Analysis of Major Characters

Emma Bovary

In Emma Bovary, Flaubert uses irony to criticize romanticism and to investigate the relation of beauty to corruption and of fate to free will. Emma embarks directly down a path to moral and financial ruin over the course of the novel. She is very beautiful, as we can tell by the way several men fall in love with her, but she is morally corrupt and unable to accept and appreciate the realities of her life. Since her girlhood in a convent, she has read romantic novels that feed her discontent with her ordinary life. She dreams of the purest, most impossible forms of love and wealth, ignoring whatever beauty is present in the world around her. Flaubert once said, “Madame Bovary is me,” and many scholars believe that he was referring to a weakness he shared with his character for romance, sentimental flights of fancy, and melancholy. Flaubert, however, approaches romanticism with self-conscious irony, pointing out its flaws even as he is tempted by it. Emma, on the other hand, never recognizes that her desires are unreasonable. She rails emotionally against the society that, from her perspective, makes them impossible for her to achieve.

Emma’s failure is not completely her own. Her character demonstrates the many ways in which circumstance—rather than free will—determined the position of women in the nineteenth century. If Emma were as rich as her lover, Rodolphe, for instance, she would be free to indulge the lifestyle she imagines. Flaubert suggests at times that her dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society she lives in is justified. For example, the author includes details that seem to ridicule Homais’s pompous speechmaking or Charles’s boorish table manners. These details indicate that Emma’s plight is emblematic of the difficulties of any sensitive person trapped among the French bourgeoisie. But Emma’s inability to accept her situation and her attempt to escape it through adultery and deception constitute moral errors. These mistakes bring about her ruin and, in the process, cause harm to innocent people around her. For example, though dim-witted and unable to recognize his wife’s true character, Charles loves Emma, and she deceives him. Similarly, little Berthe is but an innocent child in need of her mother’s care and love, but Emma is cold to her, and Berthe ends up working in a cotton mill because of Emma’s selfish spending and suicide, and because of Charles’s resulting death.

We can see that Emma’s role as a woman may have an even greater effect on the course of her life than her social status does. Emma is frequently portrayed as the object of a man’s gaze: her husband’s, Rodolphe’s, Leon’s, Justin’s—even Flaubert’s, since the whole novel is essentially a description of how he sees Emma. Moreover, Emma’s only power over the men in her life is sexual. Near the end of her life, when she searches desperately for money, she has to ask men for it, and the only thing she can use to persuade them to give it to her is sex. Emma’s prostitution is the result of her self-destructive spending, but the fact that, as a woman, she has no other means of finding money is a result of the misogynistic society in which she lives.

Charles Bovary

Charles represents both the society and the personal characteristics that Emma detests. He is incompetent, stupid, and unimaginative. In one of the novel’s most revelatory moments, Charles looks into Emma’s eyes and sees not her soul but rather his own image, reflected in miniature. Charles’s perception of his own reflection is not narcissistic but merely a simple,

direct sensation, unmediated by romantic notions. The moment demonstrates his inability to imagine an idealized version of the world or find mystic qualities in the world’s physical aspects. Instead, he views life literally and never imbues what he sees with romantic import. Thus it is the physical aspects of Emma that delight Charles. When the narrative focuses on his point of view, we see every detail of her dress, her skin, and her hair. When it comes to her aspirations and depressions, however, Charles is at a loss. He nods and smiles dumbly as Emma conducts the same sorts of conversations with him that she does with her dog. Charles is too stupid to manage his money well or to see through Emma’s obvious lies, and he is a frighteningly incompetent doctor. In one scene, as he goes to repair Rouault’s leg, we learn that he is trying desperately to “call to mind all the fractures he [knows].” His operation on Hippolyte’s clubfoot, while it is not his idea, is a complete failure. Charles is more than merely incompetent, however. He is physically repulsive, though it’s hard to tell from Flaubert’s descriptions whether he is actually an ugly man or whether he appears disgusting only through Emma’s eyes.

