Then again...

I hadn't noticed the theme of three...curious! I DID notice the big fat moon last night. In fact it, along with a series of high volume thrash songs on my Shuffle, and a fast, fast walk with the dog assuaged my work-related brain rage. Thank you moon.

Anyway, gender. The passage about the meetup between Esteban and Transito caught my attention too, both for the reasons mentioned by Kevin, and because this is an instant where the class imbalance is temporarily neutralized through sheer force of Transito's personality/philosophy. Esteban, offers to front her some money to start her own house and she refuses his offer. (118) Interestingly, the venture she describes...a whore's cooperative...is anathema to his top-down frame of mind. Her commie ways don't seem to dampen his appetite. Certainly, gender plays differently for women of the lower class than for women of his class.

Another spot that caught me had to do with Clara...and I like her better for it. Even as she goes about conducting the charitable work expected of women of her class...bringing food to the poor and care to the masses stricken by exanthemic typhus (!) she is fully aware that "this is to assuage our conscience ...but it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity, they need justice." (136) This issue is the cause of some of her worst arguments with Esteban, says Allende, but although he rages at her, he still tolerates the ideas coming from her better than he does, say, coming from Pedro Tercero (three) Garcia. Perhaps, like his tolerance of female spiritualists but disdain for male spiritualists, its because she's a girl. Ideas in women are, for him, less real and so less threatening.

Although...the fine line between female "privilege" and male threat/gravity shatters when he totally loses it with Ferula for sleeping in Clara's bed. Of course, because Esteban categorizes Ferula as lesbian, whore, spinster etc. she is no longer a "woman" according to the the gendered norms for real women (i.e., sexually available to a man and within the proper etiquette of polite society). (132)

Dang. And I had actually started to have sympathy for Esteban based on the first person narrative sections in "The Time of the Spirits," especially his moment of genuine insight into Clara that her silences are her "last refuge, not a mental illness." (113) Through his eyes we get to see a fuller character in Clara. And isn't fullness of character, agency, the mark of being human and not just a sketch to fulfill the back drop of someone else's story?

Aryana