Abstract
Paying close attention to The Infinite Plan, Allende’s first novel about the United States, this chapter analyzes American identity by exploring Allende’s insistence on the inextricable relationship between gendered discourse, patriarchy, and nationalism. While feminists have historically seen national power as a crucial factor in the reproduction of patriarchy, an analysis of The Infinite Plan clarifies Allende’s position that American identity rests on patriarchal discourses of power and that nationalism extols masculine traits and denigrates the feminine. Recalling that Foucault’s notion of “truth” as always relative and caught up in a network of power relations, we see that Allende’s fictional biography thus becomes an investigation into “aesthetics of power” where the characters, who are based on “real” characters but incorporated into Allende’s fictional reality, both produce and resist a masculine-based truth that operates at various levels.2 In doing so, Allende applies her knowledge gained from the experience of surviving a military dictatorship in Chile to an analysis of US militarism and US nationalism.
He had fulfilled the rights of passage and the successive steps along the road to manhood; he had made himself a man, silently enduring repeated bumps and knocks along the way, faithful to the national myth of the independent, proud, and free individual. He considered himself a good citizen willing to pay his taxes and defend his country, but somewhere he had fallen into an insidious trap, and instead of living the expected reward he was still slogging through a swamp.
—Isabel Allende, The Infinite Plan 1
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Notes
Isabel Allende, The Infinite Plan, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London, UK: Harper, 1991), 245. This passage will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter.
The “aesthetics of power” is discussed in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, “Introduction,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), ix–xx.
John Rodden, “Introduction,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, Revised Edition, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 18.
Isabel Allende in an interview with John Brosnahan, “Transforming Stories, Writing Reality,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, trans. from Spanish Virginia Invernizzi, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 165.
Isabel Allende in an interview with Jacqueline Cruz, Jacqueline Mitchell, Silvia Pellarolo, and Javier Rangel, “A Sniper between Cultures,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, trans. from Spanish Virginia Invernizzi, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 209.
Mary Mackey, “Adrift in America: Lost Souls Wander the United States in Isabel Allende’s New Novel,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 25, 1993, http://www.isabelallende.com/infinite_plan_reviews.htm (Accessed November 17, 2010).
Michael Toms, “Writing from the Belly,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, Revised Edition, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 182. Allende explains, “My protagonist goes through life running after the materialistic American Dream. The 80s betray him, and he ends up on his knees. He has to start all over again; he has to find his roots and go back to the basics, and he does that. I feel that’s what’s happening to this society. We’ve reached a point where violence, crime, loneliness, and despair are so terrible that people are looking for answers in other places now.”
Isabel Allende explains this in an interview with Jennifer Benjamin and Sally Engelfried, “Magical Feminist,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, Revised Edition, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004),195.
Celia Correas de Zapata, Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 2002), 79–81.
John Rodden, “The Writer as Exile, and her Search for Home,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, Revised Edition, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 234. Allende explains, “My husband tried to write a book about much of the content of the novel, but he couldn’t do it. I could do it, both because I had the distance and because I became a journalist again. I interviewed my husband and a friend named Tabra who makes my jewelry. I went to all the places, I ‘researched’ California: there really is a man who invented a religion called ‘The Infinite Plan.’”
Isabel Allende, “Isabel Allende: 2010 National Book Festival,” Library of Congress, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lRL2aiuLi4 (Accessed November 22, 2010).
Rosa Pinol, “A Mother’s Letter of Loss,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, trans. from Spanish Virginia Invernizzi, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 401.
Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4–5.
Jo Fisher, Out of Shadows: Women, Resistance and Politics in South America (London, UK: Latin America Bureau, 1993), 25.
Change International Reports, Military Ideology and the Dissolution of Democracy: Women in Chile (London, UK: Change International Reports: Women and Society, 1981), 6.
David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 41.
See Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions (1990),” in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sarah Sulih with Judith Butler (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 114.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, UK: Routledge, 1990), 138.
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992), 215.
See Thomas F. Strychacz, Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 3.
This would reflect Greenblatt’s definition of “self-fashioning.” See Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Introduction,” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 9.
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 212.
Crèvecœur writes of such an American man in Letters from an American Farmer with the example of Mr. John Bertram, who is described as a “worthy citizen” and a “good, trusty, moral” man (182). See J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Susan Manning (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 129.
Sigmund Freud, Civilizations and its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London, UK: Penguin, 2002), 4–5.
Anne McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Gender, Race, and Nationalisms,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 89.
Daniel Conway, “Contesting the Masculine State,” in Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender, and Violence in International Relations, ed. Jane L. Parpart and Marysia Zalewski (London, UK: Zed Books Ltd, 2008), 127.
See Nancy R Comley and Robert Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), ix.
Rosalind Miles, The Rites of Man: Love, Sex and Death in the Making of the Male (London, UK: Grafton, 1991), 1.
Jill Steans, Gender and International Relations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 50.
Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 44.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 202–3.
Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith, “Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe,” in Writing New Identities, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11.
Ten days after Pinochet’s government took power, the newspaper La Nación had a front-page photograph of “overworked” barbers cutting the long hair off many young men. As described in Mary Helen Spooner, Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 10.
See Augusto Pinochet, Pinochet: Patria y Democracia, ed. Andrés Bello (Santiago, Chile: Corporacion de Estudios Nacionales, 1983), 188, 91.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3.
Salvador Allende Gossens, “‘The Purpose of our Victory,’ in Inaugural Address in the National Stadium (Santiago, November 5, 1970),” in Chile’s Road to Socialism, trans. J. Darling, ed. Joan E. Garces (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1973), 53.
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, as quoted in Morna Macleod, Pinochet’s Chile: An Eyewitness Report 1980/1981 (Nottingham, UK: Chile Committee for Human Rights, 1981), 20. Also see
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Pinochet: Patria y Democracia, ed. Andrés Bello (Santiago, Chile: Corporacion de Estudios Nacionales, 1983), 55.
One journalist described the coup as genocide. See Carlos Cerda, Génocide au Chili (Paris, France: Cahiers Libres, 1974), 9.
John Lechte, “Hannah Arendt,” in Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-Humanism, 2nd ed. (London, UK: Routledge, 2008), 230.
Mark Ensalaco, Chile under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), x.
See Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press, 1980), 78–108.
Rosalind Miles, Women and Power (Glasgow, Scotland: Futura Publications, 1985), 81.
Sandra Lee Bartky, “Femininity, Foucault, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 72.
See Helen O’Grady, Woman’s Relationship with Herself: Gender, Foucault, and Therapy (London, UK: Routledge, 2005), 27.
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 36.
See John C. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000).
Stephanie A. Slocum-Schaffer, America in the Seventies 70s (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 169.
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© 2013 Bonnie M. Craig
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Craig, B.M. (2013). Gendered Discourses of Patriarchal Nationalism. In: Rewriting American Identity in the Fiction and Memoirs of Isabel Allende. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337580_4
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