Despite his unimaginative nature, Charles is one of the novel’s most moral and sincere characters. He truly loves Emma, forgiving her even when he finally recognizes her infidelities. He does everything he can to save her when she is ill, and he gives her the benefit of the doubt whenever her lies seem to fail her. Literal-minded, humble, free of temptations, and without aspirations, Charles is Emma’s opposite. While she possesses some beauty, sensitivity, and intelligence despite her moral corruption, Charles remains good-hearted despite his boorishness and stupidity.

Monsieur Homais

Although Homais is not central to the plot of Madame Bovary, he is an absolutely essential part of its atmosphere. He is a pompous speechmaker, endlessly rattling on about medical techniques and theories that he really knows nothing about. His presence serves, in part, to heighten our sense of Emma’s frustration with her life. Flaubert relates Homais’s speeches in full, forcing us to read them just as Emma is forced to listen to them. Homais is also an extremely selfish man. When the Bovarys first arrive in Yonville, we learn that he is only befriending Charles because he wants Charles to turn a blind eye to his disreputable medical practices.

In the last sentence of the book, Homais receives the Legion of Honor, a medal he has always dreamed of attaining, after Emma and Charles are both dead. Meanwhile, Charles—who loved his wife as deeply as he was capable—and Emma—who yearned to live an exceptional life—are both punished. By rewarding Homais, Flaubert does not advocate his kind of life. Instead, he shows us a realistic portrayal of one of the most disappointing aspects of the world—that the mediocre and the selfish often fare better than either those who live passionately and try to be exceptional or those who live humbly and treat others with kind generosity.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Inadequacy of Language

Madame Bovary explores the possibility that the written word fails to capture even a small part of the depth of a human life. Flaubert uses a variety of techniques to show how language is often an inadequate medium for expressing emotions and ideas. The characters’ frequent inability to communicate with each other is emblematic of the fact that words do not perfectly describe what they signify. In the first chapter, for example, Charles’s teacher thinks he says his name is “Charbovari.” He fails to make his own name understood. This inadequacy of speech is something Emma will encounter again and again as she tries to make her distress known to the priest or to express her love to Rodolphe. It is also present when Charles reads the letter from Rodolphe and misinterprets it as a note of platonic affection.

The lies that fill Madame Bovary contribute to the sense of language’s inadequacy in the novel, and to the notion that words may be more effective for the purposes of obscuring the truth or conveying its opposite, than for representing the truth itself. Emma’s life is described as “a tissue of lies.” She invents story after story to prevent her husband from discovering her affairs. Similarly, Rodolphe tells so many lies about his love for Emma that he assumes her words are also insincere. Flaubert points out that by lying the lovers make it impossible for words ever to touch at the truth in things.

The strong sense of the inadequacy of language is in part a reaction against the school of realism. Although Flaubert was in some senses a realist, he also believed it was wrong to claim that realism provided a more accurate picture of life than romanticism. He deploys ironic romantic descriptions to establish a tension between various characters’ experience of events and the real aspects of life. By combining ironic romanticism and literal realistic narration, Flaubert captures his characters and their struggles mormore fully than a strictly literal or a wholesale romantic style would allow.

The Powerlessness of Women

Emma Bovary’s hope that her baby will be a man because “a woman is always hampered” is just one of the many instances in the novel in which Flaubert demonstrates an intimate understanding of the plight of women in his time. We see throughout Madame Bovary how Emma’s male companions possess the power to change her life for better or worse—a power that she herself lacks. Even Charles contributes to Emma’s powerlessness. His laziness prevents him from becoming a good doctor, and his incompetence prevents him from advancing into a higher social stratum that might satisfy Emma’s yearnings. As a result, Emma is stuck in a country town without much money. Rodolphe, who possesses the financial power to whisk Emma away from her life, abandons her, and, as a woman, she is incapable of fleeing on her own. Leon at first seems similar to Emma. Both are discontented with country life, and both dream of bigger and better things. But because Leon is a man, he has the power to actually fulfill his dream of moving to the city, whereas Emma must stay in Yonville, shackled to a husband and child.

