Isabel Allende's Early Novels: Women's Work in the Home and Mother-Daughter Relationships

The sexed ideology that women are designed for a life of cooking, caring, chores, and children maintains an intransigent position in the mindsets of the male characters in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows. Seemingly an unchanging characteristic of civilization, the work that women do in the home constitutes an aspect of patriarchal oppression. The dominant attitudes underpinning the sexual division of labor foreground a self-effacing image of femininity that divests women of social confidence. This thesis traces the author’s representations of women’s work in the home, hoping to gain understanding of the system of power that pressures women into the wife-mother role. In The House of the Spirits, the unyielding heroines actively contest the domestic work allocated to them, expunging from within the prevailing image of a meek homemaker. In light of how the repetitive and fatiguing nature of domestic labor suffocates creativity, it is no wonder that magic should find its way into the tenacious mothers and daughters that employ strategies to deal with household chores. In Of Love and Shadows, the daughters decide their own destinies by not modeling themselves after their mothers, who prize domestic services in exchange for male approbation. Drawing upon feminist criticism, I argue that the mothers and daughters in Allende’s two novels have enacted the dissolution of patriarchal control by wrestling with the oppression in the home.Table of Contents Abstract v Abbreviations vi Acknowledgements vii Foreword 1 Chapter One 4 Women’s Work in the Home and Patriarchal Oppression Chapter Two 22 The Magical Matrilineage in The House of the Spirits Chapter Three 55 Daughters’ Destinies in Of Love and Shadows Afterword 87 Works Cited 9