Rewriting American Identity in the Fiction and Memoirs of Isabel Allende

B. Craig

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137339973
• eBook ISBN: 9781137337580
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Moving away from territorially-bound narratives toward a more kinetic conceptualization of identity, this book represents the first analysis of the politics of American identity within the fiction and memoirs of Isabel Allende. Craig offers a radical transformation of societal frameworks through revised notions of place, temporality, and space.

Chapter 1

Belonging within Isabel Allende’s “California Dream”

This monograph represents a detailed analysis of Isabel Allende’s (b. 1942) contemporary fiction and memoirs and considers the degree to which her work engages with American identity, the United States’ national narrative, and spaces of citizenship. Born in Peru to a family of Chilean diplomats and now a US citizen, Isabel Allende has long been involved in the complex networks of power relations and conflicting narratives in the broader context of the Americas. Since immigrating to California in 1988, her work has dealt largely with the United States’ imperial relationship to the rest of the Americas, American identity, and multicultural sites of interdependent belonging. In this monograph, I focus on how Allende’s fiction and memoirs in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century become a testament to her model of a fluid nation where she reconciles the apparent contradictions between allegiance to political states and subjective versions of belonging within the United States’ past, present, and future. By reading her memoirs alongside her fiction, this monograph shows that Allende’s work demands a radical transformation of societal frameworks through revised notions of place, temporality, and space and, in doing so, offers an alternative perspective to common perceptions of American identity.

Allende’s fiction and memoirs will be analyzed in the following terms: political (the decision to take US citizenship), psychological (affective engagement as a site of belonging), feminist (the gendered relationship to patriarchal nationhood), historical (US sites of racial and linguistic hybridity), philosophical (ecological frameworks of sustainability), and cultural (with particular attention to the Hispanic community). Allende’s work requires a detailed analysis in light of these terms as she reconciles being an “American” within the Americas by situating a distinct concept of American identity within the United States.

Overall, Allende contributes to the immigrant experience in American literature as she investigates how national and psychological territory is formed, imagined, and invented in order to create a site of belonging that she calls “that country inside my head.”1 She writes in My Invented Country about her decision to move to the United States:

I was determined to win my place in California and in the heart of that man, cost what it may. In the United States, everyone, with the exception of the Indians, descends from someone who came from somewhere else; there was nothing special about my case. The twentieth century was the century of immigrants and refugees; the world had never seen so many humans fleeing violence or poverty abandon their place of origin to start a new life in a new land. My family and I are part of that diaspora; it isn’t as bad as it sounds. I knew that I would never assimilate completely, I was too old to melt in that famous Yankee pot. I look like a Chilean, I dream, cook, make love, and write in Spanish, and most of my books have a pronounced Latin American flavor. I was convinced that I would never be a Californian, but I wouldn’t pretend to be one either; all I aspired to was to earn a driver’s license and learn enough English to order food in a restaurant. I didn’t dream I would get much more.2

In light of this quotation, questions to be explored in this monograph are the following: What exactly does Allende find in this “Yankee pot” within the United States? What does she discover about the nature of identity in relation to nation and what is this “much more” that she discovers in California? Crucially, how does she end up envisioning a revised notion of American identity that extends both to the United States and beyond? Moreover, what type of future reality does she imagine and desire to implement within the United States? And ultimately, what does her literature express about a subject’s relationship to national borders and how does it contribute to a remapping of the fields of American Studies and American Literature?