Ultimately, however, the novel’s moral structure requires that Emma assume responsibility for her own actions. She can’t blame everything on the men around her. She freely chooses to be unfaithful to Charles, and her infidelities wound him fatally in the end. On the other hand, in Emma’s situation, the only two choices she has are to take lovers or to remain faithful in a dull marriage. Once she has married Charles, the choice to commit adultery is Emma’s only means of exercising power over her own destiny. While men have access to wealth and

property, the only currency Emma possesses to influence others is her body, a form of capital she can trade only in secret with the price of shame and the added expense of deception. When she pleads desperately for money to pay her debts, men offer the money in return for sexual favors. Eventually, she tries to win back Rodolphe as a lover if he will pay her debts. Even her final act of suicide is made possible by a transaction funded with her physical charms, which are dispensed toward Justin, who allows Emma access to the cupboard where the arsenic is kept. Even to take her own life, she must resort to sexual power, using Justin’s love for her to convince him to do what she wants.

The Failures of the Bourgeoisie

Emma’s disappointments stem in great part from her dissatisfaction with the world of the French bourgeoisie. She aspires to have taste that is more refined and sophisticated than that of her class. This frustration reflects a rising social and historical trend of the last half of the nineteenth century. At the time Flaubert was writing, the word “bourgeois” referred to the middle class: people who lacked the independent wealth and ancestry of the nobility, but whose professions did not require them to perform physical labor to earn their living. Their tastes were characterized as gaudily materialistic. They indulged themselves as their means allowed, but without discrimination. The mediocrity of the bourgeoisie was frustrating to -Flaubert, and he used Emma Bovary’s disgust with her class as a way of conveying his own hatred for the middle class. Madame Bovary shows how ridiculous, stifling, and potentially harmful the attitudes and trappings of the bourgeoisie can be. In the pharmacist Homais’s long-winded, know-it-all speeches, Flaubert mocks the bourgeois class’s pretensions to knowledge and learning and its faith in the power of technologies that it doesn’t completely understand. But Homais is not just funny; he is also dangerous. When he urges Charles to try a new medical procedure on Hippolyte, the patient acquires gangrene and then loses his leg. Homais does even greater damage when he attempts to treat Emma for her poisoning. He tries to show off by analyzing the poison and coming up with an antidote. Later, a doctor will tell him that he should have simply stuck a finger down Emma’s throat to save her life.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Death and Illness

There are many disturbing references to death and illness in Madame Bovary, and the novel can seem very morbid. These references emphasize Flaubert’s realistic, unflinching description of the world, and also act as physical manifestations of Emma’s moral decay. For example, Lestiboudois grows potatoes in the graveyard because the decomposing bodies help them grow, and Homais keeps fetuses in jars. Similarly, Hippolyte loses his leg to gangrene, the blind beggar with festering skin follows the carriage to and from Rouen, and, when Emma faints in Part Two, Chapter XIII, Homais wakes her up with smelling salts, saying, “this thing would resuscitate a corpse!” Such excessive corruption is a comment on the physical state of the world. Flaubert constantly reminds us that death and decay lurk beneath the surface of everyday life, and that innocence is often coupled very closely with corruption. This focus on the negative aspects of life is part of Flaubert’s realism.

Windows

Windows are frequently associated with Emma. We often see her looking out of them, or we glimpse her through them from the street as she waves goodbye to Charles or Leon. For Emma, these windows represent the possibility of escape. A shutter bangs open to announce her engagement, and she contemplates jumping out the attic window to commit suicide. But Emma never manages to really escape. She stays inside the window, looking out at the world and imagining a freedom that she never can obtain. Windows also serve to take Emma back to the past. At the ball, when the servant breaks the window and Emma sees the peasants outside, she is suddenly reminded of her simple childhood. Such a retreat to childhood also could be a kind of escape for Emma, who would surely be much happier if she stopped striving to escape that simple life. But, again, she ignores the possibility of escape, trapping herself within her own desires for romantic ideals of wealth she can’t obtain.

