Mujerista Movement and Literature

Isabel Allende holds a preeminent place in its literary history, though at times she seems like the lone Feminine voice in Latin American Literature.  Donald Shaw Brown-Forman Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Virginia wrote in his book The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (1998), “Without question the major literary event in Spanish America during the early eighties was the publication in 1982 of Isabel Allende’s runaway success La Casa de los Espiritus”. (Buendel, 2006)

 Her works include a large variety of subjects that affect her female protagonists as History happens around them and how they themselves change its course.  She captures history using a magical reality to reclaim pasts that are often overlooked.

“Women’s stories have not been told, they need a literature that names their pain and allows them to use the emptiness in their lives as an occasion for insight rather than as one more indication of their worthlessness,”  said Carol Christ in Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. (Freitas, 2006)

The claim that women’s stories and voices have been ignored, stifled,  not been told, heard, or encouraged, has been a focus for feminist theories in the past few decades (Freitas, 2006)

The definition or History of Feminism is the history of Feminist movements divided into three ‘waves’ dealing with different aspects of the same issues. These are suffrage, Inequality, and an examination of a self conscious and systemic ideology.  Feminism is the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. 

Isabel Allende is not a writer of Feminism. Feminism is a Narrow depiction of the female experience.  Looking further, there are many different aspects of feminism in literature.

 Amazon feminism is dedicated to the image of the female hero in fiction and in fact, as it is expressed in art and literature in the physiques and feats of female athletes, martial artists, and other powerfully built women, and in gender-related and sexual orientations. (Guthrie, 1995)  In the nineties was seen an explosion of these.  Characters such as Xena: Warrior Princess and female spies such as Sydney Bristol and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer were Icons of this movement.  Allende does not focus her writing on this type of feminism in her works.  They appear sometimes where she would create a peripheral character with an unusual strength.  Her protagonist strength remains hidden.