Allende’s ‘Soul’ full of humour, wisdom and a very real anger
That Isabel Allende’s The Soul of a Woman is forthright, honest and passionate will not surprise her legions of fans. Ever since she burst on to the scene with The House of the Spirits, in 1982, she has had a wildly enthusiastic audience for her magical-realist fables. But this new book, a “meditation on power, feminism and what it means to be a woman”, is also funny.
That it should be humorous on a subject that she takes entirely seriously at the same time is one of the great pleasures of this little collection.
Written during lockdown, The Soul of a Woman is a series of observations, too fragmentary to be called essays, but none the less compelling for their juxtapositions: the topic of vanity segues — hilariously — to that of online dating as an older person: “Any 60-year-old grumpy guy with a beer belly feels that he deserves a woman 20 or 30 years younger.”
An account of her surprise at the global success of her first novel is followed by an admission that the lack of acceptance by the — predominantly male — Chilean literati still stings. Then she’s off again on the quest for eternal youth and the realities of ageing, vowing that she will be “active forever and use every brain cell and soul spark so there will be nothing left when I go”. It shouldn’t work, but it does, because of that unstoppable energy, that wry optimism and that deep seam of fun that runs alongside the darker stories.
It was her mother Panchita’s
struggles as a single mum that informed Isabel’s feminism, as she saw how difficult it was for her to survive in the 1940s without a provider. Salvation came in the form of Ramón, a Chilean diplomat, “well situated on the upper bar of the chicken coop”, but Allende saw that to be truly independent, she needed to earn her own living. A job on a feminist magazine, Paula, and a popular column, ‘Civilise your Troglodyte’, followed. “My three colleagues and I wrote with a knife between our teeth,” she says with relish, as they took on subjects like sex, money, the menopause, contraception and so on. For the first time, motherhood was no longer the pinnacle of a woman’s achievements, a lesson she would pass on to both her daughter, Paula, and her son, Nicolas.
However, “in a blatant contradiction of my feminist preachings”, she married Miguel at just 20, before blind passion caused her to leave her two children to follow a lover to Spain for two months in 1976, returning “heartbroken, with my tail between my legs”. It would seem that feminism doesn’t free us from our hormones, about which Allende is admirably truthful.
She refers to the “epic idiocies I engaged in from my 30s to my 50s because of sexual passion” while being clear that she would change nothing. At 78, she knows that the only thing that frees women is age, “when we become invisible and are no longer objects of desire”. Allende addresses this invisibility head on, and the irony that the liberation that comes with age does not negate vanity.
Just like her mother, who declared, aged 90, “I don’t look bad despite my age, do I? The few friends I have left look like iguanas,” Allende says. “I jump out of bed an hour before everybody else to shower and put on makeup, because when I wake up, I look like a defeated boxer.” But now, she no longer internalises the standards of other women to whom she compares herself unfavourably. Instead, she needs no other justification than that this process “gives me pleasure”.
But deeper female suffering is
never far from Allende’s mind. As a young woman, she accompanied a suicidal teenager to a backstreet abortionist because,
Deeper female suffering is never far from Allende’s mind. As a young woman, she accompanied a suicidal teenager to a backstreet abortionist
“in Chile, abortion was severely punished by law but was widely practiced clandestinely, and still is.” Although this happened 60 years ago, she says,“I have not been able to forget it... I relive it in my nightmares.”
Her work on her foundation, which she created following the tragic death of her daughter in 1992, has taken her to parts of the world where feminism might seem like a pipe dream: a town in Africa decimated by Aids, Nepal, where her friend Olga Murray has worked tirelessly to end the practice of female slavery, places where FGM, honour killings and war crimes against women are commonplace.
And many here will be painfully aware of the double standards that define our more “advanced” societies: the unequal treatment of female celebrities, the trolling of women on social media and the uncomfortable statistics about how the work of home and childrearing was divided during the pandemic.
Allende doesn’t have all the answers to the Herculean task of improving the lives of women, simply declaring: “We have a lot of work to do, my friends... We are going to get really angry, so angry that our fury will smash the foundations that support our civilisation.”
Light on detail, but perhaps it’s unfair to expect her to come up with a timetabled action plan. Allende is a writer, and her job is to inspire, to entertain, to provoke, all of which she has achieved in this endlessly stimulating book.
And that energy, that curiosity is still very much alive.
Her grandchildren tell her that they are non-binary and she is jubilant that they won’t be bound by gender roles as were her generation. Where that will lead us is going to be interesting, particularly when we come up against the age-old conundrum of who rears the children, but her point is well made.
The Soul of a Woman is like a gossipy lunch with a wise aunt: full of humour, wisdom and energy, but it is also propelled by a real anger at the lack of progress since the wave of feminism first broke in the 1960s.
Brave, fiery and truthful, it’s authentically, inimitably Isabel Allende.