Isabel Allende & Eva Luna: Fictional Reality and the Breaking of Patriarchal Codes

Isabel Allende. Many connotations are associated with this famous name. Some recall the name of her ancestor, Salvador Allende, and his controversial presidency in Chile. Most, however, know her as the Latin American novelist famous for her unique writing style that protests against the patriarchy that has long hindered Hispanic woman from gaining a voice, not only in their own countries, but around the world. Her 1987 novel Eva Luna serves as a semi-autobiography of the author, giving an insightful look into the woman who has revolutionized Latin American literature and feminism.

Isabel Allende was born on 2 August 1942 to Francisca Llona Barros and Tomás Allende, a Chilean diplomat and the first cousin of Salvador Allende (Erro-Peralta). At a very young age, her parents divorced, forcing Allende and her mother to live with her maternal grandparents (Ibid). Growing up in the home of her grandparents Allende benefitted from intellectual freedom as well as access to a large home library (Pinto 23). In an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Allende revealed that her mother was the most important person in her life (Ibid). Although she passed away when Allende was quite young, her grandmother was also influential in her life; she bequeathed to her granddaughter a legacy of great storytelling (Erro-Peralta).

As a child, Allende also extensively travelled the world after her mother remarried to another diplomat (Erro Perralta). At age fifteen she returned to Chile to complete her high school education (Ibid). Then, after graduating at age sixteen, she worked for the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) for the United Nations before discovering her aptitude for journalism (Ibid). While working for a television program, writing children’s stories, producing children’s plays, and editing the successful children’s magazine Mampato, Allende found time to write a column called “Impertinentes” (Impertinences) for Paula, a reformist women’s magazine (Ibid). In 1962, Allende married Miguel Frías- her childhood sweetheart (Pinto 24). They went on to have two children together.

On 11 September 1973, in a military coup d’ état, General Augusto Pinochet took over Chile and established a regime that lasted until 11 March 1990 (Dorfman 1). Days later, Pinochet ordered the Chilean Air Force to bomb La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende resided, completing the coup with the assassination of Chile’s democratically elected president (20). The betrayal involved in this act was atrocious, as President Allende had promoted Pinochet to the position of Commander in Chief of the Army of Chile just nineteen days before on 23 August 1973 (22). During the reign of terror that seized the country, the government used the National Stadium for several months as a concentration camp in a gross transgression against human rights (1-2, 14). There, they interrogated, tortured, and killed more than two thousand Chileans, who came to be known as the desaparecidos (disappeared)—people whom they catured in brutal police raids who were in the least suspected of supporting Salvador Allende or opposing Pinochet’s regime (Ensalaco 19). In many cases, it remains unknown even today why various individuals were executed and others freed after their tortuous incarcerations (73). Frequently, the government disposed of the executed by flying over the ocean to dump the bodies in the sea, or in rivers (74). In the years that followed, unemployment rates reached almost 70 percent, in large part due to Pinochet’s habit of selling profit-producing public enterprises at substandard low prices to private buyers (Dorfman 43-44).

During an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Allende describes her family’s struggles during the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship. “The military coup split my life in half with the blow of a hatchet,” Allende described (26). At first, the Chileans did not fully understand what was going on; neither did they entirely know what a military coup was, or what torture entailed, except in referenced to the Middle Ages or the Inquisition (26-27). Most believed that after a few days, the soldiers would return to their barracks, there would be another election, and democracy would be reinstated; but this was not to be (Allende, Mi Pais 187-88). “I’m not very brave,” Allende admitted, “and after a few months I came to believe that any direct action [against the regime] would mean an enormous risk for me and for my family” (Pinto 26-27). However, according to an article by Nora Erro-Peralta, “Confronted with the repression and violence instituted by the military dictatorship, she joined the efforts of church-sponsored groups in providing food and aid to the needy and families of victims of the regime.” Allende explained to Pinto that she and her husband picked Venezuela for their self-exile because, as a journalist, Allende needed to work in a Spanish-speaking country. Also, Venezuela was the only country under that category where they could easily obtain passports, where the economy was doing well enough that foreigners could obtain jobs, and where no fascist dictatorship dominated (Pinto 27).

When they first moved to Caracas, Venezuela, Isabel Allende suffered from the well-known problem of writer’s block, and so she decided to work for several years as a teacher and then as an administrator (Erro-Peralta). Eventually, she was hired at a leading Venezuelan newspaper, El Nacional, as a reporter and satirical writer. It was not until she heard about the imminent death of her grandfather that she wrote her first novel, which began as a letter, encouraging him to never give up hope for life, and ended as a 500 page novel entitled La casa de los espiritus (Ibid). The novel was initially banned in Chile because of Pinochet’s censorship, and so it was smuggled into the country, sometimes even in diaper bags; later, however, the regime lifted the ban and her books became bestsellers in her native country (Pinto 38-39).

