In addition to class struggle, The House of the Spirits also highlights the struggle of women in patriarchal society. The women of the novel’s unidentified South American country are expected to occupy a very specific role in society during the mid-20th century, and that role rarely leads out of the domestic sphere. Women are expected to be wives, mothers, and caregivers, and their education and upbringing are geared to that end. They are also expected to be obedient and dependent on their fathers, brothers, and husbands. The importance of the patriarchy is reflected in wealthy landowner Esteban Trueba’s desire for legitimate sons to carry his name and the string of ignored “bastards” he leaves in his wake, and it is further mirrored in the disrespectful and abusive way Esteban treats the women in his life. The novel’s women both submit to and resist this patriarchal power, but they are never weak, and they each exert their power and independence in different ways. With her portrayal of women and the patriarchy in The House of the Spirits, Allende lays bare women’s oppression, while also highlighting women’s innate strength and the importance of their relationships with one another.
The oppression of women in The House of the Spirits is most apparent in the extreme violence against women seen throughout most of the novel, which frequently humiliates the women and places them in a subordinate position to men. When Esteban first moves to Tres Marías, his family’s country hacienda (estate), he violently rapes Pancha García, a young peasant girl, with “unnecessary brutality.” Pancha does not fight during the assault. Allende writes, “Before her, her mother—and before her, her grandmother—had suffered the same animal fate.” Violence against women is experienced from generation to generation within their patriarchal society, and Pancha has come to expect it. When Esteban catches his daughter, Blanca, having an affair with Pedro Tercero García, a peasant from Tres Marías, Esteban savagely beats Blanca—and when Blanca’s mother, Clara, objects, Esteban knocks out several of Clara’s teeth. Esteban insists on having complete control over his wife and daughter, even if that requires violence. Lastly, when Esteban’s granddaughter, Alba, is arrested during the military coup d’état at the novel’s climax, she is beaten, tortured, and raped by the military police, especially by Colonel García—the illegitimate grandson of Esteban, who is looking for some added revenge against his absent grandfather. The violent treatment of Alba by the military police is rooted in both her identity as Senator Trueba’s granddaughter and her association with Miguel, a wanted revolutionary, and it highlights how no woman in 20th-century Latin America is safe from oppression and abuse.
Despite the violence and oppression of patriarchal society in The House of the Spirits, the novel’s women each display strength, which highlights the innate power of women. Clara’s mother, Nívea, plasters the town with suffragette posters at night and loudly calls “for women to have equal rights with men, to be allowed to vote and attend the university, and for all children, even bastards, to be granted the full protection of the law.” In short, Nívea advocates for values opposite her patriarchal society’s, a bold move that takes much bravery. After Esteban beats Blanca and knocks out Clara’s teeth, Clara takes Blanca and leaves Tres Marías, returning to their estate— “the big house on the corner”—in the capital. There, Clara changes the lock on her bedroom door and vows never to speak to Esteban again. She dies over seven years later, never once speaking to her husband. Because of her sexist society, there is little recourse or justice for Clara and Blanca, but Clara isn’t exactly powerless, and she makes Esteban pay in the only way she can—by withholding her love and attention. When the country’s first Socialist president is murdered in a military coup d’état, Alba assists in the revolutionary cause by hiding wanted revolutionaries in her grandfather’s massive house until they can safely escape the country. Instead of filling the role of wife and mother, Alba goes to the university and expresses her own political beliefs, which violate both the law and her grandfather’s rules. In this way, Alba resists the oppression of patriarchal society most strongly, despite the danger it poses to her both legally and personally.
Toward the end of the novel, after Alba is finally released from police custody (thanks to the help of Tránsito Soto, a powerful prostitute and another example of a strong woman in the novel), Alba discovers she is pregnant. “I carry this child in my womb,” Alba says, “the daughter of so many rapes or perhaps of Miguel, but above all, my own daughter.” Alba has no way of knowing who the father of her child is, but she implies that this isn’t important. While the sexist nature of her patriarchal society places importance on fathers and sons, for Alba and the strong women who come before her, it is women’s own power and their bonds with each other that matter most.
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Women and the Patriarchy Quotes in The House of the Spirits
“I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too,” she said, full of hatred.
“And I would not have liked to be a woman,” he said.
Esteban did not remove his clothes. He attacked her savagely, thrusting himself into her without preamble, with unnecessary brutality. He realized too late, from the blood spattered on her dress, that the young girl was a virgin, but neither Pancha’s humble origin nor the pressing demands of his desire allowed him to reconsider. Pancha García made no attempt to defend herself. She did not complain, nor did she shut her eyes. She lay on her back, staring at the sky with terror, until she felt the man drop to the ground beside her with a moan. She began to whimper softly. Before her, her mother—and before her, her grandmother—had suffered the same animal fate.
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.
“Father, 1 don’t know how to say this. I think I committed a sin.”
“Of the flesh, my child?”
“My flesh is withered, Father, but not my spirit! The devil is tormenting me.”
“The mercy of the Lord is infinite.”
“You don’t know the thoughts that can run through the mind of a single woman, Father, a virgin who has never been with a man, not for any lack of opportunities but because God sent my mother a protracted illness and I had to be her nurse.”
“That sacrifice is recorded in heaven, my child.”
“Even if I sinned in my thoughts?”
“Well, it depends on your thoughts....”
“I can’t sleep at night. I feel as if I’m choking. I get up and walk around the garden and then I walk inside the house. I go to my sister-in-law’s room and put my ear to her door. Sometimes I tiptoe in and watch her while she sleeps. She looks like an angel. I want to climb into bed with her and feel the warmth of her skin and her gentle breathing.”
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.
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.
He had finally come to accept—beaten into it by the tide of new ideas— that not all women were complete idiots, and he believed that Alba, who was too plain to attract a well-to-do husband, could enter one of the professions and make her living like a man.
When the project was complete, I came up against an unexpected obstacle: I was unable to transfer Rosa to the new tomb because the del Valle family objected. I tried to convince them, using every argument I could think of along with gifts and pressure, even bringing my political power to bear, but it was all in vain. My brothers-in-law were unyielding. I think they must have heard about Nívea’s head and were angry with me for having kept it in the basement all that time. In light of their obstinacy, I called Jaime in and told him to get ready to accompany me to the cemetery to steal Rosa’s body. He didn’t look surprised.
“If they won’t give her to us, we’ll have to take her by force,” I told him.
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.
“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.
