Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu
“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Images of Otherness in the Chilean Exile Literature
A Pretext: Isabel Allende’s ‘Daughter of Fortune’
Abstract: Dealing with the literary theme of Otherness in the contemporary Latin American literature, the study focuses on one of the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s books, Daughter of Fortune (1999). The author is here obviously interested in projecting her narrative discourse on a net of cultural hybridizations and complex identities, very different at the ethnic, national, racial or social level. That is why the image of the Otherness works both ways: for each identity (represented by a group or just by an individual) the Other is the Stranger. Allende uses her own personal cross-cultural history in order to give shape to a world which functions through oppositions and hierarchies. The heroine of the novel, somehow a marginal because of her gender, ambiguous origin and social status, performs a voyage between the two symbolical spaces (Valparaiso and California), travel which eventually becomes a quest for her own identity. The book is abundant in literary clichés, especially regarding the representations of the Other
Keywords: Latin-American Literature; Isabel Allende; Otherness; the Other, Stranger; “Daughter of Fortune”; Intertextuality.
The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune (1999) represents an interesting, but also a significant field of interpretation in which the subject of the present study (the Otherness) is concerned, because of the multicultural background the plot develops in, but also through the characters, who have very different ethnic origins and therefore are involved in a game of complex interactions and perspectives. The first section of the novel has as a background the Chilean port of Valparaiso in the first half of the 19th century, while the second, through the symbolical voyage of the female character, is California in the years of the Gold Rush. Yet, the natives of both places, Chileans and respectively Mexicans, are somehow left behind, being represented by less important characters, while the attention of the novel focuses on the different strangers arriving and inhabiting both spaces (English in Chile, Chinese, Europeans, South-Americans in California, now a land belonging to the United States). It is therefore, a story about the Other and his or her voyage into the unknown, a story about identities and carrying one’s culture to new lands, about interaction and hybridization. The author’s life itself wears the marks of her exile and constrained wanderings[1] and this becomes apparent in the choice of the spaces present in the novel (Chile and California, her two homes). Isabel Allende’s cultural and personal evolution places her rightfully in the area of both Latin and Inter-American writers[2].
Before analysing Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune within the complex of Otherness there are some preliminary references to be made to the history of this concept. As the present study deals precisely with the image of otherness and with the cross-cultural perspectives in Allende’s novel on this diversified background, the main concept (that of the other or the stranger) implies a preliminary reference to the notion, distinguishing the fact that there has always been an ambiguity noticeable in the perception of the stranger, the exotic. The perception towards the Other has always been a combination between fascination (in discovering the difference and the delights of the immersion of the discoverer/ conqueror into a “new world”) and suspicion or anxiety (as Jean Delumeau highlighted in his anatomy of Western fears[3], the one towards the Other is very persistent in the European imaginary). The concept was determined within philosophy[4] in relation with the problems of identity and defined itself through the area or segment of difference towards the subject, in opposition with the essence of the Self: Michel de Certeau believes that in the Western tradition there are two representations on the other: one defined by similarity and another by difference.[5] Individual identity suffered extension towards group identity and the Other gained a social, racial, ethnical or religious connotation, actually illustrating a phenomenon which was present for centuries (at least) in the history of Western societies. Professor Lawrence Cahoonee[6] emphasized that
“What appear to be cultural units — human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations — are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchizing. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is ‘privileged’ or favoured, and the other is devalued in some way.” [7]
The otherness involves tension by definition, the stable coordinates of one’s perception of the self being confronted with the difference. Edward Said’s reflections on the relation between East and West are of interest in this context through some of the reflections on the subject of otherness: Said acknowledged that the discourse built around the image of the Stranger is preliminary coded. Still, the prior representation is not necessarily reflected by the confrontation to reality itself[8]. Baudrillard, after quoting Simmel’s opinion on the existence not of a distance but of a boundary between the Self and the Stranger, recognizes a crisis nowadays (an elision) of the Other and simultaneously a need of the Self for such a complementary figure (with the result in the creation of an “artificial stranger”, a fiction of otherness). As Isabel Allende’s book (the subject of this analysis over the image of the Other/ the Stranger) unfolds its plot in mid-19th century Chile and California, Baudrillard also interests us for his observations over the fascination of the period for the idea of the Other as exotic[9] and the voyage towards the Other, mainly assimilated to the Oriental: the voyage, Baudrillard writes, is a manner of metaphorical exploration of the Other, of “wandering” in a foreign world, of “tasting” or “touching” its difference[10].
Finally, in closing this selection of reflections on the idea of Other, we’ll emphasize the idea of the Stranger as belonging par excellence to exteriority[11], to a ex-centric space. In this respect, colonialism has changed, actually reversing the relation between the stranger as extraterritorial and the local, who becomes “a stranger within his own country”[12].
