SOURCE: “Magic Feminism in Isabel Allende's The Stories of Eva Luna,” in Multicultural Literatures through Feminist/Post Structuralist Lenses, edited by Barbara Frey Waxman, The University of Tennessee Press, 1993, pp. 103-36.

In the following essay, Hart provides a feminist interpretation of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna.

Magic used to show the reader what equality between the sexes should be is a key technique employed by Isabel Allende in The Stories of Eva Luna.¹ In the long tradition of magic realism in Latin American letters, the point has never been to hold up an exact mirror to reality, but rather to reflect deeper truths about human nature, sociopolitical conditions, and mortality through what on the surface often appear flamboyant, contradictory, or impossible events. That is exactly what Allende does in this book with such major feminist concerns as prostitution, child abuse, and rape. Reality is transformed to force us to...