SOURCE: Swanson, Philip. “Tyrants and Trash: Sex, Class and Culture in La casa de los espíritus.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 71, no. 2 (April 1994): 217-37.

In the following essay, Swanson examines traditional interpretations of feminism in The House of the Spirits, demonstrating the ways the female characters embrace popular rather than elite culture as a means of challenging political and social structures.

In an article published in Ideologies and Literature, Gabriela Mora gives Isabel Allende a sound drubbing on the grounds that the Chilean author reproposes in her fiction traditional negative female stereotypes and fails to equip her female characters with a serious political consciousness. Mora concludes—having spotted some unacceptable traces of individualism in the form of a few allusions to the idea of destiny—that, behind Allende's superficial revisionism, there lurk “fundamentos más insidiosos que amarran a las gentes a creer en esencias e inmutabilidades.”¹ In...