Daughter of Fortune (1999) is by its characters and spatial organisation a crossroad of national identities and complex multicultural relations. The plot develops around Eliza, an orphan adopted by the Sommers brothers (English immigrants living in Chile) and raised up by the sophisticated spinster Miss Rose and her Amerindian servant, the wise Mama Fresia. When she becomes a young woman, the well-educated Eliza falls in love with a Chilean, Joaquin Andieta. The latter, attracted to California by the Gold Rush, will be soon followed by the pregnant Eliza, who travels clandestinely and thus suffers a miscarriage. In California she continues her quest dressed as a man, with the help of a constant friend, the Chinese doctor, Tao Chi’en, but ends discovering her own identity and starting a whole new life in the recently built San Francisco.
In what regards the cross-cultural structure of the novel, the main character, Eliza, is the most hybrid of all, as Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos notices[13], mainly because of her ambiguous origin (she is found in a soap crate at the doorstep of the British Company for Importation-Exportation), education and eventually her destiny. Similar to the closed British societies formed in the colonized India, the Sommers live in a simulacrum of England within the Chilean port of Valparaiso, where, although surrounded by Indian servants and maintaining professional activities with different nationalities (as they move in an open space, a naval town), they only cultivate social relations with the British.
In the second part of the novel, after the monstrous voyage performed by the heroine, the plot moves into the California of the Gold Rush, were nationalities mix in a “melting pot” of European, South, North-American and Oriental adventurers. The couple Eliza – the Chinese Tao remain the centre of the action, in a multicultural world, somehow polarized by the appearance of some symbolical spaces, baptized after their inhabitants’ natal places (like Chinatown and Chilecito, which means “Little Chile”). The history in California changes the accents of the Valparaiso episodes (the “all is possible” of childhood and teenage magical territories) transgressing into a chaos of violence and adventure.
Returning to the first stage of the story, a central, yet mysterious episode is represented by the finding of the heroine, as an infant, on the doorstep of the two brothers (Rose and Jeremy Sommers) by people with again mixed identities: an English lady, Miss Rose Sommers and her indigenous housekeeper, Mama Fresia. At this point they already represent two totally different attitudes (with a religious, symbolical background): the Christian woman, who adopts the orphan, and the superstitious Mapuche Indian, who suggests the abandoned child must be cursed and could bring misfortune to the family. On the other hand, in an interesting manner of empathising to the child, both women tend to attribute to the girl her own ethnical provenance[14]: while Miss Rose assures Eliza later that she has English origin
(“You have English blood, like us. Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language”[15]),
the servant sees her as indigenous[16] (“You, English? Don’t get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine”), beliefs which both prove to be true, due to Eliza mixed origin[17]. Later on, the ambiguity of this birth is cleared, in Eliza’s absence, as well as Miss Rose’s deep interest in her education in future, which, as becomes obvious, is not ethically or religiously motivated, not even psychologically (in her lack of children), but lies in her knowledge of the blood relation between the family and the child (as the third brother, captain John Sommers, is actually the father of the abandoned child). All this melodrama is actually part of a complex texture Isabel Allende creates by placing together different national and cultural backgrounds, combined with the prejudices created towards the Other by each of them.
The Sommers brothers live within this England in miniature, labelled symbolically by the name of The British Import and Export Company, Limited, title comprising suggestions about relations of international change. They have created for themselves the perfect illusion of ignoring the distance and living in the same world, by using English products ordered by catalogue, frequenting a Protestant church (Miss Rose even sings in the choir), having English friends and even ignoring the local clime by respecting their native country season’s calendar (which was the reverse of the Chilean one)[18].
Born under an ambivalent star, Eliza Sommers lives in Valparaiso a double existence, somehow typical to this cultural colonial background, between Miss Rose’s illusory space (imaginary England, a house of dolls) and Mama Fresia’s tangible reality, a persistent one, aromatized with the Creole ingredients of the kitchen. She is provided a good, aristocratic breeding by Miss Rose’s efforts to teach her piano, foreign language and good manners but also left to spend many days in the society of Indians, where she is initiated into the beliefs and habits of the local people[19]. Her oscillation between the world of masters and that of servants emphasised her ambiguous status.
Regarding the Latin-American cultural environment many observed that it represents a specific mixture of magical Indian beliefs and Catholicism: “the influence of the Amerindian presence and of the American landscape has distilled religious rituals which differ from those of the European communities in which they originated”[20]. The author describes such a local procession, that of the Christ of May (Cristo de Mayo) using the perspective of the Stranger, of Jacob Todd, an Irish recently installed in Valparaiso. He finds the image unbelievable, through its typical mixture of violence and religious devotion, primitiveness and sadness: the impression is that of a medieval procession, impossible to be shared to his incredulous friends in London. Actually his character is used more than once to reflect the distance between the European and the native (Chilean and Indian perspective), and even as a new pole of discussion through his liberal opinions regarding the relations of power with the natives, which, although Chile was no longer a colony, were still in the disadvantage of the latter:
“this is a country of thieves – says Jeremy Sommers – nowhere else in the world would the Company spend so much in ensuring the merchandise. They steal everything and all that escapes the burglars is flooded during the winter, burnt during the summer or get wrecked in an earthquake”[21].
