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The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

#101: Nov. - Dec. 2011 (Fiction)
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Suzanne

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The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende

The Three Marias
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heledd
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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For me, this chapter chronicles Esteban’s regression to his childhood fits of rage, his fury at the unjust and shameful poverty of his youth, and the rejection of the expectations of self sacrifice imposed on him by his women folk.
Neither of the children have any sympathy for the mother, bedridden, and immobile, left alone ‘with no other company than her pious reading materials’ and the occasional thrill of being taken to church and accused by Father Restrepo of being ‘a shameless hussy who prostitutes herself down by the docks!’

At Tres Marias he is free of any feminine restrictions on his towering fits of rage. Initially, his enormous energy is dissipated in the regeneration of the hacienda, but with this venture’s emerging success, his energy takes the form of sexual perversion.
Again, we have two voices. Estaban talks of the past and his memories, while the narrator fills in omissions.

Estaban has no doubt that he has been a good patron. The land was restored to prosperity, a school and granary built, a sewing workshop established, peasants ailments treated, and no one went hungry.
The narrator, however, describes his pre meditated and savage rape of a fifteen year old, returned to her parents once pregnant.
The radio is the first sign of change in the hacienda, bringing news of the war in Europe, but it is ignored by everyone apart from Pedro Segunda, the closest friend Esteban had. Pedro Segunda hates Esteban, but seems unable to name the reasons, even though it is his sister that Esteban first raped. Here, the narration takes one of it’s unsettling leaps into the future, informing us that Pedro Segunda ‘…would have to put up with his tantrums, his inconsiderate orders, and his self importance for the rest of his life’.
The rape of children continues for ten years ‘with a string of bastards that was springing up behind him as if by magic’ Esteban is unsure of the exact number of children he has fathered, because to him peasant women were ‘. . .a hygienic method for relieving the tensions of the day and obtaining a good night’s sleep’. He only acknowledges his first child, also called Esteban. Perhaps Esteban is seeking revenge against the women who have raised him.
The peasants are powerless to act, this is normal behaviour for a patron, and generations of women have suffered in the same way.
The post war boom brings more wealth to the already wealthy, but the peasants’ life style remains unchanged. But now with immigrants from Europe bringing subversive ideas, and the spread of radio, and the telegraph, there is awareness that change is imminent. Pedro Segunda and an old priest try to persuade Esteban of this, but he remains totally unconvinced, and blind to the coming social revolution.
The end of this era is proclaimed by a dream Esteban has, in which he sees Rosa hurling a package at him, which is a tiny girl with no eyes, calling him ‘Papa’. Perhaps this signifies the raped children who should have been protected by his paternalism, not violated by it. That same day, Esteban receives a letter summoning him to his home.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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Later in the book, there are three old clairvoyant ladies who are rather similar to the three Norns of Norse myth, or the Graeae who help Perseus find Medusa in the Greek myth.

The name of Esteban Trueba's rural farm, the three Maries (Tres Marias), seems like a nod to this sense of fate, and again a symbol for Chile.

Esteban finds his ancestral property utterly run down. Through hard work, skill and leadership, he converts it into a model farm.

The surprising thing in this discussion is how Allende presents a sympathetic portrait of Esteban's right wing political philosophy. He explains that if it were not for him, the peasants of Tres Marias would still be dirt poor and illiterate. It gives a sense of why owners of property hate communists so much, who they see as idiots and wreckers consumed by dreams of resentment and lacking any practical understanding of how to make anything real.

However, there are some ominous contradictions, especially Esteban's bad habit of raping virgins with impunity. He stores up hatred for himself, although the peasants are powerless to do anything against him. It suggests that everything he has done for them is irrelevant against the class hatred founded on Esteban's attitude that peasants are sub-human.

There are similarities between The House of the Spirits and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In both, a family represents a nation in its contradictory identity. In both, a father has bastard sons who destroy him. The common parable is that conventional traditions do not understand how they appear to their victims, and that irrational and evil behavior by rulers has a price in the generation of social conflict.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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After he rapes Pancha, the first girl, he does begin to take an interest in the lives and welfare of the peasants. But when she becomes pregnant, he reverts to using the girls for his own pleasure again. He firmly believes that the peasants are incapable of acting on their own initiative, and need leadership, and a 'father figure'. Perhaps this was so, when he first took an interest in the hacienda, but he refuses to acknowledge that times were changing with the very first radio set that he himself built.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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There are similarities between The House of the Spirits and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In both, a family represents a nation in its contradictory identity. In both, a father has bastard sons who destroy him.
Ooh! haven't come to that bit yet
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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Any ideas of the meaning of Rosa hurling the little girl with no eyes at Esteban?
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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In this chapter, Estaban shows a contradictory nature. He is a man of rage and selfishness, but he gives the peasants a better life. He builds a school, granary, etc. He may have done it all for selfish reasons, to make his hacienda the best, he needed to have healthy workers. It may have been that he did it for himself, since he thinks the peasants are like children, unable to take care of themselves.

He sinks into a life of depravity, raping the girls of the hacienda. He thinks of them as an object to satisfy his needs. He becomes a despicable man, all the while patting himself on the back about what a good patron he is.

He is faced with the reality of his mother, who he has not been to see nor planned to see, when he is told she is dying. He sent them food and other things to assuage his guilt over not going to see them. He again thinks he is a good man because he provides for them and sends them letters.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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The essential paradox within Chilean politics emerges in Allende's description of how Esteban Trueba builds the rundown farm of Three Maries into a model capitalist property.

This chapter provides a physical and pyychological portrait of Esteban. His mother's family were Lima blue bloods, which is one factor giving the false impression the book might be set in Peru rather than Chile. His father was a wastrel. A summary about Ernesto is at shmoop.com/house-of-spirits/esteban-tru ... rueba.html, a website with a lot of good information about The House of the Spirits.

The chapter starts as Esteban and his sister Ferula mourn Rosa. Esteban decides that his mine won't make him rich, so he will restore his rural property The Three Maries. The journey by train and foot to the remote property paints a vivid picture of despair and poverty. "About five miles outside the town of San Lucas, along a ruined path overgrown with weeds and full of potholes, there was a wooden sign with the name of the property. It hung from a broken chain and the wind knocked it against the post with a muffled sound that made it echo like a funeral drum. A single glance was enough to make him understand that it would take a Hercules to rescue the place from desolation." (p64)
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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Have 10 pages left to read in this chapter...will have er done by tomorrow morning. I despise Estaban.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; The Three Marias

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Damifino wrote:I despise Estaban.
I think Allende intends us to despise him. However, she is also at great pains to provide a sympathetic portrait of his entrepreneurial talents. This is part of the paradox of the book, that the conservative classes have provided leadership that has built national wealth, but in doing so they have employed methods of bastardry, if that term can also mean creation of bastards as well as acting like a bastard, that make them very hateable.

Esteban is to be despised not just because of his rape and violence, but also because he rejects his illegitimate children. This cold indifference to things that he himself is responsible for is monumentally unjust. The peasants of Tres Marias look on Esteban with mingled hate, fear and respect. The respect remains because of the fact that he has actually built up the property and its resources through his own effort and skill, and the coordination of the workforce would not have happened without him. And yet, he lives by a code of legitimacy that is pure class prejudice, denying full humanity to everyone who is not of his class.
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