The Rebirth of Chile in Relation to Childbirth and Female Pain

Abstract

Chilean novelists Isabel Allende and Diamela Eltit wrote during a time in which Augusto Pinochet’s reign created chaos within the government and suffering for its citizens. In the works The House of the Spirits by Allende and The Fourth World by Eltit, emphasis is placed on the female characters’ inability to have full freedom of speech, and also how the burdens of conceiving a child and giving birth became not just an infliction upon their bodies but upon their existence as women in a disadvantaged society. By analyzing the conceptions, pregnancies, and births of various characters in the novels while referencing how society treated women during Pinochet’s dictatorship, this paper will reveal that childbirth is used as a metaphor for the birth of a new Chile.