The Sommers, as the entire symbolical British community, cultivated a negative attitude towards the natives (considered as inferior, immoral, uncivilized etc., perfect savages[22]):
“the indigenous blood is hidden as if it were a disease. I don’t blame them: Indians are famous for being dirty, drunker and lazy. The government tries to improve the race by bringing European immigrants”[23].
Still, their Chilean household survives mainly because of the Indian Mama Fresia, her wise interventions in crucial moments and multiple skills of a housekeeper, empirical healer, cook etc. Judy Berry-Bravo believes the character of Mama Fresia, an Indian Mapuche, to be one of the successes[24] of the novel, as it is a rare case in the Chilean novel to find such a picturesque description of a native, playing an important part in the family economy. In spite of the passive tension between the immigrants and natives, the latter acting as servants in the European hybrid local mansions (the South American clime and habits implied some “unorthodox” appendages to the houses, inhabited or used by the Indian staff), Mama Fresia has a benign influence in the story. As the story evolves, she is described as empathizing with the girl, whose ambiguous ethnical identity becomes one of the many reasons of their close relationship and mutual affection (the Mapuche servant would become Eliza’s confident and main help as she falls in love and becomes pregnant, which leads to her secret – and traumatic – trip to California).
The situation of the Indians as colonized people and the way they react to the conquest and the change of relations of power (which has made them strangers in their own native land) interest Allende. Asked about the colonising process (from which she was inspired for another of her books, Inés Del Alma mía[25]) and the situation of the Mapuche in Chile, Allende answers: “The war has lasted for 300 years. The Mapuche have never been submitted, they have lived marginalized by the Chilean society and now they are treating war again. They have been an invincible people, preferring death to submission. […] – Is this conquest completed? – No, it is not.”[26]
The image Allende creates to the Indians is at best illustrated through the character of Mama Fresia, who notices and finds solutions to everything, being in a way the centre and organizer of a world in which she seems an outsider, while Miss Rose reigns with grace over her “house of dolls”, an illusion of a traditional English mansion. Fighting efficiently the diseases, the clime and natural disasters, Mama Fresia, a very prominent feminine goddess in the book, manages the real, dark and complicated side of the idyllic space Miss Rose had built at the surface, and Eliza, with her ambiguous identity, circulating between the two worlds, is familiarized with both, without a preference, accepting symbolically her Creole, rich, identity.
The image of the Other perceived as a savage is very significant here and requires attention, being a cultural representation inherited from, some researchers say, pre-colonial times. It seems to represent a psychological want for the Other (and determining in a way the process of colonizing), in order to assure the identity illusion of the accomplished society “an internal demand of the structure of the Western society. In the heart of the European civilization, , there has been developed, similar to a functional growth, a myth which hides and in the same time reveals the nature of this culture which has provided identity consistency for itself based on a fundamental myth: that of the savage”[27]. Sonia Mattalia also believes the image of the savage is a pre-representation, built a priori, pre-existent in the European imaginary and projected over the conquered colonies”[28] and which accompanied him as his “shadow” (using Roger Bartra’s image[29]).
“The problem of identity has always been an intellectual preoccupation, in the countries born out of very different ethnics and cultures”[30]. The Creole, the product of such mixed, hybrid communities, is yet generally defined by the area of provenance, and not by the race or nationality.
As Isabel Allende emphasized in her memoir, Mi país inventado (My Invented Country), the Chilean society has always been a multilayered one, similar to a “millefeuille” cake, to class selection, a national criteria being added in the novel. The Europeans were considered the civilized, the superior nation (and race), brought to a “savage” place to bring the light of reason to barbarians (fact which becomes obvious in the discussions around Todd’s so-called missionary intentions and his discovery, with a journalistic eye of Chile and later, of California). “The Westerner is at the top of any social division[31]. [..] If the English, the French or the US citizen are examples of civilization, the Native American, the Chilean in this case, the Araucanos and all the other «dirty» American [native] people are thieves and barbarians. Classifying the type of society the action in The Daughter of Fortune takes place in, the researcher Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos says that “at the superior level there is the Western world, represented by England, France and the United States. At a second level, there are the Chileans and Mexicans (Latin Americans in general, but all men). They are followed by native Amerindians and Asians [the latter, coming, the English in the novel say, from] «a land of dirty people, ugly, weak, noisy, corrupted and savage, who were eating cats and cobras and were killing they own recent-born daughters»[32]. The fourth place was for the black slaves from African origin and at the bottom of all these levels there was the woman (in the novel, the Asian and Chilean woman)”[33].We shall come back to this ultimate, submitted, yet essential generic character in the novel.
