Conflicting Ideologies in Three Magical Realist Children’s Novels by Isabel Allende

Abstract


 
 
 A recent movement to establish ecopoetic frames in children’s literature has led to the exploration of a critical confluence of magical realism with ecocriticism. Because of a common capacity to interrogate dominant Western value systems, magical realist discourse has been linked with ecopoetic frames that promote narrative representations of environmental justice movements. such an alignment is possible because the postcolonial heritage of magical realism, founded by Latin American authors, offers a site of resistance by which the dominant ideologies of colonising nations are interrogated. In fictions which form the basis for ecocriticism authors may create similar narrative spaces of resistance to encode representations of ecological malpractice which are enacted upon indigenous peoples by an invasive non-indigenous presence. This ideological confluence between magical realist strategies and ecocritical frames represents a problematic interface between indigenous and non-indigenous subjectivities because representations of ecological intervention are primarily Western in origin, while magical realism promotes representations of indigenous voice. the problems that arise from this alignment are particularly evident in Allende’s three quest fictions for children in that the two dominant eco-warrior protagonists are non-indigenous and narrative perspective is largely derived from Western subject focalisations. the author’s magical realist frame by which Western cultural positions are interrogated has thus been compromised by the fact that subject focalisations privilege non-indigenous perceptions about the plight of tribal peoples in a manner that limits indigenous voice. even though each eco-warrior quest instigates magical realist strategies – irreducible elements of magic, phenomenological elements, merged frames that anchor magical elements in mimetic detail (Faris, 2004) – the authorial intent to expose exploitation of indigenous peoples is framed by Western ecocritical perspectives. Furthermore, because representations of magical power saturate depictions of eco-warrior agency, the grounding mimetic is disrupted and quest resolutions are imbued by fantasy.