SOURCE: Roof, Maria. “W. E. B. Du Bois, Isabel Allende, and the Empowerment of Third World Women.” CLA Journal 39, no. 4 (June 1996): 401-16.

In the following essay, Roof compares the narrative patterns of The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Infinite Plan to W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of “double consciousness.”

Might the theories developed by an African-American male sociologist-philosopher born in 1868 be so highly insightful that they have relevance to the works of a Basque-descended, Chilean, female novelist publishing in the 1980s? Some truths traverse cultures and speak to unanticipated audiences in new and exciting ways. Distant in time and space are two seemingly disparate writers, the famous U.S. intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and the contemporary Chilean novelist Isabel Allende (1940). Yet Du Bois's theories about the marginalized African sector of U.S. society illuminate essential aspects of...