Eating

The quantity of food consumed in Madame Bovary could feed an army for a week. From Emma’s wedding feast to the Bovarys’ daily dinner, Flaubert’s characters are frequently eating, and the way they eat reveals important character traits. Charles’s atrocious table manners, magnified through Emma’s disgust, reveal him to be boorish and lacking in sophistication. When Emma is shown sucking her fingers or licking out the bottom of a glass, we see a base animal sensuality and a lust for physical satisfaction in her that all her pretensions to refinement cannot conceal. Finally, when Emma goes to the ball, the exquisite table manners of the nobles and the fine foods they consume signify the refinement and sophistication of their class. In each of these cases, what one eats or how one eats is an indicator of social class.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Blind Beggar

A picture of physical decay, the blind beggar who follows the carriage in which Emma rides to meet Leon also symbolizes Emma’s moral corruption. He sings songs about “birds and sunshine and green leaves” in a voice “like an inarticulate lament of some vague despair.” This coupling of innocence with disease relates to the combination of beauty and corruption that Emma herself has become. While her words, appearance, and fantasies are those of an innocent and beautiful wife, her spirit becomes foul and corrupt as she indulges herself in adulterous temptations and the deceptions required to maintain her illicit affairs. Later, when Emma dies, the blind man gets to the end of his song about a young girl dreaming. We then discover that what we thought was a song about an innocent woman is actually a bawdy, sexual song. This progression from innocence to sexual degradation mirrors the path of Emma’s life.

Dried Flowers

When Emma comes home with Charles, she notices his dead wife’s wedding bouquet in the bedroom and wonders what will happen to her own bouquet when she dies. Later, when they move to Yonville, she burns her own bouquet as a gesture of defiance against her unhappy

marriage. The dried bouquet stands for disappointed hopes, and for the new promise of a wedding day turned sour and old. In another sense, Emma’s burning of her bouquet foreshadows the way her desires will consume her youth and, eventually, her life.

The Lathe

Binet’s habit of making useless napkin rings on his lathe is a symbol with several meanings. First, it represents the useless, nonproductive, ornamental character of bourgeois tastes. Second, it represents something more ominous—the monotony of the life that traps Emma. In the scene in which she contemplates throwing herself out the window, Emma hears the sound of the lathe calling her to suicide. Finally, the lathe represents the craftsman repeatedly making a simple, uniform work of art. Flaubert once compared himself as a writer to a craftsman working on a lathe.

narrator  · In the first chapter, Charles’s classmates narrate as a first-person plural “we.” It is unclear whether one person or the whole class is speaking. For the rest of the novel, an omniscient third-person narrator tells the story. Although the narrator appears to be objective, he often makes his opinion felt, especially regarding the ridiculous attempts of his characters’ efforts to appear sophisticated.

point of view  · The first chapter is told from the perspective of one or all of Charles Bovary’s schoolfellows. After that, we see the world through Charles’s eyes momentarily before being introduced to Emma. The bulk of the novel recounts events as she experiences them, though always in the third person and sometimes giving us a brief glimpse into someone else’s mind. Despite the fact that the narrator limits most of his attention to Emma, however, there is a fairly even mix of objective observations of her behavior and subjective accounts of her thoughts and feelings. Flaubert also often uses free indirect discourse, the narrative integration of thoughts and feelings without quotation marks or attribution, to show what his characters are thinking. After Emma’s death, the narration is mostly objective.

tone · Flaubert’s attitude toward his story and his heroine is evenly divided between sympathy and ironic contempt. We know that he identified strongly with his heroine because he once said “Madame Bovary is me.” His sympathy for her is evident in the way he describes her passions and the circumstances that conspire against her. He is also, however, very much aware of how ridiculous attempts at sophistication by members of the bourgeoisie can be, and he portrays many of his characters as foolish, ridiculous and grotesque.

