The mysterious beauty of the feminine can be seen elusively threaded underneath the power of the masculine, and quite simply, it has been this way since the early sparks of civilization. A common catch phrase summarizes this idea with "behind every great man, is an even greater woman,"" meaning that in the social hierarchy where men reign supreme, the male platform is built upon the strength of the maternal, held thickly in the metaphorical womb. For the masculine, with all it's rationality, realism and decisiveness, it is the concave hallow that fits into the convex of the feminine, with all it's subtle whimsy, elements of fantasy and nurturing undertones. Isabel Allende, a Chilean novelist, illustrates the spectacular glow of the feminine influence on the power of patriarchy, despite the male refusal to acknowledge it as it's equal, by employing the use of magical realism, a modern Latin American literary tradition, with in her masterwork, The House of the Spirits, paralleling the magical realist work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez who discourses on the decay of absolute patriarchal power, as seen in Autumn of the Patriarch. .
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 strength of the novel lies in Allende's portrayal of the feminine, and the strength of her women characters, heightened by her use of magical realism.
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 the time when Allende's House of Spirits was first published.