Eventually, Allende and Frías divorced because he was forced to work in another part of Venezuela away from Isabel and the children, causing their marriage to disintegrate (Allende, Mi Pais 195). In 1988 she remarried to an American lawyer named William Gordon. He who is from California, where they now reside (Hunter). Eva Luna and her subsequent novels were written from the United States, but not without considerable influence from her prior residences. Well-known for her talent in interweaving fiction and reality through her writing, critics “single out [Allende] for her dedication to combating the traditionally patriarchal dominance of Latin American history and tradition by attesting to the significant role of that region’s women, and by emphasizing the importance of family relationships, storytelling, memory writing, survival, and the courage to defy and oppose gender and class divisions” (Ibid).

As Barbara Mujica so accurately stated, reading Eva Luna gives “that sensation of peeling an onion.” The episodic novel closely resembles the picaresque genre, while also serving as a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, for the protagonist, Eva Luna (Erro-Peralta). Allende’s writing holds strong emotional appeal, using personal anecdotes to depict the societal and political concerns of Chile as well as other similar countries (Perricone 83). Although her narrative “embodies, contradicts, or transcends the patriarchal system through the characterization of Spanish American men,” she also uses highly romantic male and female relationships in her stories (83-84).

Eva Luna is set in Venezuela, the place of Allende’s exile from Chile, and in many ways serves as a tribute to her place of asylum from Pinochet’s regime (Ruta). Furthermore, “Eva Luna is Allende’s allegorical representation of her acceptance of the condition of her exile and of her profession as a writer of fiction” (Ramblado-Minero 54). Through the novel, she metaphorically analyzes the advances she made as a Latin American female author (64). She even admitted in an interview that it was only through writing the novel that she finally began to accept herself for who she is as a woman (Rodden 79). In an interview with Farhat Iftekharrudin, Allende stated, “I think that in a weird way, Eva Luna is me or I am Eva Luna. She is a storyteller, and she creates herself.” Nora Erro-Peralta explains that Eva Luna “learns the power of words and how to spin tales that first serve as an escape from a life of abject poverty and eventually pave the road to love, fame, and fortune.”
Eva Luna is conceived when, as a treatment, her mother Consuelo, a housekeeper for the elusive embalmer Professor Jones, sleeps with an elderly Indian gardener who is suffering from a snakebite (Hart 164). Making love to the Indian was Consuelo’s first act performed of her own initiative and against the patriarchal society in which she lived (Davies &Jones 70). By naming her daughter Eva without having her take the Indian’s last name, Consuelo ignores the traditional patriarchal code of assuming the father’s surname. When people protest her decision, she allows Eva to take on the name of her father’s tribe (Luna) as her last name (Diamond-Nigh 137-138). Through Eva Luna, Allende depicts aspects of her own childhood growing up with an absent father. “You will never find a loving father in my books,” Allende once stated (Foster 80). Women in her books are strong and know what they want from the beginning, without the help of men (Ibid).

Consuelo dies when Eva Luna is still young, but not before she passes on her legacy of storytelling and fantasy in much the same way as Allende’s grandmother. To explain her love for the sea, Consuelo invented a story that she was the daughter of a Dutch sailor when, in reality, missionaries found her on the floor of a forest and brought her to live in a convent (Lang 116). According to Susan de Carvalho, “Eva Luna learns from her mother to fantacize, to use her own private world as an escape, a space in which she has the power to create and control her own reality” (77). Similarly, according to Linda Gould Levine in her article Weaving Life into Fiction, “[Allende’s] unbridled imagination and sense of dramatic exaggeration continually refashion real-life experiences and events, even her own, perhaps because like her character, Eva Luna, she tries to live her life as she ‘would like it be, as in a novel’” (2).

After the death of her mother, Eva is left in the charge of the household cook until the death of their benefactor, Professor Jones, forces them to find another home. Eva finds employment at age seven with an old maid and a bachelor who are brother and sister; one day, however, finally weary of the woman’s constant nagging and the man’s sexual advances, Eva flees the home under the pretense of shopping at the market. Now homeless and on the streets, Eva meets a boy named Huberto Naranjo, who teaches her the art of pick-pocketing as well as other means of survival. Eventually, Eva decides to return to her previous employers because of the assurance of food and shelter that she has there. This time, she charms the cook, Elvira, with her story-telling abilities, becoming like her granddaughter. Later, Eva is fired, and moves around for a time, working a variety of jobs. In a particularly interesting episode, she works for a minister who, each night in his bedroom, relieves himself in a felt-covered chair with a chamber pot in the seat. Her job is to clean up his mess each morning. Ultimately fed up with his laziness and the stench of her duty, one morning Eva dumps the contents of the chamber-pot over the man’s head before fleeing the house forever.

