Writing
The House of the Spirits begins and ends
with the narrators referring explicitly to her use of Clara’s journals
in order to write the story at hand. Of course, the words of this
narrator were written by Isabel Allende. Allusions to Clara’s writing
pervade the novel. Special attention is given to the ways in which
each woman learns to write, and the moments when writing acquires
meaning in her life. Both Clara and Alba first learn how to write
and then learn how to use writing. Writing serves as testimony both
on a personal and on a political level, bearing witness to events
for the purpose of broadcasting them to a wider audience that may
be able to learn from or even remedy the events testified to. On
the personal level, Alba and other family members are able to piece
together their “true” family history based on Clara’s writings;
on the political level, Alba is able to testify to the abuses of
power of the military regime through her writing. Alba’s writing
is also a metaphor for Isabel Allende’s writing of The House
of the Spirits as a testimony to events that took place
in her native Chile during her lifetime.
Fate
Chance or strange twists of fate recur repeatedly in The
House of the Spirits. These are thematized in Clara’s clairvoyance,
which allows her to understand people’s fates and to predict the
future. They also structure the plot, which revolves around the
encounters and reencounters of members of the del Valle-Trueba family
and the Garcia family with each other and with their natural and
political environment. Each of the romantic couples in the novel
meets seemingly by chance at a young age and years later realizes
that things were meant to be. Just as loves return and persist through
a strange combination of chance and design, so do other connections,
such as friendships and debts. Although Clara must come to realize
that she can predict but not change the future, fate is not an entirely
arbitrary experience in The House of the Spirits.
Rather, each character’s fate is the result of all of their actions,
great and small, just as the country’s fate is determined by the
particular combination of political influences that those characters
exert.
