SOURCE: Spanos, Tony. “Isabel Allende's ‘The Judge's Wife’: Heroine or Female Stereotype?” The Encyclia: The Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 67 (1990): 163-72.

In the following essay, Spanos examines the role of the main female character Casilda within the concepts of literary feminism in the short story “The Judge’s Wife.”

Isabel Allende has become internationally known for her best-seller novels, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, and Eva Luna. Her novels are read and studied in several English, Comparative Literature, and Spanish departments in the United States and Canada. A few of her short stories are now beginning to appear in English in some of the popular literary anthologies. She is presently living in Marin County, California.

The success her three novels have received, not to mention the historical material Allende elaborates on in them, requires us to meditate about and...