First of all, there is the image of the Oriental, which comprised at a first level the character of Tao, Eliza’s friend and eventually her husband (the history of the couple continues in Retrato en sepia, another novel of the writer, published in 2000) and pluralized in a series of smaller appearances of other Orientals in the story (perceived as the community – called Chinatown – and its problems). Still, next to the part Tao plays in the development of the story, what matters most is the perspective of the Western over the Oriental and the prejudices of the former over the latter. The Chinese doctor, Tao Chi’en, is perceived, in spite of his profession and culture, as a marginal, an insignificant and inferior Other, mainly a Stranger to all the Western values. Still, through the novel the Tao reveals his wisdom and depth of mind, his skills as a doctor and his human quality, being also very respectful towards his cultural inheritance. He becomes progressively more and more important in Eliza’s story, as a geographical unknown area which reveals itself to the look of the traveller, in this case the woman. Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos sees Daughter of Fortune as crossed by an “Oriental route”, insisting, on the grounds of Edward Said’s theories on the “discourse of power”, on the perspective in the novel towards the Oriental. Rivera speaks of the Asian, who is regarded as the other of the Western man, but as a subaltern other, who initially is not allowed an individual voice in the Western world. Still, the perspective in the novel is not unique, but multileveled, showing that the author doesn’t belong to the Western male society, but that she is also a marginal, but one who belongs to another century and can speak: “On the one hand, the narrative voice in The Daughter of Fortune presents an exotic Far East, where one could find the best balms and lotions and where, even better, «there were the most beautiful women in the universe», who are, actually the worst treated in the novel. In the chapters entitled The Fourth Son and Tao Chi´en, the narrative voice continues showing an idealized vision on the intelligent and wise East: «Tao, …as way, direction, sense and harmony»”[34]. On the other hand, Rivera continues, the author presents in more than one situation the contempt of the Western society towards the Far East (such as the passage describing the Opium Wars between China and Great Britain). Still, the negative perspective works both ways, as the Chinese felt the same contempt for the Western, perceived as a savage in his violence[35] and arrogance.
Eliza and Tao, both faces of the other for the Western society, find eventually in the “melting pot” of California in the Gold Rush time a new home[36] and, most importantly, a place to develop their skills (Tao as a doctor, Eliza in pastry) and to grow their hybrid family (developed in Retrato en sepia). The relation of the characters with the Californian space is also ambivalent: they are in a way assimilated, becoming part of the new community, but they also maintain they roots and ethnical identities. In the novel this credo of the “American dream”[37] is explicitly described: in the United States, “one wipes down one’s past and can start all over again. […] The ability of renewal, as individualism, is part of the North American myth”[38].
Over the time, “the notion of «the colonized» has expanded considerably to include women”[39] and other marginalized figures. Although the main character is that of a woman and even more, the novel is signed by a female writer[40] (also very much interested in the problems regarding gender and womanhood), we talk of the inferior place women occupy because of the hierarchical scale imposed by the 19th century perspective[41]. Eliza lives in a world where, among different types of otherness, she is one of the less valued. That is why she has to be mentioned, paradoxically, in an analysis of the image of Other, although she is the main character and Allende’s novels usually impose a “femino-centric” world[42]. The society, in which Eliza is born, although cross-cultural, preserves a cultural tradition about the woman as the Other. Even more, in the novel, the North American recently born (during the Gold Rush) community of San Francisco, absorbs in the beginning no other women but prostitutes, treated as objects, emphasising this way the marginal position of women in society. That is why Eliza has to disguise for a long time as a man (the temporary male identity is emphasized by the absence of her menstruation for a time and lack of interest in all that represented her feminine side before), and has the feeling of somehow loosing her gender identity, until the last scene of the novel, when she symbolically recovers her initial clothing and her sensuality. Still, the new born community will little by little assimilate women, some of them (many, actually, Allende’s fictional world being dominated by women) becoming prominent independent personalities (such as Paulina del Valle, who is a brilliant businesswoman). Although some of the ideas are ahead of their times and come in a line Allende preserves when women are concerned (see the suffragette character of Nívea, in The House of Spirits), the woman characters are very well constructed and have their independence and persistence.
In which Eliza herself is concerned, we insist again upon her ambivalence: ethnical, educational spatial etc. Careful with filiations, Allende offers her a double genealogy, which implies a wanderer father (the sailor), but also places her always between two worlds, two social classes etc., with the uncertainty of a future which for another girl (with a known situation) would have been a very stable. An exception is the same Paulina del Valle[43], also brave enough to make her own destiny. Living this fractured identity, Eliza tries to discover herself in the love story with Andieta, which initially represents the centre of her quest, but whose image dissipates little by little, until it disappears along the way. Eliza changes and evolves by over passing different initiation tests in her travel to and inside California, and reveals a more and more complex identity. In the end, after experimenting different symbolical dangers and drawbacks (disease, death, solitude, poverty etc.), the heroine builds herself a new identity, which comes together with her rediscovery of her womanhood, and the acknowledgment of the freedom she had acquired in her quest (her last line is actually: “Now I’m free….”).
