The Relationship Between Magical Realism and Feminist Movement

Magical realism is a literary genre that emerged more like a movement first associated with European paintings than Latin American writers. Unlike other genres, magical realism depicts a combination of realistic fiction and real-life moments. The Latin Americans invested in the genre to express their real-life realities initially suppressed by European domination. Magical realism seeks to re-establish the world through literature by showing what it could be if different perceptions are adopted. The genre responds to harsh realities by attacking it in a magical fictional world and demonstrating what the world should become and not it's present. It is a dynamic, open-world dualism seeking to synthesize the stubborn duality that human culture has created as reality. Women chose the magical realism philosophy for feminist themes because both magical realism and feminism seek to recover the same elements. Both phenomena try to re-establish the world from the destruction caused by the Western culture dualistic value system. Now female writers have adapted magical realism to express the mystery of reality that patriarch society has put them through and suppressed their identity. I argue that magical dashes of realism give feminism the space to depict gender suppression realities in a realistic fiction form and normalize particular imaginations of the world that accommodates gender equality.

How Magical Realism is Connected to the Feminist Movement

Both feminism and magical realism emerged as movements used by social icons to address suppressions encountered by people. When Latin American writers used magical realism, they did so to talk about economic oppressions and exploitation by western nations; they used the genre to critique American imperialism and express their stance towards the Western-created ideologies in their region. It is ironic that women later adopted the same genre to address the patriarchal system that disregards women's rights. However, the genre is the only writing technique with enough freedom to express real issues in a fictional way but in a way that demands non-fantasy interpretation. Therefore, magical realism is the perfect writing genre that can allow women writers to move away from the fantastic conformation and write about matters that will receive enough attention in the real world.

In her novel, The House of the Spirits, Allende explores men and women's victimization by Western culture. Allende challenges the dualistic human culture by demonstrating that women are the primary retainers who have been denied human bonding and spirituality and shows that women have the predominant power to change the patriarch system. To reveal the philosophy of feminism, Allende uses magical realism tenets and techniques to empower women's understanding of human reality and challenge the ideologies that deprive this reality. Allende asserts that through the expansion of her imagination and a re-established sense of magic, she can pinpoint the hidden elements of human spirituality and give the readers a chance to open their minds to new possibilities or realities of social norms and imagine transformation through the depicted Chilean society. Through this text, Allende captures her response to the experiences that directly impact her in Chilean society. Using magical realism, she de-familiarizes Chile and recreates it to a magical world where spirituality is allowed to thrive, unlike in the real sense where it is suppressed. The novel is a direct but fictional refusal to accommodate the military's existing patriarchal oppression in Latin American and upper socialclasses. The recreation that Allende forms for Chile is a magical realistic one that gives authentic voices for human elements that have been repressed to express to their realities. This novel is one of the female writers' contributions to magical realism and postcolonial nations. The history of postcolonial nations is primarily exclusively conveyed among men, and this novel by female writers is mostly criticized as inauthentic in the representation of this history. This work points to the real connection between feminism and magical realism since a woman is attempting to show the world the exceptional experiences that females go through and how things can change. Additionally, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of solitude earns literature a large percentage of magical realism reputation. The narration uses this strategy to describe his fictional society's reality and rewrites the characterized town's historical happenings. In this novel, the writer deals with war, suffering in Columbia during the 1960s facilitated by political motivations; the aim of depicting these scenarios to the reader is to the un-ending strategies in Latin American politics. Marquez's magical realism is a political reinterpretation of reality by using an oral style adapted from his grandmother's storytelling techniques. He reproduces a traditional popular opinion that challenges the dominant culture and reinstating a value system that the conventional community can identify as its own. Marquez introduces the reader to his Colombia characterized by legends, myths, heroes, technology, and modernity. One Hundred Years of solitude is a revolutionary novel that provides a mirror-looking opportunity to the author's mind by presenting his beliefs and thoughts that offer a voice to Latin America. The novel fictionalizes the life of a character Jose Arcadio who undergoes through struggles that are less exaggerated in such that the reader can identify to them. The story captures social and economic struggles that the character experiences in pursuit of being a provider to his family. The story is set in mundane environments that the reader interacts with in real life and can relate to when reading the novel and the characters traits are portrayed as ordinary people that we interact with in our lives. The economical struggles here are depicted to illustrate how the La tinAmerican population economies were disrupted by Western colonization and the citizens are left to suffer with day-day challenges of feeding their families. This is an issue that most people especially from low-income families experience throughout their life span; people go to school study, attain a good background of their life but the real society is incapable of providing enabling their citizens with good living standards because it is deprived with resources. Young people acting as sole providers of their families get to watch and go through depressive states as they put up with the fight of a better life. Therefore, the novel is fictionalized like any other common artistic work, but its context is not, and as the readers read, they get to understand how the writer perceives the world.

