The Judge's Wife

In Isabel Allende’s short story The Judge’s Wife, she conveys the theme of being raised in an unhealthy environment has a similar negative affect on your adulthood. In The Judge’s Wife, the main character Nicolás Vidal lives a voluntarily isolated life that results in him leading a lonely existence. His mother tried her hardest to make up for their unfortunate situations. She gave him a strong name to give him purpose, however, Allende writes, “Even that princely appellation had not been enough to exorcise the fatal omens”. The name does give Nicolás Vidal some sense of caring though, proof that at least one woman Nicolás Vidal remembers his childhood as one with “not a single happy memory”(187).Melancholy beginnings transitioned Nicolás

Vidal from a innocent child to a person who is payed to stay away from places and sought after by the military. He seems cold and uncaring on the outside, the description of how he remembers his early life reveals how sensitive he is also as a result of it. If he truly did not care about anything, he would not still be affected by those volatile times. How he was raised was of violence and a prophecy that looms over him and terrorizes his every thought. His early lifestyle propelled Nicolás Vidal into the person we see for the majority of the story. Similar to Nicolás Vidal’s harsh upbringing, Allende describes Casilda, the judge's wife. When Nicolás Vidal first sees her, he takes note that her family, “fanning themselves with an air of utter bewilderment, then departed straightaway, never to return”. This brief descriptor gives a big insight to how Casilda was raised and how it still motivates her actions. The people painted by Nicolás Vidal’s thoughts were indifferent and frail, happy to sell away one of their members to be married to someone who “was twice her age, and had slept alone for so many years he didn’t have the slightest notion of how to go about pleasing a woman.” Casilda is raised to be frail inside and out, which takes her a long time to get past.