There is one more, although secondary, aspect to discuss in the problem of otherness in the novel: a permanent sensation of déjà vu, of the use of some literary clichés, which we decide to read, because of various reasons, as an (intentional or not) persistence of intertextuality, which is to be found in more than one of Allende’s novels. Allende, a great reader as she declares and she is obvious to be, cultivates some traditional literary images, which are attached especially to national identities. The Victorian society (which is developed, of course as a copy, in Valparaiso) brings to the fore some literary clichés: features of the English lady, the spinster, the English club, the gentleman, the captain, etc. Yet, the characters individualize and acquire shape during the process, detaching somehow from the stereotype. Many analyst have noticed literary filiations, but some, such as, Rossane Brunton stated that they are “deliberate”[44]. The examples of such stereotypes are numerous, but the most obvious is probably the character of the French count in The House of Spirits, too significant to be missed in a study of the Otherness. Count Jean de Satigny is obviously the product of an identity stereotype: the French aristocratic decadence and degeneration, from an entire cultural tradition, with the peak in the fin de siècle. Satigny fills the cliché and even surpasses it: he is a dandy[45], with the most extravagant fashion habits, has original, but extremely elegant manners, is interested only in art and beauty (“the count decorated [the house] after his taste, with an ambiguous and decadent refinement”[46]) and, of course, eventually proves to be vicious beyond imagination, through his orgies implying his Indian servants[47]. Paradoxically, the character most obviously inspired from literature, has also origins in the author’s personal history, as she associates to him the character of her father, an ambiguous image in her past, and initially even adopts his name subconsciously[48] (Bilbaire), changed afterwards at her mother’s wish. Amused, the writer recognized that some of the orgies described in the chapter regarding the French count were also suggested by her mother[49]. Still, the literary layer is not only most obvious but also evidently adopted deliberately, as the image of the “French count“ respects, sometimes ironically, the coordinates of the stereotype. It is used in order to fill a segment which required vice and strangeness, which says many things about the perception of the distant other.
In order to conclude, we can notice Isabel Allende’s interest in projecting her narrative discourse on a net of complex identities, very different at the ethnical, national, racial or social level. That is why the image of the Otherness works both ways: for each identity (represented by a group or just by an individual) the other is the Stranger, the Different. Allende uses her own cross-cultural personal history in order to give shape to a world which functions through oppositions and hierarchies. Her heroine, a marginal person, because of her gender and ambiguous origin and social status, is forced in a way to lead this quest for her own identity and way, and California in the time of the Gold Rush is the perfect place for Eliza to start a new life, on her own rules. The book is abundant in literary clichés, especially in the representations towards the Other, and one of them is that regarding the space: the voyage to a new world (Valparaiso for the English and other immigrants, California for an incredible variety of adventurers). Allende is fond of hybridized images and creates unbelievable associations between characters, historical information and fantasies (in the magical realism style), ideas and beliefs belonging to the 19th, but also to the 20th century, one of most interesting results being the system of metaphorical mirrors (some of them distortional) which reflect the subspecies of the Other.
References
Allende, Isabel, Casa spiritelor, trad. din spaniola de Cornelia Radulescu, col. Raftul intai, 2004
Allende, Isabel, Fiica norocului, trad. din spaniola de Cornelia Radulescu, col. Raftul intai, 2002
Allende, Isabel, Hija de la fortuna, Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1999
Allende, Isabel, Hija de la fortuna, Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 2001
Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espiritus, Editorial Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1995
Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espiritus, Editorial Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1984
Allende, Isabel, Mi país inventado, Editorial Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 2003
Baudrillard, Jean, Marc Guillaume, Figuri ale alterităţii, Traducere de Ciprian Mihali, Editura Paralela 45, Piteşti, 2002
Berry-Bravo, Judy, Isabel Allende e Hija de la Fortuna1. Chilenos en la California del Gold Rush., http://www.revistacienciasociales.cl/archivos/revista11/word/revista11_resena1.doc
Brunton, Rosanne D. , Feminine discourses in the fantastic : A reading of selected inter-American writers, Thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 1990
CULTURA : LA ESCRITORA CHILENA HOY PRESENTA SU NUEVA NOVELA, “INES DEL ALMA MIA”, EN BUENOS AIRES, Isabel Allende: “La Conquista de Chile todavía no ha terminado” , http://www.si.clarin.com.ar/diario/2006/08/25/sociedad/s-03901.htm
de la Parra, Marco Antonio, La mala memoria. Historia personal de Chile contemporáneo, Planeta, Santiago de Chile, 1998
Ferreol, Gilles, Guy Jucquois (coord.), Dictionarul alteritatii si al relatiilor interculturale, Traducere de Nadia Farcas, Editura Polirom, 2005
Mattalia, Sonia, Mascaras suele vestir. Pasión y revuelta: escrituras de mujeres en América Latina, Iberoamericana, Madrid, 2003
Rivera Campos, Isaac Galileo, La ruta orientalista en Hija de la fortuna de Isabel Allende, in Especulo. Revista de estudios literarios. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/rutaorie.html
Said, Edward, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press., 2000
http://elespaciodeastartet.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!E0CC6C78506F46B4!137.entry
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http://www.coh.arizona.edu/spanish/divergencias/archives/fall2003/Hija%20de%20la%20Fortuna.pdf
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Notes
[1] “He sido, forastera durante casi toda mi vida, condición que acepto porque no me queda, alternativa. Varias veces me he visto forzada a partir, rompiendo, ataduras y dejando todo atrás, para comenzar de nuevo, en otra parte; he sido, peregrina por más caminos de los que puedo, recordar. De tanto despedirme se me secaron las raíces y debí generar otras que, a falta de un lugar geográfico donde afincarse, lo han hecho en la memoria; pero, ¡cuidado!, la memoria es un laberinto donde acechan minotauros.”, Isabel Allende. Mi país inventado. Un paseo nostálgico por Chile (2003), quoted from http://archivo.elnuevodiario.com.ni/2003/marzo/20-marzo-2003/cultural/cultural3.html.
