare in public that only a military coup could halt the advance of Marxism because people who had anxiously waited fifty years to be in power would not relinquish it because there was a chicken shortage.
Clara also brought the saving idea of writing in her mind, without paper or pencil, to keep her thoughts occupied and to escape from the doghouse and live. She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life, and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of sorrow, ignoring, despite all evidence, that only blocks away from their happy world there were others, these others who live or die on the dark side. “You have a lot to do, so stop feeling sorry for yourself, drink some water, and start writing,” Clara told her granddaughter before disappearing the same way she had come.
[…] I’ve spent a whole month looking for her and I’m going crazy, these are the things that make the junta look so bad abroad and give the United Nations reason to screw around with human rights, at first I didn’t want to hear about the dead, the tortured, and the disappeared, but now I can’t keep thinking they’re just Communist lies, because even the gringos, who were the first to help the military and sent their own pilots to bombard the Presidential Palace, are scandalized by all the killing, it’s not that I’m against repression, I understand that in the beginning you have to be firm if you want a return to order, but things have gotten out of hand […].
“If you want, I’ll tell you my story so you can write it down,” one said. Then they laughed and made jokes, arguing that everybody’s story was the same and that it would be better to write love stories because everyone likes them. They also forced me to eat. They divided up the servings with the strictest sense of justice, each according to her need; they gave me a little more because they said I was just skin and bones and not even the most desperate man would ever look at me. I shuddered, but Ana Diaz reminded me that I was not the only woman who had been raped, and that, along with many other things, it was something I had to forget. The women spent the whole day singing at the top of their lungs. The guards would pound on the wall.
“Shut up, whores!”
“Make us if you can, bastards! Let’s see if you dare!” And they sang even stronger but the guards did not come in, for they had learned that there is no way to avoid the unavoidable.
The day my grandfather tumbled his grandmother, Pancha García, among the rushes of the riverbank, he added another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself. Afterward the grandson of the woman who was raped repeats the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist, and perhaps forty years from now my grandson will knock García’s granddaughter down among the rushes, and so on down through the centuries in an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love.