Marquez's magical realism is derived from politics and history to address depressing things that citizens encounter. The book presents supernatural as mundane and mundane asextraordinary or supernatural. Realistic elements are balanced with  exceptional instances by fusing housecleaning, poverty, and levitating priests. The magical realism here is used for two purposes; two re-establish a new Colombia to the reader and enable the reader to examine the real and the imaginary part of the history. The myth and the reality overlap, helping the author use the myth as a literary device to get the readers to his conceptualized reality. Although the characters and settings are fictionalized, the message communicated is real and captures actual Latin American history experiences. I believe the two novels show a perfect depiction of magical realism.

Both novels align with my argument that magical realism has and continues to help artists to capture harsh realities by conforming them into a box of fictional setting. Although both novels address different topics, they all talk about things that are reflected as injustices in the larger society we live in. Allende talks about the social injustices that women face in society where they are disregarded and not given the chance to extensively express their spirituality through describing a fictional world where patriarch dominates. She narrates her story with a certain society in a mind and the magic inserts indirect reflects how Allende  would prefer the society she lives in to look like by creating a world where the readers can see how the suppression impacts women and the positive impact freedom would do to women. The novel is an ultimate example of how feminism has adopted the magical realism technique to share narratives that have impacted them since the formation of societal co-existence of the two genders. While Marquez novel although not specially tied to feminism it still unrelished suppressions magically by focusing on the political history of the Latin America communities. It is also an illustration of how magical realism started among Latin American writers; to fight political oppressions from the Western cultures. Generally, both novels were insightful and helpful in showing a relation between magical realism and feminism and illustrated the quality of the genre that attracted women to it.

The essay is developed through a deep analysis of a wide range of resources that capture magical realism. To independently analyze magical realism and its contribution to art in general, I reviewed several resources that explain the genre's history and development. Different authors and critics show varied perceptions regarding women adopting the genre to talk about feminine social injustices; some, such as Ahmad et al., believe that women's contribution to magical realism has brought great success to feminism. While in works such as Takolander et al., critics are captures about women using magical realism; some of the discussed stances dismiss magical realism female writers such as Isabel Allende, Marrie Darrieusecq, and Angela Carter on the account that their work is inauthentic as compared to the postcolonial nationalism speculations. This calls for disregarding of women contribution to magical realism which is another illustration of patriarch dominance; women work is still judged as less deserving of national recognition. The critics believe that women work is deviated to what is needed to proclaim the postcolonial nationalism. The genre is like a path away from conformity and that why I disagree with the critics on women adoption of magical realism since it shows that they are working beyond what the society expects them to and addressing issues that’s beyond the expected. In addition to the class covered materials on the genre I also reviewed other materials that shows a variety of ways that magical realism has helped writers address issues and correct the shortcomings that women face in the larger society. Some materials show the contribution of Native American women in magical realism, others cover how male writers also adopt the genre to talk about feminism. Through search materials I plan to show the relation between women struggles and the voice offered in magical realism despite who is using the technique. The reviewed material profoundly brings out magical realism's contributions to general social injustices and the development of the feminist movement.

Conclusion

Magical realism is a literature genre extracted initially from Latin American political history and literature but currently widely spread. Magical realism fuses realistic instances with fictional settings to redefine certain realities that people experience in the real world. Today, magical realism is perceived as a movement that writers use to communicate the injustices happening and construct a certain reality that accommodates their self-constructed justices and allows them to familiarize any new possibilities they need to see in real life. Feminism mergers well with magical realism because both philosophies seek to fight dominations and recover certain suppressed elements by the dualistic human culture. Specifically, the house of spirits by Isabelle Allende fictionally captures a society to address the social realities that allows human spirituality to thrive and challenge the factors that hinder its expression. Women use magical realism to express the traumas they experience and as a way of re-creating a world that accommodated their capabilities and allows gender equality. Magical realism is a way of women showing what they need the  world to be like and the changes they expect to happen. It gives a literary work the ability to be viewed from the fictional perception and looking for an intended message in each narration, hence pioneering change.