SOURCE: “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” in Feminist Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 369-88.

In the following essay, Foreman provides a feminist reading of the magic realism in works by Isabel Allende and Toni Morrison.

The storyteller takes what [she] tells from experience—[her] own or that reported by others. And [she] in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to [the] tale. … In every case the storyteller is a [wo]man who has counsel for [her] reader. … Today having counsel is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring … because the communicability of experience is decreasing.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations

In the postmodern world of dead authors and destabilized subjects, “experience” resounds like something embarrassingly anti-quated. Nonetheless, repossessing historical experience which “reclaim[s] the past”¹ is Isabel Allende's work, as it is, similarly, Toni Morrison's. In The...