Esteban and Clara in The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

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Esteban & Clara
The conflict in life is in every place and in all fields. The time there is conflict in our story between our heroes, there is also one about the story itself. Isabel Allende, the author of The House of the Spirits, wrote the novel after fleeing her own country. She has been accused of everything from literary piracy to political exploitation for The House of the Spirits. Regarded as one of the most prominent examples of Latin American magical realism, many critics describe The House of the Spirits as a sort of feminist twist on Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some scholars accuse Allende of being unoriginal, or even ripping off the Colombian author; however others defend Allende for mastering a genre (Dougherty 19).

The House of the Spirits can be read as a traditional romance novel, following a single family over several generations. But here we are going to talk about two persons of the Trueba family, Clara and Esteban. We are told that not only did Clara foresee her marriage but also the identity of her husband-to-be: Rosa's fiancé, whom she doesn’t see since her sister's funeral and who is fifteen years her senior. The patriarch of the Trueba family, Esteban is a passionate, hard-working man who is determined to succeed. He is also quick to anger, frequently cruel, and intolerant of those less fortunate than himself. He allows no contradiction of his strict conservative beliefs, and thinks he is justified in ruling his plantation with an iron hand because he has improved the peasants' standard of living. Notably, Clara marries Trueba without love and without conceding to the male authority implied by the traditional notion of marriage. Although Clara and Esteban share intense sexual ...

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...ying back what she owes to him before.

The mother and the father, the man and the woman, the reality and the spiritualty, the ghosts and the souls, the love and the hatred, the peasants and the rich, the good and the bad and Clara and Esteban, all can be found in The House of the Spirits. This is in many ways the message of the novel: action must be taken, resolves must be made, pain and suffering must be endured and resisted, but ultimately the world moves forward and, even if in unexpected ways, problems are resolved.

Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, in an essay for Novels for Students , Gale, 1999.

Ronie-Richele Garcia-Johnson, "The Struggle for Space: Feminism and Freedom in The House of the Spirits," in Revista Hispanica Moderna, Vol. XLVII, No. 1, June, 1994, pp. 184-193.

The House of the Spirits: A Twentieth-Century Family Chronicle By Charles Rossman

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