[2] Rosanne Brunton’s, Feminine discourses in the fantastic : A reading of selected inter-American writers, Thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 1990.
[3] See Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, xiv e – xviii e siècles, une cité assiégée, Paris, Fayard, 1978.
[5] “En la tradición occidental se han construido, señala de Certeau, dos posiciones reductoras ante el otro: el otro es alguien que tiene rasgos semejantes al si mismo o alguien que todavía no los tiene. Es decir, el otro es reconocido por su posible parecido o el /otro es el que todavía no es parecido. La primera establece un espacio de semejanza, reconociendo un cierto estatuto ontológico a la otredad que la acerca al si mismo, [s.n.] trabaja con la analogía y la identificación parcial; mientras que la segunda desconoce un estatuto ontológico a la otredad, de tal manera que su esfuerzo pone l énfasis en la diferencia para su conversión en semejanza y procura la apropiación de tal diferencia”, Michel de Certeau, La escritura de la Historia, Universidad Iberoamericana, México, 1985 apud Sonia Mattalia, Mascaras suele vestir. Pasión y revuelta: escrituras de mujeres en América Latina, Iberoamericana, Madrid, 2003.
[6] Lawrence Cahoone is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985 and taught until 2000 at Boston University. He is the author of The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anticulture (SUNY 1988), The Ends of Philosophy: Pragmatism, Foundationalism, and Postmodernism (SUNY 1995, reprinted Blackwell 2002), Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics (Blackwell 2002), Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus Culture in Contemporary Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad (Penn State, 2005), and editor of From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (second edition, Blackwell 2003).
[8] “My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting”, Edward Said, Orientalism , Pantheon, New York, 1978, p. 273.
[10] Jean Baudrillard, Marc Guillaume, Figuri ale alterităţii, Traducere de Ciprian Mihali, Editura Paralela 45, Piteşti, 2002, p. 59.
[11] Gilles Ferreol, Guy Jucquois (ed.), Dictionarul alteritatii si al relatiilor interculturale, Traducere de Nadia Farcaş, Editura Polirom, 2005, p. 633.
[13] Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos, La ruta orientalista en Hija de la fortuna de Isabel Allende, in Especulo. Revista de estudios literarios. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/rutaorie.html
[14] “Yo estaba allí y me acuerdo muy bien. Venías tiritando en un chaleco de hombre, ni un pañal te habían puesto, y estabas toda cagada (…) No te hagas ilusiones, no naciste para princesa y si hubieras tenido el pelo tan negro como lo tienes ahora, los patrones habrían tirado la caja en la basura”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, Barcelona, Plaza Janés, 1999, p. 23.
[15] “Tienes sangre inglesa, como nosotros -le aseguró Miss Rose cuando ella tuvo edad para entender-. Sólo a alguien de la colonia británica se le habría ocurrido ponerte en una cesta en la puerta de la “Compañía Británica de Importación y Exportación”. Seguro conocía el buen corazón de mi hermano Jeremy y adivinó que te recogería. En ese tiempo yo estaba loca por tener un hijo y tú caíste en mis brazos enviada por el Señor, para ser educada en los sólidos principios de la fe protestante y el idioma inglés”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 23.
[16] Yo estaba allí y me acuerdo muy bien. Venías tiritando en un chaleco de hombre, ni un pañal te habían puesto, y estabas toda cagada (…) No te hagas ilusiones, no naciste para princesa y si hubieras tenido el pelo tan negro como lo tienes ahora, los patrones habrían tirado la caja en la basura”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 23.