An Overview of Allende’s Work and Life Story

Allende’s life story is most certainly interlayered and transnational. Since her birth in Peru, she has lived in five other countries: Chile, Bolivia, Lebanon, Belgium, Venezuela, and the United States. Her biological father was a Chilean diplomat who led the family to Peru, and her step-father was also a Chilean diplomat who led the family to Bolivia and Lebanon. In Bolivia, Allende attended an American school, and she attended an English school in Lebanon. She is most often associated with her biological father’s second cousin, Salvador Allende, who was president of Chile and deposed in an allegedly CIA-backed coup-d’état in 1973. In 1975, Allende moved to Venezuela with her first husband and two children in what she describes as “self-imposed exile” (Paula 273) and remained there until 1987. Later that year, Allende was on a book tour in San Francisco and met William C. Gordon, an attorney from California. Allende moved to San Rafael, California, to live with Gordon in 1987, married him, and became a US resident in 1988. As she explains, she immigrated to California because of “lust at first sight” (My Invented Country 184) even though she believed that the United States was her “personal enemy” (Paula 305). Allende remained a permanent resident of California from 1988 to 2003 and became a US citizen in 2003. Allende’s fiction and memoirs in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century therefore offer fascinating opportunities to analyze how an immigrant in the United States develops a sense of belonging. Allende describes the complicated path to US citizenship, saying, “I would have to live in this empire and travel it from end to end to understand its complexity, know it, and learn to love it” (Paula 305).

This monograph focuses primarily on the work Allende produced in the United States between the years of 1990 and 2010. This work includes her four memoirs: Paula (Paula); Aphrodite (Afrodita); My Invented Country (Mi país inventado); and The Sum of Our Days (La suma de los días). This includes seven works of fiction: The Infinite Plan (El plan infinito); Daughter of Fortune (Hija de la fortuna); Portrait in Sepia (Retrato en sepia); City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias); Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (El reino del dragón del oro); Forest of the Pygmies (El bosque de los pigmeos); and Zorro (El Zorro). With the exception of The Stories of Eva Luna (Cuentos de Eva Luna), Inés of my Soul (Inés de mi alma), and Island beneath the Sea (La isla bajo el mar), all Allende’s work between 1990 and 2010 directly addresses American identity within the context of California. Further references to these texts may be indicated parenthetically as the following: Aphrodite (A); City of the Beasts (COTB); Daughter of Fortune (DOF); Forest of the Pygmies (FOTP); The Infinite Plan (TIP); Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (KOTGD); My Invented Country (MIC); Paula (P); Portrait in Sepia (PIS); The Sum of Our Days (TSOOD); and Zorro (Z). Through the analysis of her memoirs and fiction, I aim to paint a full picture of Allende’s multifaceted view on American identity.

Allende within National Literary Paradigms

To categorize Allende as a “national” writer is difficult in that she is identified as an American, a Chilean, a Peruvian, and a US Latina. This is highlighted by her Hispanic Heritage award in 1996, which recognizes Latinos within the United States; her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004; and her award of Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2010. Among many other awards, she was nominated to the Council of Cervantes Institute in Spain in 2011 and received the International Literature and Arts award from the World Affairs Councils of America in 2002. As the awards listed show, Allende’s hybrid national identity situates her within various literary disciplines.

Within the great level of plurality in Latin American literature traditions, many argue that magical realist writers form the intellectual context that has influenced Allende, notably the Latin American “Boom” writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Some see Allende as part of a “Feminine Boom” that brings the marginalized woman out of the periphery and into the center.3 Others identify Allende as a Spanish American writer.4 More specifically, Allende may be considered as part of a long tradition of writers from Chile who have written about the United States and California. A few notable writers are the following: Vincente Pérez Rosales first wrote about the Chilean involvement in the Californian Gold Rush;5 Pablo Neruda most famously wrote about California in the play Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta (Fulgor y Muerte de Joaquín Murieta) in 1972;6 and Ariel Dorfman’s extensive work on the “North/South” divide within the Americas addresses questions of American identity, in particular his memoir Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey, published in 1998.7

Furthermore, the publication of Allende’s novels beginning in the 1990s is part of what is considered to be a large cultural explosion of Latino/a literature in the United States in which US “mainstream” publishers have published work by several notable Latino/a writers. Two examples are Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1992). Allende is sometimes categorized with these writers as evidenced by her nomination for the Hispanic Heritage Foundation Award and several academic articles that categorize her as a “US Latina.” For example, Ana Patricia Rodríguez points out that Allende’s status as the first US Latino/a to be featured in Oprah’s Book Club raises the question of why US Latino writers have “been virtually excluded from the club.”8 Significantly, Allende is included in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011) and even more specifically, she is identified as a Californian Latina in the anthology Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature in California (2002).

