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Critical Essay by P. Gabrielle Foreman
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...
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This section contains 7,904 words (approx. 27 pages at 300 words per page) |
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