The House of the Spirits Summary

The House of the Spirits opens with the del Valle family gathered together in church on Holy Thursday. Father Restrepo pronounces young Clara possessed by the devil. The body and possessions of Uncle Marcos are dropped off at the del Valle household, and Clara takes Barrabas, Uncle Marcos's dog, as her own. Esteban Trueba wins Rosa's hand, but before they can be married, she is poisoned to death by accident in place of Severo. After witnessing Rosa's autopsy, Clara resolves not to speak for nine years.

The story shifts to Esteban's family life. His sister, Férula, is sacrificing her youth to care for their ailing mother, Doña Ester. After spending many months mining, Esteban decides to raise the old family hacienda, Tres Marias, out of ruin. He succeeds in restoring the estate to its former glory, but is unfair to his peasant employees and rapes their young women, including Pancha García, who becomes pregnant with the first of many illegitimate children whom Esteban refuses to acknowledge. Esteban has his first tryst with the prostitute Transito Soto at a brothel called the Red Lantern. He lends her fifty pesos to travel to the capital and make a better life for herself.

Clara spends most of her childhood in silence, accompanying her mother on her suffragette missions throughout the city. On her nineteenth birthday Clara finally speaks. She announces that she will soon be married to Esteban Trueba. He arrives shortly after to ask for Clara's hand, and she accepts. Barrabas dies from a butcher knife to the back during Clara and Esteban's engagement party. After their wedding, Esteban builds their mansion, which comes to be known as "the big house on the corner," and Férula moves in with them. Soon, Clara announces that she is pregnant with a girl named Blanca. Blanca is considered "the first normal person in generations" in the Trueba family because she is not inclined to communicate with spirits. From the family's first visit to Tres Marias, she develops an unshakeable bond with Pedro Tercero García. Esteban heartily disapproves of their friendship, especially when Pedro Tercero begins circulating revolutionary propaganda among the peasants. When Clara sinks into one of her long silences, it becomes evident that she is pregnant again. Right before the twins, Jaime and Nícolas, are born, Nívea and Severo del Valle are killed in a car accident. Clara enlists Férula's help to locate her mother's missing head, which they have to hide in a hat box because the rest of the body is already in the ground. Clara happily resigns herself to living in the spiritual world. Droves of those similarly inclined, including the Mora sisters, join her in her endeavors at "the big house on the corner." Because of her involvement in the spiritual world, Clara does not play a big role in raising her sons. Férula is so passionate about Clara that one day she gives into temptation and curls up in bed with her. When Esteban discovers her there, he banishes his sister from the household, although he continues to send her money through a priest. The Truebas discover that Férula has died when her ghost visits the household to bid farewell to Clara. Clara and Esteban go to collect her body and find that she has been living like a peasant woman, never using the money Esteban sent her.

At Tres Marias, Blanca and Pedro Tercero make love for the first time. They must meet even more secretly when Esteban banishes him from the property for trying to arouse a revolutionary spirit among the peasants. When a great earthquake hits, Esteban is crushed beneath the rubble of the main house, but Old Pedro García manages to heal all of his broken bones. As Esteban recovers, he befriends Count Jean de Satigny. After their experimental

chinchilla business fails, Jean becomes enamored of Blanca, who is not interested in him because she loves Pedro Tercero. Jean follows Blanca to the riverbank one night, where he witnesses her affair with Pedro Tercero. When he tells Esteban, the patrón lashes Blanca and knocks out several of Clara's teeth. Mother and daughter leave Tres Marias and move back to "the big house on the corner." Clara resolves never to speak to Esteban again. Back on the hacienda, little Esteban García betrays Pedro Tercero's whereabouts to Esteban Trueba. Grandfather and illegitimate grandson travel to the fugitive's hiding place, where Esteban Trueba tries to kill Pedro Tercero but succeeds only in cutting off several of his fingers. When the Estebans return to Tres Marias, the older slaps the younger for being a traitor and denies him his promised reward.