Allende is also part of a growing number of contemporary immigrant writers from outside of North America who now reside in Northern California, have taken US citizenship, and are writing about the immigrant experience.9 Such US immigrant writers in California include Afghan American Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), and Indian American Bharati Mukherjee, author of Jasmine (1991) and The Holder of the World (1993) among other novels. Mukherjee considers herself “totally an American writer”10 and challenges the concept of American identity when she asks, “Who defines ‘American’? Who can claim to belong?”11

Categorizing Allende as an American writer is probably best understood by placing her within the cultural context of California. As she explains, “I think I am a good example of what California is all about. It’s about immigration and diversity . . . It’s a nation within the nation.”12 The idea that California is distinct from the rest of the United States is expressed in the seminal anthology The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State.13 The introduction cites three reasons: the first is California’s history of the Gold Rush and the finding of “El Dorado.” This formative event, the writers argue, created the “California Dream,” an extension of the American Dream, where instead of being a “rags to riches” story epitomized in works by Horatio Alger, the Californian Dream suggests that an actual paradise is to be found. Some historians go so far to argue that the Californian Dream has become the “American Dream” of the twenty-first century.14 The second reason is the physical landscape of California, which has arguably produced an idea of extreme innovation and the final frontier.15 The third reason is that while California may have come to represent the final limit of US Western expansion, it is also a multifarious site of arrival from all directions, “a kind of borderland where the continent meets the sea, where Asia meets America, where cultures and subcultures touch, collide, ignite, and sometimes intermingle.”16 In light of the “California Dream” and the belief that California is the “Great Exception” as Carey McWilliams famously explained,17 Allende’s American literature may therefore respond to these distinct historical, physical, and cultural realities found within the site of California.

Furthermore, it must be noted that there are several scholars who argue that Allende’s writings are not worthy of academic attention.18 As renowned Chilean critic Roberto Bolaño writes about Isabel Allende, “the glamour of her life as a South American in California, her imitations of García Márquez, her unquestionable courage, the way her writing ranges from the kitsch to the pathetic . . . In other words: Allende’s work is bad, but it’s alive; it’s anemic, like a lot of Latin Americans, but it’s alive. It won’t live long, like many sick people, but for now it’s alive. And there’s always the possibility of a miracle. Who knows?”19 Other critics within the United States concur that Allende’s writing is “kitsch” and describe Allende as “Chile’s first mass-marketed modern writer, beginning with her initial imitations of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism in The House of the Spirits.”20 Some see her work as simply “middlebrow” literature and point to her nomination to Oprah’s Book Club (OBC) in 2000 as evidence of her “mass-market cachet.”21 They argue that “serious” writers are not a part of the OBC.22 As Harold Bloom states, her work belongs to the “cosmos of supermarket fiction,”23 and he adds that he “can locate no aesthetic achievement in the immensely popular The House of the Spirits, or in Paula, or in the recent Daughter of Fortune (Oprah’s Book Club).”24

While it is important to respect diverse perspectives in academic study, it borders on the illogical that Allende’s appeal to the mass market makes her work incompatible with the study of American literature and the United States. Situating Allende in the context of reception or reader response theory suggests that Allende’s novels are embedded in various cultural layers, which reflect the way diverse people are acquiring, reading, and interpretin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Belonging within Isabel Allende’s “California Dream”
• 2. The Politics of National Belonging
• 3. “The Intangible Space” of Belonging: Paradigms of Affective Engagement within Nation
• 4. Gendered Discourses of Patriarchal Nationalism: “The Intransigent Father”
• 5. Feminist, “Feminine,” and “Matriarchal” Nations?
• 6. Sites of Transformation within the Americas: Historical California and an Inter-American Identity
• 7. Future Sustainable Landscapes of Belonging: The “Young American” and Eco-Centered Ethical Frameworks
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography