In the creation of her novel, "The House of the Spirits-, author Isabel Allende uses a literary technique called magic realism'. ... Many human characteristics are clearly evident in "The House of the Spirits-, and the use, or the lack of, magic realism, is important in highlighting each characteristic. ... Within "The House of the Spirits-, these are important in the way the fantasies are used to emotional engage the reader. ... The house's linkage with Clara becomes most apparent when, after Clara's death, all of these magical links and spirits fade from the big house o...

• Word Count: 1458
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

People around the world are asking the same question to each other, "Do ghosts and spirits really haunt houses and locations in our world today?" ... There are many people think ghosts do haunt houses, places, and personal experiences. ... After I did some of the research, I have learned that ghosts and spirits truly can haunt houses, but many experts believe ghosts and spirits only appears when they have some special meaning to them whether it is their death place or an old place they used to live in. ... The claims are worthy of being believed in ghosts and spirits because many people have f...

• Word Count: 1221
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

The House of the Spirits In the novel, The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende shows how many things throughout the story that repeats itself. Things such as Esteban's sexual need, the number of people kept in the book, the genealogical order and how Clara's innocent appearance continues and...

• Word Count: 613
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School

In Isabel Allende's novel, The House of the Spirits, the important event of Clara Trueba's death serves as a structural division in the plot. ... Clara's death also transformed the rebellious nation's political system, the lives of the different family members, and even the spirits in the house; from the translucent images and surreal tone, before Clara's death, to absolute realism of panic and chaos after her death. Through Allende's tone and diction, the reader is aided in realizing a shift in the plot, "Alba knew that her grandmother was the soul of the b...

• Word Count: 990
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The House of the Spirits Although throughout most of his time in the novel "The House of the Spirits", written by Isabel Allende, Esteban Trueba acts as selfish person who for the most part has no respect for people's lives. ...

• Word Count: 958
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

Isabel Allende, in The House of the Spirits, uses this style of writing to outline Chile's tumultuous past as well as to provide her own social commentary on the current state of society. ... Reading The House of the Spirits one can see that more and more problems seem to accumulate over time, and the quality of life never really improves. ... The House of the Spirits provides new perspectives on the way we view progress, especially in its relationship to technology and modernization. ...

• Word Count: 1164
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Sherri Higgins is a researcher on ghosts and spirits. ... The house was built in the 1790's. One ghost was seen when a guest of the house was walking to breakfast and asked the house owner's if the "other guest" was coming down to eat. ... The story goes that Sara Winchester, the wife of the inventor of Winchester guns, had to build a house big enough to house every person killed by this gun. The house had stairs and doorways that led to no where. ...

• Word Count: 1035
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

Isabel Allende uses Clara Trueba's character in The House of the Spirits to create a structural split, or a division in the plot. ... These shifting factors in the novel can be conveyed to the reader by Allende's diction and tone: Alba knew that her grandmother was the soul of the big house on the corner everybody else learned it later, when Clara died and the house lost its flowers, its nomadic friends, and its playful spirits and entered into an era of decline (p283). ... The painting captures the magic and the spirits of the house, especially with Clara, floating and hovering...

• Word Count: 1506
• Approx Pages: 6

On the journey home, the men sing the song of the paddle to protect them from the forest's spirits. ... The palms (like the arms of the human) are used in the construction of houses and the core (inner flesh) provides more than 90% of the Asmat diet. ... There is pressure for the men to drive the spirits from the village during their final dance. ... Furthermore in 1963 they burned festival houses and other significant cultural and religious items and dancing and drumming were forbidden. ... Their trees are cut down with chainsaws and as the trees fall, so fall the tree spirits. ...

• Word Count: 1422
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

English Honors Philip Rosenberg Reading Journal October 24th, 2002 Chile and The House of the Spirits During the early 20th century Chile was separated into a higher class and a lower class without much in between. ... These historical events are mirrored in the novel The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende through the Trueba Families triumphs, afflictions, and day to day life. The major characters in The House of the Spirits come from two opposing classes, the aristocracy and the peasants. ... Simply by making class struggle a major theme of th...

• Word Count: 1038
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The House of the Spirits, loosely based on Allende's own life story, is a complex interweaving of multiple view points of the Trueba family, led by Esteban Trueba, and supported by Clara, his wife, their daughter Blanca, twin sons, Nicolas and Jaime, and Blanca's lovechild, Alba. ... The term magical realism, itself, originates from the pen of German critic, Franz Roh, in 1925, and was used to describe a group of Post Expressionist artists, but later delved into describing a Latin American literary genre popularized from after World War II, to the beginnings of the 1980s, around th...

• Word Count: 1940
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

As each person who was prosecuted of witchery, the girls defended themselves by testifying that they (the one accused) would come into each of the girl's rooms at night and send spirits from the devil to touch them at night. ... On the first day, Abigail mentioned Elizabeth Proctor as having unusual things in her house such as, "poppets." ... Elizabeth goes with the police in the precaution that she might be convicted with the findings of the poppet in the house. ... Then, Abigail decides to make it seem as if Mary Warren talks to the devil by putting spirits on Abigail. ... Mary Warren u...

• Word Count: 628
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: High School

The house in Cloudstreet is deeply symbolic. ... A lady who deemed herself the "Daisy Bates of the city" first owned the house. ... In this case, the house as a whole, and the aboriginal man are used a symbol to prove this. ... Besides this, the fact that "The spirits on the wall are fading, fading, finally being forced on their way to oblivion" at Wax Harry's birth shows that the familial bonds that are now made concrete have exorcised the dark spirits of the house. ... The house "breathes its first painless breath in half a century" and the room "sighs" in apparent relief as the union b...

