The novels So Long a Letter written by Mariama Bâ and The House of the Spirits written by Isabel Allende have certain similarities. The novel So Long a Letter is about a woman whose husband died and she discovers that her now deceased husband has a second wife. The novel consists of the main character writes a letter to her friend, whose ex-husband also took on a second wife, explaining the trials she is experiencing. The novel The House of the Spirits consists of three narrators that portray their life. In the novels So Long a Letter and The House of the Spirits there is an archetype of a phoenix that is portrayed by the characters Esteban Trueba, and Alba from Isabel Allende's novel, plus Ramatoulaye, and Aissatou in Mariama Bâ's when the characters are faced with many losses.
In the novel The House of the Spirits Esteban Trueba is forced to deal with the death of numerous loved ones. In the beginning of the story, his fiancé Rosa dies from being poisoned by brandy, and he metaphorically turns into ashes when he believes "without Rosa life no longer had any meaning" (Allende 47). He overcomes this loss by moving on and marrying Rosa's sister Clara. We learn of this decision when Clara stops her silence and asked him if he wanted to marry her, to which he replied, "Yes, Clara, that's why I came"(111). Esteban defeated this trial with his own way of managing his problems.
Esteban also is required to deal with the death of his sister Ferula. Previous to her dying, he forces her to move out of his house, but not before he "realizes his sister is dead when Clara vented all his fury as an unhappy husband, shouting things at her he never should have said" (157). Clara is the one that announces "Ferula is dead"(175) after her ghost visits the family. Esteban becomes a phoenix again when he is "furious because his sister, even now that she was dead, could still manage to make him feel guilty, just as she had when he was a boy"(180). The rebirth occurs when Clara helps him to understand his sister. Clara also passes away and creates the portrayal of a character being a phoenix. Alba, Clara's granddaughter,
"began to suffer nightmares from which she awoke screaming and feverish. She dreamt that everybody in the family was dying and that she was left to wander in the big house alone, with no other company than the faint, threadbare ghost that wandered up and down the corridors"(346).
Alba rises from the ashes by beginning to write her grandmothers life story, "with the help of [her] grandfather, whose memory remained intact down to the last second of his ninety years"(489).
In the epistolary novel So Long a Letter the main character Ramatoulaye has to deal with the death of her husband Modou. She is faced with her suffering as the "wails and tears all around [her], confirm his death" (Bâ 3), and she must endure
"the moment dreaded by every Senegalese woman, the moment when she sacrifices her possessions as gifts to her family-in-law, and worse still, beyond her possessions she gives up her personality, her dignity, becoming a thing in the service of the man who has married her, his grandfather, his grandmother, his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, his uncle, his aunt, his male and female cousins, his friends"(4).
She is characterized as a phoenix when she takes on this philosophy: "to overcome my bitterness, I think of human destiny"(11). This philosophy helps her manage the tests she faces in her life.
In both novels the characters deal with a loss of love. Esteban losses his love Clara when he beats her, and she stops speaking and goes into years of silence. He became the phoenix when he "ignored her silence and spoke normally to her, interpreting her slightest gestures as replies"(261). Aissatou in Mariama Bâ's novel is faced with the loss of her love when her husband takes on a second wife. Aissatou is converted to ash when she discovers "the whole town knew about" her husbands new wife while she "suspected nothing and continued to be radiant" (Bâ 30). She triumphed over this obstacle by writing him a letter that informed her spouse that she was "stripping [herself] of [his] love, [his] name, clothed in [her] dignity, the only worthy garment" (32). She ultimately depicted a phoenix when she divorced him.
Many of the characters were troubled with a loss of order in their life. A daughter's pregnancy was one of the causes of this confusion. In The House of the Spirits Esteban Trueba's daughter Blanca becomes pregnant by Pedro Tercero Garcia. Being considered a member of high society, Esteban "knew that the scandal would be the same whether she gave birth to a bastard child or married the son of a peasant: society would condemn her in either case" (Allende 246). To reestablish the order in his life, he went out in search of "a husband for his deflowered daughter and a father for" (247) her child. Jean de Satigny was the suitor he found for his daughter to marry. By ultimately demanding his daughter to marry against her will, he restored the stability in his life which symbolized his rebirth as a phoenix.
Ramatoulaye's daughter, Aissatou namesake, became pregnant, too. In her letter to Aissatou she wrote, "I envy you for having only boys! You don't know the terrors I face in dealing with the problems of my daughters" (Bâ 87). The problem is referring to her daughter being with child. It took her "superhuman effort" to come to the "decision to help and protect" (83) her daughter, even though it went against her culture. Her neighbor Farmata, who "had diverging points of view on everything" (80), urged her to disown the expecting child. Overcoming the situation, Ramatoulaye ends her letter explaining that "despite everything- disappointments and humiliations- hope still lives within [her]" (89). This means that she turned away from all her troubles to overcome them and be reborn as a phoenix
Alba experienced a loss of order in her life when she fell I love with Miguel in The House of the Spirits. The young couple "sought out every possible occasion to meet on the leafy promenades of the nearby park", they were happy and full of "uncontrollable passion" (Allende 346) for each other. This was at the peak of their life. During the political turmoil that plagued the town, Miguel went missing and Alba had "imagined a thousand times over that he was a prisoner or that he had been put to death in the most dreadful manner" (450). This was when Alba had reached her breaking point, and she was at rock bottom. When she finally saw him, she was overjoyed and savored everything about him.
Ramatoulaye's loss of order occurred when she discovered the existence of her co-wife. Irritated by her husband's second wife, Binetou, she was obligated to have her co-wife "installed in [her] house for the funeral, in accordance with tradition" (Bâ 3). She had to face her problem head on and relied on her diary as a "prop on [her] distress" (1). With the help of this coping mechanism, she was able to survive this trying situation when Binetou "return[ed] to her SICAP villa. At last!" (8).
The characters Esteban Trueba, and Alba from Isabel Allende's novel, along with Ramatoulaye, and Aissatou in Mariama Bâ's are depicted as phoenixes when the characters are faced with a loss in the novels So Long a Letter and The House of the Spirits. The characters were burdened with the loss of people, loss of order, and loss of love. The characters used their own way of dealing with the different circumstances they were overwhelmed with. In the end there were numerous characters that were portrayed within the archetype of the phoenix.
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