Back at the house, it becomes evident that Blanca is pregnant. To cover the scandal, Esteban Trueba forces her to marry Jean de Satigny. Meanwhile, Nícolas has a girlfriend named Amanda, whom his studious brother Jaime secretly loves. After Nícolas begs him, Jaime performs an abortion on Amanda and then cares for her. Blanca and Jean move to a faraway mansion, where she is completely bored but glad that he does not want to have sex with her. Jean occupies himself by spending lavish amounts of money, trafficking Indian artifacts through the house, and spending time in his locked photography studio. After she begins hallucinating, Blanca breaks into Jean's studio and finds that he has been taking kinky photographs of their Indian servants, and may be having a gay relationship with one of them. Just then she goes into labor, but refuses to give birth in the mansion and instead makes the long journey back to "the big house on the corner." As soon as she arrives, she gives birth to Alba, who has Rosa's dark green hair and is supposedly born under the most fortuitous astrological conditions. She has no formal education, but is extremely smart and raised well by all the members of the family. Despite himself, Esteban Trueba has a soft spot for his granddaughter. Alba is raised without a father, and is told that hers was a great count who died in the desert. She meets Pedro Tercero García and spends time with him regularly, but is not told he is her real father. During one of Esteban Trueba and Alba's special visits to Tres Marias, Esteban García comes to the main house to ask the patron for permission and enough money to become a police officer. Remembering how he cheated him out of his reward as a child, Esteban grants him this, not knowing that he has molested Alba moments before.

Back at "the big house on the corner," Clara decides that she has fulfilled her life's purpose and resolves to die. She passes away on Alba's seventh birthday, holding the unafraid little girl's hand. Esteban misses Clara dearly. He commissions a mausoleum where he will be buried alongside Clara and Rosa, and gets Jaime to help him exhume the latter's remains for that purpose. So begins a period of decline in the family's history. In Clara's absence, the house goes slowly to ruin. Nícolas's strange mind-over-matter ways culminate in his staging a protest against his own father outside the gates of Congress. Esteban exiles him from the country, but gives him enough money to support himself. Nícolas ends up gaining a respectful following in North America. Esteban Trueba visits the Christopher Columbus brothel, where he again sleeps with Transito Soto. Afterwards, she consoles him while he weeps with grief for Clara. At the university, Alba falls in love with Miguel, who has become a leftist student leader. She takes part in a revolutionary encampment with him, but is forced to leave by an unusually heavy and painful menstrual flow. Soon after, Alba enlists Jaime to help his old love, Amanda, who has become the victim of a terrible narcotics addiction.

In a massive political upset, the Socialists win the presidency. As part of the country's restructuring, Tres Marias is taken away from Esteban Trueba. Unwilling to comply, he drives to the hacienda where he is taken hostage by his former employees. Blanca enlists the

help of Pedro Tercero, now a government official, to save her father. In the process, Alba discovers that Pedro Tercero is her real father. Back at the house, Luisa Mora arrives to predict great calamity, but Esteban angrily dismisses her. Yet her predictions are correct; there is a coup by the political right, and the Terror begins. While Esteban celebrates with champagne, Jaime is captured and tortured for being friends with the Socialist President. When he refuses to say that the President committed suicide, he is shot and his body dynamited. In the same bloodbath, Amanda gives her life to protect Miguel. Soon it becomes clear that the military is forming its own destructive dictatorship instead of handing power over to the right as planned. Esteban Trueba realizes he has made a mistake and weeps for his country. All the while, Blanca has been hiding Pedro Tercero in a room of the house. She begs her father to save him. Esteban Trueba secures Pedro Tercero and Blanca's escape to Canada, and is finally reconciled with them both. One night, the police storm "the big house on the corner" and burn all the family's belongings. Then they kidnap Alba and take her to Esteban García, who rapes and tortures her almost to death. When Alba is on the brink of death in an isolation chamber called the "doghouse," Clara's spirit arrives and encourages her to live by writing in her mind. Alba pulls through by using her imagination. With the help of Transito Soto, Esteban García is able to save Alba and she returns to him at the house. In the epilogue, we discover that Alba has been narrating the story all along. She pieced it together from Esteban's memories and Clara's "notebooks that bore witness to life." As the novel ends, Alba stands on a new dawn for the Trueba family, pregnant with a daughter whom she will love and nurture in the tradition handed down to her from her great grandmother, Nívea del Valle.

