The House Of The Spirits And Chronicle — страница 2

“had already made up her mind to marry without love” (Allende 90). That shows extreme strength of character and will-power. Marriage without love is also evident in Chronicle of a Death Foretold when Angela will marry, Angela Vicario never forgot the horror of the night on which her parents and older sisters with their husbands, gathered together in the parlor, imposed the obligation to marry a man whom she had barely ever seen?her mother demolished [her objection] with a single phrase: “Love can be learned too.” (Marquez 38) This citation explains it all; Angela Vicario is forced to marry without love and endure the marriage while trying to learn to love someone. “It was Angela Vicario who didn’t want to marry him. ‘He seemed too much or a man for me,’ she told

me?.[She] only dared hint at the inconvenience of a lack of love?” (Marquez 37-8). Again, she does not want to marry him, but she does anyway. The effect of the authors showing this is again to try to obtain admiration for these characters because they know, and now the readers know, that their hearts and feelings play no part in their eventual destinies. Along with the many similarities, there are a few differences between these two novels. For example, the portrayal of the strength of women, when it comes to doing domestic errands, differs between the two authors. Marquez stresses domestic skills; Allende does not. Clara “was?not particularly well suited to the duties of marriage and domestic life” (Allende 88), and later, “Clara had no interest in domestic matters”

(Allende 128). Clara has no domestic skills because they were not emphasized when she was growing up; women were not typically raised to be physically strong during marriage but it turns out that they must be anyway. It is the same with Blanca; no one teaches her how to do household chores. However, in Marquez’s work, The girls were reared to get married. They knew how to do screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write engagement announcements?.”They’re perfect,” [Pura] was frequently heard to say. “Any man will be happy with them because they’ve been raised to suffer.” (Marquez 34) Here readers distinguish that in Marquez’s novel, children are taught from a very young age to sew and do other

tasks that will be important to them during marriage; taught that life will be hard and that they will have to do things that they do not want to. Conversely, in Allende’s novel, children are not taught these things. This may be because of the difference of social class that each family represents; the Trueba and del Valle families are more affluent than the Nassar and Vicario families. Again, the effect of this is the reader acquires a feeling of esteem towards the female characters because they are reared to marry and reared to live with the sacrifices of marriage and domestic life. Another difference between the novels is the style in which the theme is portrayed. The House of the Spirits uses three different narrators: Esteban, Alba and the omniscient third person. The

applicability of each of these three different narrators is to support Allende’s development of the theme utilizing more than one perspective as well as more than one gender. Readers get the perspective of the authoritative patriarch, the defiant child in addition to an omniscient narrator, which gives insight into everything which readers would not obtain through the first person narrative forms. Whereas, in Chronicle of a Death Foretold only the first person narrator is used; the narrator is a male and only reports what people say happened years ago. This style of writing, in itself, hinders the portrayal, but Marquez is clever because the chronicling style, as he uses it, allows to get many people’s perspective on events while using the usually constricting first person

narrator. The chronicling style technically only allows for the narrator to observe and dictate objectively thus making it nearly impossible to report any feelings, prohibiting bringing true feminine empathy. To conclude, the portrayal of the shrewdness in women in two Latin American novels: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, is similar in that in both works at least one female exhibits some sort of metaphysical ability and the women are forced to marry without love, which will eventually require the utmost strength of character and of determination. The portrayal is different in the two novels because Allende does not make her female characters learn to perform household responsibilities whereas Marquez does,