Metzger is a Ph.D. specializing in literature and drama at The University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the English department and an adjunct professor in the university honors program. In this essay, she discusses how the women in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits use the supernatural as a mechanism for escape from the patriarchy of Latin-American family structure.

During the more than seventy years that The House of the Spirits spans, each of the women in Esteban Trueba's life finds a way to escape his obsessive control. Although externally, Clara, Blanca, and Alba continue to exist within Esteban's world and in his house, each one is able to escape, to create an internal place where she can go. With the use of the supernatural, the Trueba women can escape to a spiritual world, a magical world from which Esteban is...