Blog Post #2

So, another blog post. The House of the Spirits and the Spanish film Volver express similar themes, characters, and magical realism. A good example of this is innocence, Paula and Clara can be described s innocent in terms of their upbringings. Paula was innocent up until she murdered her “father” because he was trying to rape her. Clara blames herself for the death of Rosa because of her magic abilities/powers so she limits her use of what is her full potential. In both the film and the book, women are suppressed in the sense that, they have less rights than men and are constantly barraged by pre conceived notions and high expectations. Another common theme throughout the book and film is wealth v. poor, in Volver, the family is on the brink of poverty and earlier in the book, Esteban used to be poor with good intentions, to provide for his soon to be wife, after he became wealthy he became a completely different person with a completely flipped set of values. This relates to the film in the sense that this poor family was so desperately trying to survive on what little they had, but in the film what they wanted the most was each other aka their mother. The suffrage of women is a very apparent thing in the book and film and it is depicted in various ways throughout both of them. One depicts women’s suffrage more descriptively than the other but they are both still trying to get the same point across. Solver was an excellent film and what made it so unique was that it depicted real world problems in such a real manner. The film gave us insight of the third world struggle of poverty and life among a society with strict rules against women saying they can only do this and that. I am excited to finish the book and I hope to be able to draw more connections to both films and literature that we work on throughout the semester.

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