Explorting Masculine And Feminie Roles

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Explorting Masculine And Feminie Roles

EXPLORING THE MASCULINE AND FEMININE IN ISABEL ALLENDE'S
THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS
By Jodi Denny
Old Dominion University
Copyright (c) 1997 Jodi Denny
This document may not be reprinted without the permission of the author.
For permission, contact: calvino@pinn.net
Isabel Allende's novel The House of the Spirits is woven with dichotomy. Opposing forces are juxtaposed: rich and poor,
good and evil, political left and right, birth and death, and the forces that will be explored in this paper, the masculine and
feminine. The masculine and feminine are equal in importance to the world of the novel, indeed, the existence of one depends
on the existence of the other. The danger lies in the fact that the masculine overshadows the feminine so much that the existence
of the feminine is threatened. If “women are a nation's primary, fundamental root from which all else grows and blossoms” (Ba
61), this threat to the feminine is a threat to the world of the novel itself. The novel illustrates the dangers of an imbalance of the
masculine and feminine within the individual, the family, and nation.
This paper will explore the concepts of the masculine and the feminine within the novel in the context of Carl Jung's theory of
the anima and animus. Jung recognized distinctive features in the psyche of men and women. He analyzed these differences in
his study of the anima and animus. The anima is the personification of the feminine nature of man's unconscious; the animus the
masculine nature of a woman's unconscious. In her book Women in Twentieth Century Literature: A Jungian View, Bettina
L. Knapp explains that “Jung believes the woman's psyche to be the adverse and reverse of the man's -- complementary to his.
He has remarked time and time again that Eros, or the principle of relatedness and feeling, is dominant in the female; that
Logos, the analytical way, the power to discriminate and judge is supreme in the male” (6). Jung's theory says that logic and
objectivity are usually the predominate features of a man's outer attitude, or at least regarded as ideals, and in a woman it is
feeling (Walz).
Marian L. Pauson elaborates on Jung's concept of the anima and animus in Jung the Philosopher: Essays in Jungian
Thought. She asserts that the animus pole is often projected in different media as “directed, didactic, forceful, functional,
rational, and serious” while the anima pole is projected as “fanciful, imaginative, colorful, lyrica...

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