• Word Count: 1957
• Approx Pages: 8

I want my family and friends to learn and understand that nobody should have the power to bring their spirits down by making them feel like they are worthless, like my half-sister did to me. ... She became extremely depressed, and felt she could no longer remain in her house. ... I also took it upon myself to start looking for a new house for her to move to. It just so happened that the house across the street from me was for rent, so I called the owner of the house and obtained all of the information for her. They ended up moving in, and needed someone to help them move and transport their ...

• Word Count: 1209
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

In both films the setting takes place in a large, dark, gloomy, and secluded house that gives the viewers a sense of foreboding and mystery. ... We are not quite sure whether we should fear these new tenants or the dead spirits. ... Typical to horror film genre on injustice has been committed causing the unrest of dead spirits. ...

• Word Count: 481
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School

The actual "House of Usher" is a symbol in itself. ... Repeating descriptions referring to the windows as "vacant eye-like windows" portraying the house as an actual face, but looking deeper it is interpreted that the house is actually symbolic to a mind as "through two luminous windows saw spirits moving musically to a lute's well-tuned law" the reader sees the internal aspect of the house, primarily as a soul, the key to the mind ( Poe 1,2,6). Through Poe's construction of this theme, the house being the foundation of the mind, other aspects can be incorporated such as the houses p...

• Word Count: 1147
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Through out this act Abby continues to tell her uncle how there were not conjuring spirits in the woods they were simply dancing. ... Also in Act 1 Parris is questioning Abby about why she was dismissed from the proctors house (I think he knows about the affair at this point) and Abigail explains that Elizabeth hates her and is a liar but I think this is all a front to get her uncle to believe the lies she is telling him. ... In Act three in the courtrooms at every point when things are going wrong for her she turns to the spirits. ... I cannot sleep for dreaming"'"; I cannot dream but...

• Word Count: 1314
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

Some of the spirits these masks evoke are represented in masks depicting women, royalty and animals. ... The Igbo use thousands of masks, which incarnate unspecified spirits of the dead, forming a vast community of souls. ... Some masks were also kept in shrines and meeting houses. ... Kuba masks also reflect spirits that act as intermediaries between the Supreme Being and mortals. ... Where the Igbo center mainly on unspecified spirits of the dead, the core of Kuba masking is much more specific. ...

• Word Count: 1569
• Approx Pages: 6

The women were in charge of the land, house and they would also weave baskets. ... Kachinas are powerful spirits to the native Hopi's and other Native Americans that are called upon to bring rain and help crops grow. ... Kachina dolls were carved out of wood by the Zuni and the Hopi and were detailed to the point that they were clothed in masks and costumes to mirror the adult men who dressed up as Kachina spirits. ...

• Word Count: 607
• Approx Pages: 2
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

The spirits told the Zuni to find the "idiwana or the middle place" (Terry, 2002), so they could build their village. ... They took this as a message from the spirits and started to build their village (Bonvillain, 1995, pp.14). The Zuni people worship spirits called the Raw People. ... Membership for this cult is hereditary in the matrilineal family residing in the house (Terry, 2002). ... Kachinas are spirits, there are many spirits, like spirits of the dead, spirits of animals, and spirits of the stars to name a few (Terry, 2002). ...

• Word Count: 1822
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

The Cloud Street library is not seen as part of the house, everyone, except Fish, neglects it. It took the love between Rose and Quick as well as the birth of Wax Harry in the library to exorcise the spirits of the Aboriginal girl and the White woman and make the library inhabitable again. ... She did not feel right being in the house and she "wasn't the type to argue with a living, breathing house". Oriel does not move back into the house until the end of the book when she packs up the tent with the help of Dolly, only when Fish is complete does she feels that she can move back into ...

• Word Count: 1377
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

The gothic genre is a type of movie and novel that includes lots of darkness, haunting, evil spirits, death, and other scary factors. ... The movie also lacked audio effects such as eerie melodic music and howling wind or spirits that other gothic genre movies have. ... The movie did include some elements of the gothic genre, such as a haunted house, mass murders, darkness, black cats, women in distress, and undead beings. Also, there was a repeating occurrence of a black cat and a young boy that appeared before each killing in the haunted house. ...

• Word Count: 737
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: High School

"Solomon had never let Livvie go any farther than the chicken house and the well. (515). ... The bottle trees were suppose to keep evil spirits Watt 3 way. In this case the bottle trees were supposed to protect Livvie from the evil spirits. ... Now I lay eyes on young man and it come to be somebody I know all the time, and been knowing since we were born in a cotton patch, and watched grow up year to year, Cash McCord growed to size growed up to come in my house in the end ragged and barefoot" (522). ...

• Word Count: 834
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: High School

Therefore, why would she have commanded one of her evil spirits to kill some horses and cows? ... Say of Molmesworth to steal victuals for him out of her master's house" (pg.308). ... Finally, if he had two spirits to do whatever mischief he desired, then why did he not use them for his benefit? ... Secondly, there were always two spirits given to the people. ... These spirits were said to have been used to perform mischievous deeds as well as to have sucked from the person's body. ...

• Word Count: 1909
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School

The house is personified in the novel and is very much apart of the family. ... The house is alive and Fish hears it talking. Also the spirits that haunt the library give the house a numinous feel. Later the evil spirits are dispelled when Quick and Rose cut a hole in the library. In the end the house's " door stood open, pressed back by the breeze they made in passing, the doors remained open almost as if welcoming "the little boxy woman and the big blowsy woman- Tim Winton's Cloudstreet tells us, families though not always loving and supporting, will be there in times of need. ...

• Word Count: 1583
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School