The life in a hacienda: peasants slaving away in the fields, the patron watching over his flock of subordinates from the best horse in the stables, and the wife sewing or doing some other meaningless craft while watching the children play on a background of perfect blue sky. But of course, nothing ever is as it appears. In The House of the Spirits Isabel Allende uses the theme of appearance versus reality to satirize the gender roles in Chili. Clara epitomizes the independent beat down feminine role, and Esteban Trueba lends himself to be criticized as both the harsh patron and the dominating male figure.

According to the church which the Del Valle family frequented “putting women on an equal footing with men [was] in open defiance of the law of God.” However, sitting in her own row of the church was Nivea and her family. Nivea, Clara’s mother, was a woman’s activist. She fought for everything from suffrage to banning uncomfortable corsets. Little Clara, only ten years old at the time, was sitting next to her mother and holding her mother’s hand. The early childhood years are said to be the time when a person develops their personality and Clara was no exception. Clara was,”extremely precocious and had inherited the runaway imagination of all the women in her family on her mother’s side.” However instead of Clara yelling at crowds of female workers and trying to influence politics like Nivea, her weapon was silence. Clara’s traumatizing experience of seeing her sister’s body taken advantage of by a “successful upper-class man” provoked her years of silence. Then and there Clara realized that the world is filled

with manipulating men that cannot be trusted but who also rule everyone’s lives. Furthermore, Clara refused to play her role as a woman in society. She never learned to cook, clean, or do any other of the household duties a wife is supposed to do; Clara was perfectly content with moving salt cellars around the table with nothing but her mind, and playing Chopin with the cover still over the keys of the piano. Clara was free to be herself, by not letting herself be taught the practices of every other fine young woman she was free to be herself. Even in her marriage to Esteban Trueba she left herself to the will of fate, not caring to love a man and marry him just because that is what is expected of her. Once Clara is married she seems to become subordinate to Esteban; however she controls him with silence and her passiveness. When Esteban has sex with Clara she awlways seems like she is in another world, “in a universe of her own invention.” This apathy controlled Esteban, drove him into tantrums, and was Clara’s power as a woman. Even though Esteban Trueba was “the most powerful patron in the region” nothing could ever give him the satisfaction of having Clara as his.

They say that opposites attract, that somehow couples balance each other out so that there is equilibrium and the world turns. Esteban Trueba is the dominant, classical male character. He is tyrannical and he treats his servants on his hacienda, Tres Marias, as if they were dogs rather than the people who helped him arise to wealth out of near oblivion. The basis for most of Trueba's actions is the desire for power, control, and wealth, and he pursues these things at any cost. He feels that because he is the patron, the alpha male, the head honcho he can do anything. One of the most violent displays of Trueba’s manhood are the many rapes he executes in Tres Marias “…not a girl passed from puberty to adulthood that he did not subject to the woods, the riverbank, or the

wrought-iron bed.” Esteban Trueba was a monster by today’s standards, however in that time in Chili a woman could hardly get upset over such a horrendous act without getting slapped around herself. Trueba wants control over his wife, to “control over that undefined and luminous material that lay with her and that escaped him.” Esteban Trueba believes that girls, daughters, wives, and mothers are all just property, like a crude doll. When he finds out about his daughter’s lover he does not hesitate to beat “her mercilessly, lash upon lash, until the girl fell flat and rigid to the ground.” During his mirage of a marriage he cheated on his wife at the Red Lantern and the Christopher Columbus, two of the well known whore houses in the area. Inside the brothels he found himself powerful, that the “best of the house” was just for him, and that all he needed for love was a handful of pesos.

The theme of gender roles in The House of the Spirits satirizes the old and often inhumane customs in Chili and the rest of the world. Isabel Allende is calling out for reform; even though the book is modern men still inherit an ignorant power-hungry mentality.