[17] Eliza’s mother was a Chilean girl, probable with Indian roots as many of the natives, as Isabel Allende itself admits in Mi pais inventado, while her father was Captain John Sommers, the brother of Miss Rose and Jeremy.
[18] “Una pequeña nación dentro del país, con sus costumbres, cultos, periódicos, clubes, escuelas y hospitales, pero lo hicieron con tan buenas maneras que lejos de producir sospechas eran considerados un ejemplo de civilidad”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 23.
[19] La niña se crió entre la salita de costura y los patios traseros, hablando inglés en una parte de la casa y una mezcla de español y Mapuche – la jerga indígena de su nana – en la otra, vestida y calzada como una duquesa unos días y otros jugando con las gallinas y los perros, descalza y mal cubierta por un delantal de huérfana”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 19.
[21] “Este es un país de ladrones, en ninguna parte del mundo la oficina gasta tanto en asegurar la mercadería como aquí. Todo se lo roban y lo que se salva de los rateros, se inunda en invierno, se quema en verano o lo aplasta un terremoto.”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 14.
[22] Pero nadie mencionaba la suerte de los indios, despojados de sus tierras y reducidos a la miseria, ni de los inquilinos en los campos, que se vendían y se heredaban con los fondos, como los animales. Tampoco se hablaba de los cargamentos de esclavos chinos y polinésicos destinados a las guaneras de las Islas Chinchas. Si no desembarcaban no había problema: la ley prohibía la esclavitud en tierra firme, pero nada decía del mar”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 51.
[23] “La sangre indígena se esconde como la plaga. No los culpo, los indios tienen fama de sucios, ebrios y perezosos. El gobierno trata de mejorar la raza trayendo inmigrantes europeos”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 28.
[24] Judy Berry-Bravo, Isabel Allende e Hija de la Fortuna1. Chilenos en la California del Gold Rush, http://www.revistacienciasociales.cl/archivos/revista11/word/revista11_resena1.doc.
[25] “Recorría sin descanso la inmensidad del sur con su pequeño ejército, adentrándose en los bosques húmedos y sombríos, bajo la alta cúpula verde tejida por los árboles más nobles y coronada por la soberbia *araucaria, que se perfilaba contra el cielo con su dura geometría. Las patas de los caballos pisaban un colchón fragante de humus, mientras los jinetes se abrían camino con las espadas en la espesura, a ratos impenetrable, de los helechos. Cruzaban arroyos de aguas frías, donde los pájaros solían quedar congelados en las orillas, las mismas aguas donde las madres mapuche sumergían a los recién nacidos*. Los lagos eran prístinos espejos del azul intenso del cielo, tan quietos, que podían contarse las piedras en el fondo. Las arañas tejían sus encajes, perlados de rocío, entre las ramas de robles, arrayanes y avellanos. Las aves del bosque cantaban reunidas, diuca, chincol, jilguero, torcaza, tordo, zorzal, y hasta el pájaro carpintero, marcando el ritmo con su infatigable tac-tac-tac. Al paso de los caballeros se levantaban nubes de mariposas y los venados, curiosos, se acercaban a saludar. La luz se filtraba entre las hojas y dibujaba sombras en el paisaje; la niebla subía del suelo tibio y envolvía el mundo en un hálito de misterio. Lluvia y más lluvia, ríos, lagos, cascadas de aguas blancas y espumosas, un universo líquido. Y al fondo, siempre, las montañas nevadas, los volcanes humeantes, las nubes viajeras. En otoño el paisaje era de oro y sangre, enjoyado, magnífico. A Pedro de Valdivia se le escapaba el alma y se le quedaba enredada entre los esbeltos troncos vestidos de musgo, fino terciopelo. El Jardín del Edén, la tierra prometida, el paraíso. Mudo, mojado de lágrimas, el conquistador conquistado iba descubriendo el lugar donde acaba la tierra, Chile.”, Isabel Allende, Inés del Alma Mía, on
http://elespaciodeastartet.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!E0CC6C78506F46B4!137.entry.
[26] Isabel Allende: “La guerra duró 300 años; los Mapuche nunca se sometieron, han vivido marginados de la sociedad chilena y ahora están en pie de guerra de nuevo. Han sido un pueblo invencible; han preferido la muerte a ser sometidos.—¿No ha terminado esa guerra?—En este momento hay muchos problemas con los Mapuche en Chile porque el gobierno está tratando de hacer cosas en sus tierras y ellos no quieren. Y no se integraron nunca.—¿La conquista no terminó? —No terminó. ”, interview by Patricia Kolesnicov, on
http://www.si.clarin.com.ar/diario/2006/08/25/sociedad/s-03901.htm.
[27]Bratra “propone que el estatuto del otro se articula como una necesidad interna en la structuración de la cultura occidental; en el corazón de la cultura europea , como nódulo fundacional, se desarrolla un mito que, a la vez, oculta y releva la naturaleza de esta cultura que se ha dotado de consistencia identitaria basándose en un mito fundamental: el del salvaje”, Sonia Mattalia, 2003, p. 277-278.