At the end of her resources, she searches the city for her old friend who helped her in her time of distress several years earlier—Huberto Naranjo. He takes her to the proprietor of a brothel, la Señora, telling her that Eva is his sister and an excellent storyteller who should be used only for this purpose. There, Eva meets a transvestite named Melecio, and they become close friends. During her stay at the brothel, Eva begins her education. When police shut-down the brothel, Eva is forced onto the streets once more. A Turkish merchant then takes her to his home in the jungle to care for his sickly wife, where he sexually abuses Eva and then later accuses her of murder when his wife commits suicide. After staying in jail until she is proven innocent, Eva once again meets Melecio, who has undergone extensive surgery to be converted into a woman, and who is now called Mimi. Eva continues her education while simultaneously working in a factory. Her renewed friendship with the now guerrilla commander, Huberto Naranjo, sparks into romance for a while until he tells her that he is fighting a “man’s war” in which she cannot participate.
After rejecting sexual advances from another factory worker, Eva leaves and begins a new job script- writing for television soap operas. When Huberto Naranjo and other guerrilla soldiers are imprisoned, Eva aids them in their escape, and then carefully weaves her experiences into her television scripts. She soon meets a German photo-journalist named Rolf Carlé (whose story has been told in third person intermittently throughout Eva Luna’s first person narrative) who has fled his country to escape the shame he feels because of his father’s participation in the Nazi atrocities of World War II. A romance ignites between the two that takes reader through the remaining episodes of the novel.

Eva Luna and Isabel Allende are comparable on many levels. First of all, they both tell stories to survive. Similarly to Eva, when her daughter Paula contracted an fatal disease, Allende told stories in the hospital in exchange for food (Ramblado-Minero 66). Next, Allende’s exile from Chile to Venezuela is comparable to the episode in which, after finally finding a home of equality and acceptance, Eva is forced to leave the brothel ad her friends there and live in the jungle. The police who raid the brothel represent the Armed Forces of Chile who took over Chile as part of Pinochet’s regime took (67).

Later, Eva is unable to voice her support of Huberto Narjanjo and the guerrilla forces because of the repression of free speech; however, she uses her storytelling capabilities to write her opinions into her scripts in such a way that she cannot be indicted. Similarly, although in large part because Isabel Allende was related to the assassinated President Salvador Allende but also because of Pinochet’s regime, she was unable to voice her sympathies through journalism without jeopardizing her safety. It was not until she began writing novels that she truly began to speak out against the atrocities in Pinochet’s regime. Allende displays the impact her exile to Venezuela had on her life through her novel, as Eva Luna is constantly seeking a home and a job in which she can freely develop her own personal identity as a Latin American woman and storyteller. Eva Luna writes similarly to Allende, too. As María de la Cinta Ramblado-Minero writes, “For Eva, the first writing experience is an exercise of memory, in which she recollects her mother’s legacy and her own experiences in order to manipulate them according to her own will” (70). Likewise, in an interview, Allende stated that “A novel is made up partly of truth and partly of fantasy. The author uses something of experience and knowledge and something of his or her own angels and demons to create a personal vision of life…Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality” (Agosin 48). Allende’s writing is a remembrance of her past, but with a spin— she rewrites the history of her novels to contradict the standard patriarchy through strong protagonists like Eva Luna.

In Eva Luna, after receiving an education, the protagonist is opened up to many opportunities that did not previously exist. The same is true of Allende and other Latin American women. Studies show that, in Latin American coutries, education and socioeconomic status directly correlate in Latin American countries to political involvement among women (Aviel 157). Furthermore, most Latin America women work until they are married, and afterwards only ten percent continue their jobs, which amounts to a thirteen percent total of active women in the Latin American workforce as a whole (158). The majority of Latin American countries did not grant women suffrage until after World War II; but even though they now have the right to vote, most women do not participate in elections unless education opens their eyes to civic duty (158). Even then, Chilean women vote separately from men, who frequently influence the way in which they vote (159). Additionally, because their patriarchal society considers motherhood to be the sole responsibility of the females, “the most important problem for [Chilean] women was their economic situation and the second most important problem was marriage” (160). Without this basic understanding of the role of the family in the lives of Latin American women, it is impossible to understand the struggles they have overcome to gain a voice. In 1968, official surveys revealed that more than 84 percent of Chilean women did not participate in organizations, such as the one Isabel Allende’s aided during the early months of Pinochet’s rule (161). Allende worked to make changes in the patriarchy and to create awareness of the plight of marginalized Latin American women, but she did so alone, without joining a larger radical organization.

In conclusion, through her novels Isabel Allende not only reveals many aspects of her personal life and the difficult events of her past, but she also works against the traditional Latin American patriarchal codes to pave new for Latin American women. However, it seems that her ultimate goal in writing is equality without marginalization in “a more just and free society”, as she explains that feminism is not a war against men, but a joint effort of the genders to create such a world (Pinto, “Chile’s” 73). As María de la Cinta Ramblado-Minero writes, “In Eva Luna, the social worries of the author are represented in the main character, a servant’s illegitimate child who will prosper in life through her own work, but with her social origin ever present” (145). Allende, likewise, is constantly dogged by critics who distrust the work of Latin American women, but she continues to write her stories, winning over thousands of readers of multiple tongues.

Works Cited

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--- Mi Pais Inventado. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Print.

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--- Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Trans. Trudy Balch and Magdalena G. Pinto. Austin: University of Texas, 1991. Print.

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