As we have attempted to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, Isabel Allende’s writings propose a contestation and reconfiguration of social hierarchies that have traditionally delineated society according to clase, race, sexuality, or political views. Despite certain elitist authors’ and critics’ fondness for dismissing Allende as popular or naïve, a careful reading of her body of fiction reveals that it systematically dismantles hegemonic categories and binary logic, as such meeting the objectives of many of the postcolonial writers who besmirch her works. As noted critic Philip Swanson points out, if the postcolonial project in its essence insists on progress by means of “dynamic transformation via conflict, friction … constant negotiation and diplomacy,” then its goals clearly coincide with “Allende’s own narrative world in which binary oppositions are set up and then problematized or dissolved so as to create a greater sense of awareness of and respect for different positionalities” (“Z/Z” 266). The author’s tremendous commercial success, due to both the accessibility of her work and her talent, make her visibility and impact far greater than that of many postmodern authors and artists whose audience is necessarily limited by the very complexity and hermeticism of their work. Accordingly, Allende must be recognized as “a figure sometimes ridiculed for her populism but who is able to reach audiences in a way that the male writers of the Boom could only have dreamed of “ (Swanson, “Z/Z” 275).

Allende’s fiction simultaneously reflects and reorders the universe. The trilogy achieves what Rivero describes as “a feat of configuration” through its sophisticated representation of 130 years of history, as experienced across three continents. Allende unifies and interweaves, over nearly two decades of writing, “the saga of six English, Chilean, and Chinese families – the Sommers, the Del Valles, the Domínguez, the Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, the Truebas, the Chi’ens – [that] reconfigures the panorama of nineteenth and twentieth-century history along the Pacific coasts of the Americas” (Rivero 106). As she represents the key events of what may be termed masculine history – politics and military feats, for example – Allende achieves a concurrent re-centering that privileges women’s experiences across time. As Nívea del Valle complains in a letter to her beloved, Severo, in Retrato en sepia (Portrait in Sepia), “¿Qué gano con estudiar y leer tanto, primo, si no hay lugar para la acción en la vida de la mujer? … No imaginas cuánto envidio a los hombres como tú, que tienen el mundo por escenario” (45–46).