Cultural Analysis - Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits"

Chilean Culture in the Twentieth Century

Culture is not a word with a very simple meaning. On the contrary, culture is a word that must be defined using numerous other terms and elements because of the complexity of the subject, and without these terms and elements, culture could not exist at all. Cultural anthropology reflects specifically on culture and all of its elements in order to grasp a proper understanding of humankind: their history, their current times, and their future. The economy, family, politics, caste and class systems, and religion all play major roles in the definition of a peoples’ culture. Culture, in turn, is a small part of what defines each individual.

Isabel Allende’s novel, titled “the House of the Spirits,” is an expression of culture in Chile. For the sake of cultural analysis, I chose this book because it has very strong examples of the elements required in defining culture, and Allende has an effective way of helping me understand the general concepts of Chilean family, religion, and social order, and even some of the more refined concepts of Chilean marriage, beliefs, traditions, and class and gender roles.
It is important to understand that cultures are never exactly the same. There are often similarities across cultures, but they are outweighed by the many distinctive differences that make each culture identifiable, individual and unique. Chilean culture in particular heavily emphasizes a need for good economy, close families, strong politics, social class, and faith in God, all of which are represented in explicit detail in Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits.”

Chile’s economy in the twentieth century, the time set in Allende’s novel, was not horrible, nor was it splendid. Much like the gender roles and class system, there are only two ways the economy can possibly go: first, the economy can be based around the rich, whose wealth supports those who are less fortunate; second, the economy can be run by the poor, who somehow distribute the wealth equally between themselves and the more fortunate. The status quo for conservatives was to push for unequal distribution of wealth; more simply put, the rich should be considerably wealthy and the poor should be living in poverty. Peasants, however, such as the character Pedro Garcia, eventually win the fight in Chile to equalize the scale of wealth distribution among the people. Peasants are “rural cultivators who produce for the subsistence of their households but are also integrated into larger, complex state societies” (Nanda and Warms 115). The economy in this culture, including the way that people debate in order to influence and change it it, is very similar to the that of many cultures around the world today.

Women did not have rights in the beginning of the twentieth century, and nor did lower-class citizens. Throughout time, things changed, and important people were able to re-govern the people a new way; women were given more rights and opportunities, and the lower-class was supported in some way by the upper-class.

Although economy is considered important in a culture, it is most specifically the structure and shaping of a culture that relies on economy. More relied on by Chilean culture than economy are traditions and kinships, however. Traditions and kinships go hand-in-hand; traditions that are passed down in a culture influence its peoples’ outlook on their family and their relationships. I think that tradition exists mostly to ensure a solid ground on which a people can build their culture. Something that is unchanging is necessary to build such a thing as culture.

The traditions and rituals in the lives of the characters seem to have been passed down through many generations in their culture, almost as part of an inheritance. Family members who die often pass down, or pass on, their estate or their possessions. Family ties have always been especially strong in Chilean culture, and this fact is not expected to change anytime in the future. Inheritance and tradition are completely utilized in this culture. However, marriages are not always happy, and interferences are to be dealt with in a traditional manner. Divorce is unheard of, even if a couple does not work together, but often times a couple is set up for an arranged marriage. This can cause strength or failure in any partnership. In Allende’s book, for instance, a woman was set up for a marriage by her father because she had a baby, and her father wanted the baby to be given some kind of legitimacy by itself having a father. Unfortunately, the man was perverted and she and her child ended up moving back in with her parents. Through this trial, the woman never got a divorce from the man her father had her marry.

Religion has indefinitely become a kind of culturally influential cookie cutter. It shapes culture and the people within it to live a particular way of life. In “The House of the Spirits,” Catholic religion in Chile is of the first cultural elements that Isabel Allende mentions, probably due to its importance in the understanding of the characters and their web of families. Isabel Allende mentions the Christian-Catholic religion often throughout her novel, and even where it is not directly evident that she is exemplifying this religion as important to the culture of Chile, it is certainly made clear by the references to the saints, Father Restrepo, and “the Gothic stained-glass windows of the church” (5).

Along with tradition and religion, superstition and magic are seen often in Allende’s story about the Trueba family. In many cultures, magic plays along with the role of religion, but in this culture there are other-worldly beings that exist with the humans in Chile. Ghosts; spirits; los espiritos, almost friends with the character named Clara, especially, who has special fortune-telling abilities. Allende writes, “Clara was a vision in white Chantilly lace and natural camellias, as happy as a parrot after her nine years of silence, dancing with her fiancé beneath the canopies and lanterns, completely oblivious to … the spirits that gestured desperately at her from the curtains…” (90-91).These warnings were about her dog, Barrabás, who dies in her lap shortly thereafter.

Superstition, magic and mysticism compose a large sum of Chilean culture, as well as many other cultures around the world. Literature, such as Isabel Allende’s novel, is an elaborate way to describe aspects about a specific culture. According to Associated Content’s website, “Literature can have much to say about the culture in which it is written or which it is written about. This is particularly true if the novel, fiction though it may be, entwines fact with fantasy within the plot.” It is through this literature that we are able to see cultures in a different way. Anthropologists can study culture in a way much more fluent than without having text to study a culture’s literature from.






Works Cited

Nanda, Serene and Richard Warms. Culture Counts; A Concise Introduction To Cultural Anthropology. Ed. Erin Mitchell. California: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.

Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. New York: The Dial Press, 1986. Print.
AssociatedContent.com. Yahoo! News Network, 2011. Web. 12 Nov. 2011.