[28] “Representantes de una especia imaginaria, preexistente y persistente en el imaginario europeo, que acompañó a los europeos en la empresa conquistadora y se superpuso como figura desplazada sobre los indios americanos”, Sonia Mattalia, 2003, p. 278.
[29] “El hombre llamado civilizado no ha dado un solo paso sin ir acompañado de su sombra, el salvaje”, Bartra, apud Sonia Mattalia, 2003, p. 16.
[31] “El occidental se encuentra en la cúspide de toda división social. […] Si el inglés, el francés y el estadounidense son ejemplos de civilización, y el nativo americano-refiriéndome en este caso, al chileno, al araucano y todos los demás “grasientos” de nuestra América-son unos ladrones y bárbaros. En un tercer nivel social, se encuentran los “amarillos” o “celestiales” chinos”, Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos, http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/rutaorie.html.
[32] “Una tierra de gente sucia, fea, débil, ruidosa, corrupta y salvaje, que comía gatos y culebras y mataba a sus propias hijas al nacer”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 195.
[33] “En el nivel superior está Occidente, representado por Inglaterra, Francia y Estados Unidos. En un segundo nivel, se encuentran los chilenos y mexicanos (latinoamericanos en general, pero todos hombres). Seguidos por los indios nativos de América y los asiáticos. El cuarto lugar corresponde a los esclavos negros de descendencia africana, y al fondo de todos los niveles, se puede encontrar a la mujer (en la novela, la mujer asiática y la chilena)”, Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos, http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/rutaorie.html.
[34] “Tao… como vía, dirección, sentido y armonía, pero sobre todo representaba el viaje de la vida”, Isabel Allende, Hija de la fortuna, 1999, p. 174.
[35] “Por otro lado, el chino civilizado que “sentía un desprecio irreprensible por la guerra y se inclinaba, en cambio, hacia las artes de la música, pintura y literatura” también tenía una opinión negativa sobre el occidental (176). Por ejemplo, al maestro de Tao Chi´en “la arrogancia de los extranjeros le resultaba intolerable, sentía gran desprecio por esos brutales fan güey, fantasmas blancos que no se lavan, bebían leche y alcohol, eran totalmente ignorantes de las normas elementales de buena educación e incapaces de honrar a sus antepasados en la forma debida” (184).”, Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos, http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/rutaorie.html.
[36] “Tao y Eliza son el “otro” de occidente, Eliza por ser la mezcla de un inglés con una chilena y Tao por ser oriental. Sin embargo, ambos personajes optan por asimilarse a la nueva cultura para poder sobrevivir. Es importante notar que aunque se asimilan a la nueva cultura, ellos no dejan las raíces de sus orígenes. En muchas instancias, tratan de segregarse en sus propios grupos étnicos: Chinatown y “Little Chile.” Ambos están profundamente anclados en sus raíces, lo cual no significa que estén dispuestos a aceptar lo que les conviene de la cultura hegemónica para poder subsistir (Rama 140).
[37] “Exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries and experiences can therefore pro-vide us with new narrative forms or, in John Berger’s phrase, with other ways of telling” (315). Said Lenz.
[38] “Uno borra el pasado y puede volver a comenzar de nuevo […] La capacidad de renovación, así como el individualismo, está incorporada al mito norteamericano” (107).
[39] See Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press., 2000, p. 295
[45] “Usaba zapatos de cabritilla y chaquetas de lino crudo, no sudaba como los otros mortales y olía a colonia inglesa […]. Era el único hombre que Esteban conocía, que se pusiera esmalte brillante en las uñas y se echara colaron azul en los ojos”, Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espiritus, Editorial Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1984, p. 164.
[46] “El conde la decoro a su gusto, con un refinamiento equivoco y decadente”, Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espiritus, 1984, p. 222.
[47] “Vio el insondable abismo entre los muslos de la cocinera, a la llama embalsamada cabalgando sobre una mucama coja y el indio impertérrito que le servia la mesa, en cueros como un recién nacido…”, Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espiritus, 1984, p. 231.
[48] “En esas páginas yo había introducido a un conde francés con un nombre escogido al azar: Bilbaire. Supongo que lo oí alguna vez, lo guardé, en un comportamiento olvidado y al crear al personaje lo llamé así sin la menor conciencia de haber utilizado el apellido materno de mi progenitor. […]Con la reacción de mi madre renacieron algunas sospechas sobre mi padre que atormentaron mi niñez. […]A ella, que tiene una imaginación morbosa, se le ocurrió que entre las fotografías escabrosas que coleccionaba ese personaje había una llama embalsamada cabalgando sobre una mucama coja.”, Isabel Allende, about writing The House of Spirits, on http://webs.ono.com/libroteca/allende.htm.