MAJOR CHARACTERS

Clara

Clara is barely aware of the material world. She is most interested in communicating with spirits and only pays attention to mundane details such as domestic chores in times of extreme necessity. Clara is often described as floating through the world. At times, this refers to her literally levitating, at others it shows the way she is able to ignore much of what she does not want to deal with. Clara's temper is extremely calm. She inspires great respect and devotion in all those who meet her, from Esteban to his sister Ferula to his foreman Pedro Segundo. Although she can see it in advance, Clara never fights her destiny. She is not, however, passive. When she faces a situation that she does not like, she proceeds to change it in quiet, subtle ways, such as adding little rooms to the big house on the corner bit by bit until, although it looks the same on the outside and is completely transformed. Clara's character changes very little as she grows from a young girl to an old woman.

Blanca

Blanca is very close to her mother and very distant from her father. She is raised by Clara and Ferula together and quickly devises illnesses that get her returned home when she is sent away to school. Unlike her mother, Blanca is quite practical. After her divorce from Jean de Satigny, and even more so after Clara's death, Blanca runs the big house on the corner. Like both of her parents, Blanca is incredibly stubborn. Even while she runs his house, she never asks for a cent from her father, instead supporting herself through her ceramics.

Blanca's character is defined primarily by her love for Pedro Tercero. However, she is not simply attached to him. In fact, for most of the novel she is separated from Pedro Tercero as

much by her own choice as by outside circumstance. It is precisely the idea of her love for Pedro Tercero that defines Blanca more than any actual relationship the two may have.

Alba

Alba is defined primarily through the affects she has on those around her and through her reactions to their actions. It is in fact in reaction to her detention, torture, and rape at the hands of Esteban Garcia that she convinces her grandfather to help her write the story of their family in order to, as she puts it, "reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own."

Esteban Trueba

Esteban is obsessive, violent, and materialistic. He devotes his life to his business and political careers, determined first to become rich and then to become powerful. He owes much of his success to the labor of the peasants at Tres Marias, but he never treats them with respect or equality. From the time he becomes engaged to Clara through the end of his life, Esteban is passionately in love with her. His love for her is so strong it is like an obsession. It is not, however, enough to curb his temper, even toward her. Esteban achieves his material goals but is not able to be close to anyone except his granddaughter Alba. As he ages, Esteban begins to see the negative outcomes of his violent, selfish actions and becomes increasingly aware of how lonely he is.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes

The Struggle Between Classes

The major characters in The House of the Spirits come from two opposing classes: the landed aristocracy and the peasants. Most of the population of Latin America, as well as all of the characters in the novel, belong to one of these two classes. Essentially the only other class distinction that might be drawn is that occupied by those in civil service. Peasants can join the police force or the army and gain access to education and a higher class status, which is the case of Esteban Garcia. The del Valle and Trueba families represent the land-owning upper-class criollos (a criollo is a person who is born and raised in South America but is a direct descendant of Spaniards), while the Garcias represent the peasants. The two classes come into conflict because one (upper) owns the land that the other (lower) works on. Especially in rural areas such as Tres Marias, the upper classes control all of the infrastructure, such as schools, transportation, banks, and hospitals, as well as all of the capital. As the upper classes prosper, conflict mounts when that prosperity is not equally distributed.

Several different attitudes are presented toward this inequality in The House of the Spirits. Esteban Trueba represents the conservative view—that the status quo should be maintained and that there is no reason for the peasants to share in the upper class’s wealth or to change their situation. Pedro Tercero Garcia represents the revolutionary peasants who will work to make that change happen. The Trueba women, as well as Jaime, support the peasants. This sets up an important alliance between all of those who are subjugated by the patriarchal system.

