Esteban & ClaraThe conflict in life is everywhere and in all fields. As soon as there is a conflict between our heroes in our story, there is also one about the story itself. Isabel Allende, author of The House of the Spirits, wrote the novel after fleeing her country. She has been accused of everything from literary piracy to political exploitation for The House of the Spirits. Considered one of the most important examples of Latin American magical realism, many critics describe The House of the Spirits as a sort of feminist twist on Gabriel García Márquez's film One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some scholars accuse Allende of not being original, or even of ripping off the Colombian author; however others defend Allende for mastering a genre (Dougherty 19). The House of the Spirits can be read as a traditional romance novel, following a single family over several generations. But here we will talk about two people from the Trueba family, Clara and Esteban. We are told that Clara not only foresaw her marriage but also the identity of her future husband: Rosa's fiancé, whom she has not seen since her sister's funeral and who is fifteen years her senior. The patriarch of the Trueba family, Esteban is a passionate and hard-working man, determined to succeed. He is also quick to anger, often cruel and intolerant towards those less fortunate than himself. He admits no contradiction to his strict conservative beliefs and thinks he is justified in ruling his plantation with an iron hand because it has improved the farmers' standard of living. In particular, Clara marries Trueba without love and without giving in to the male authority implicit in the traditional notion of marriage. Although Clara and Esteban share intense sexual activity... middle of paper... giving him back what she owes him first. The mother and the father, the man and the woman, the reality and the spirituality, the ghosts and the souls, the love and the hate, the peasants and the rich, the good and the bad and Clara and Esteban, everything can be found in The House of Spirits. This is in many ways the message of the novel: you have to act, make decisions, endure and resist pain and suffering, but in the end the world moves on and, albeit in unexpected ways, problems are solved. Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999. Ronie-Richele Garcia-Johnson, “The Struggle for Space: Feminism and Freedom in The House of the Spirits,” in Revista Hispanica Moderna, vol. XLVII, No. 1, June 1994, pp. 184-193. The House of the Spirits: A Twentieth-Century Family Chronicle by Charles Rossman