Simply by making class struggle a major theme of the novel, The House of the Spirits supports the view of the peasants: the conservatives would not see class struggle as a problem, let alone a topic around which to organize a novel. The third person narration of the story is in fact given in the perspective of Alba, a staunch supporter of the socialist revolution. Alba’s views also prevail in the retrospective commentary of Esteban Trueba, who slowly comes to accept his granddaughter’s position.

The Power of Women

The protagonists of the novel are all women who work in different and subtle ways to assert their rights. The House of the Spirits can be seen as a woman-centered response to the paradigmatic text of magical realism: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Where One Hundred Years of Solitude centers around three generations of men, with the women whom they love as important but secondary characters, The House of the Spirits does the opposite. Clara, Blanca, and Alba remain the focus of the story, while Esteban, Pedro Tercero, and Miguel enter the story because they are the men those women love or marry. Experiences particularly central to the lives of women dominate the minor as well as the major events in the story, such as the detailed descriptions of each childbirth and the abortion, as well as the presentation of physical and sexual violence against women.

Aside from Nivea’s commitment to female suffrage, the women rarely explicitly condemn gender inequality. Each woman’s life is, however, marked by it. All of the women in The House of the Spirits are strong women who do not bow to mistreatment. They choose subtle responses the situations, though, instead of outright revolt. This very method of resistance can be seen as particularly feminine. If violence and activity are male traits, while gentleness and passivity are female ones, The House of the Spirits shows that this does not mean that men accomplish things and change things while women do not. On the contrary, the women in The House of the Spirits effect more long-lasting and drastic changes than do any of the men. While the men lead revolutions that topple governments, those revolutions are themselves quickly toppled. The women’s subtler methods of teaching literacy and basic healthcare, setting curses, and refusing to speak are far more effective in exacting permanent change.

The Importance of Genealogy

Although genealogy is a subtle theme in the novel, it is ultimately the source of the denouement. Almost all of the characters in the story belong to either the del Valle-Trueba family, or else to the Garcia family. The family name or genealogy to which each character belongs determines her or his class position. Genealogy does not, however, follow simply from biological parenting. In fact, the bloodlines of the Trueba and Garcia families cross repeatedly, but Esteban Trueba works hard to assure that their family names and their genealogies do not. In the novel, it is less whose genes you share and more the last name you carry that determines genealogy. At the birth of each child, the question of last name is raised. In addition, at each point that a character wishes to mark a drastic shift in alliances away from their father or family, they change their last name. Despite Esteban’s efforts to make genealogy by name the only type of genealogy that matters, his refusal to acknowledge some of his biological children ultimately comes back to haunt him.

Civilization vs. Barbarity

The unnamed country in The House of the Spirits, like Allende’s native Chile, is divided between modern city and largely undeveloped countryside, and between an aristocratic and a peasant class, with little in between. One of the oldest tropes or models for understanding the great divergences in Latin American culture is that of culture versus nature or civilization versus barbarity.

The traditional view of civilization and barbarity holds that while nature is bountiful and has restorative powers, it is barbaric and needs the influence of civilization in order to be productive. This same view considers civilization the realm of the upper classes and the cities; it is rational and well ordered. While several of the characters in The House of the Spirits subscribe to these traditional views, the novel works to break down any neat divisions between civilization and barbarity. The beliefs and practices of those who believe themselves to be civilized are shown to often be inhumane, irrational, ineffective, and backward. At the same time, the “barbaric” peasants demonstrate the most levelheaded, successful responses to everything from natural disasters to politics.

Motifs

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.

Symbols

The Big House on the Corner

Esteban builds a big house on the corner that on the surface is straightforward, if somewhat ostentatious. Similarly, The House of the Spirits can be read as a traditional romance novel, following a single family over several generations. However, Esteban’s house ends up full of complicated and impractical additions. Despite its apparently traditional structure, The House of the Spirits contains an enormous number of complicated twists of plot. The title of the novel underlines the association: The House of the Spirits refers both to the book as a whole, and also to the big house on the corner, which, thanks to Clara, is always full of ghosts and spirits.