Daughter Of Fortune

“‘Your body will change, your thoughts will be jumbled, and any man will be able to do what he wants with you,’ Eliza was advised by Mama Fresia, from whom she could not hide her new state.”

Another theme in the book is the impact of overwhelming passion on a woman’s life. When Eliza begins to menstruate, she is prophetically warned by Mama Fresia of the danger of her new bodily desires. A second maternal figure to Eliza, Mama Fresia is a Mapuche Indian who is deeply connected to nature’s secrets.

“Nothing as perilous, you know, as the demon of fantasy embedded in every female heart.”

The patriarch of the Sommers household, Jeremy holds a very low opinion of women’s abilities. His comment concerns the danger of Eliza imagining that she will inhabit a higher place in society than is warranted by her humble beginnings. Jeremy’s personification of fantasy as a demon indicates how hazardous he thinks a woman’s imagination is—especially in view of his sister Rose’s scandalous affair.

“I would happily give half my life to have the freedom a man has, Eliza.”

Rose Sommers confesses the main source of her frustrations in life: She was born a woman in a 19th-century patriarchal culture that placed great limitations on females. The one time that Rose tried to make her own choices, her elder brother Jeremy intervened to prevent a stain on the family’s name. In contrast, Rose’s brother John is free to live life as he pleases, engaging in many affairs, without his brother’s intervention. 

“Life is long and filled with unpleasant surprises.”

Paulina del Valle marries Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz but manages to circumvent the 19th-century marriage rules of legal subordination to her husband. Due to her bold act of defying her dominating father to marry the entrepreneurial Feliciano, her husband honors his wife’s business talent. Commenting about life’s surprises, Paulina prepares to avoid the typical widow’s lot. She requests that her husband open a bank account in her name and deposit a portion of the profits she has earned for him. Feliciano agrees despite the fact that he has never heard of a married woman with money of her own. Allende suggests through the character of Paulina that bold action can sometimes overcome oppression.

“She would ask herself a thousand times along the way whether she had had a chance to flee from the devastating passion that would warp her life, whether maybe in those brief instants she could have turned away and saved herself, but every time she formulated the question she concluded that her fate had been determined since the beginning of time.”

Allende depicts passion in the novel as overwhelming, inevitable, and destructive for the people caught in its grip. Due to her unwanted pregnancy and her obsession with finding Joaquín, Eliza feels that her love for him twisted her life in ways that she had not anticipated. Over time, however, Eliza realizes that she idealized her lover, and Tao teaches her that she is not doomed to repeat the same tragic love.

“Those seconds were so intense that Joaquín Andieta’s notebook dropped from his hands, as if some irresistible force had seized it from him, as that same glowing heat washed over him, searing him in its reflection.”

Allende uses powerful adjective-noun combinations—“irresistible force” and “glowing heat”—along with action verbs—“seized,” “washed,” and “searing”—to convey the intense experience of Eliza’s first meeting with Joaquín.

“The girl felt that she was opening like a carnivorous flower, emitting demonic perfumes to attract her man like a Venus’s-flytrap, crushing him, swallowing him, digesting him, and finally spitting out the splinters of his bones.”

Allende compares the youthful Rose Sommers’s power to sexually attract the older Karl Bretzner to the mechanisms of a devouring, seductive flower, the Venus’s-flytrap, which traps and consumes insects. The shocking comparison, with its frightening imagery of “crushing” and “spitting out the splinters of his bones,” suggests the potential destructiveness of uncontrolled desire. 

“Those pages, reread a thousand times in stolen moments, were the principal sustenance of her passion, because they revealed an aspect of Joaquín Andieta that did not emerge when they were together.”

The novel hints that Eliza maintains an idealized version of Joaquín Andieta by perusing his letters. This idealization, however, does not match Joaquín’s often distracted presence when the two young people are together.

“'A woman without virtue is nothing, she can never become a wife and mother, better she tie a stone around her neck and jump into the sea,’ had been drummed into her time and time again.”

Eliza has been educated in a patriarchal society that emphasizes that a woman’s value consists of her roles as a wife and mother. Therefore, her chastity has to be protected before marriage or she will be “damaged goods,” not suitable for reproducing the family order. Despite knowing that she is sacrificing her honor and potential future, Eliza gives in to her overwhelming instinct to spend the night with Joaquín.

“He was prepared to give his life for the pointless glory of a burst of heroism, but he had a visceral fear of looking Eliza in the eyes and talking of his sentiments.”

With this sentence, Allende indicates that the lovers Joaquín and Eliza actually have quite different goals. Born into impoverished and unjust circumstances, Joaquín is preoccupied with the possibilities of political action. Allende uses the adjective “pointless” before “glory” and the noun “burst” before “heroism,” foreshadowing the possibility that Joaquín may die in a burst of gunfire in a futile gesture.

“And she might die that very night at the hands of the good woman who had brought her up and loved her more than anyone in this world.”

After Eliza discovers her pregnancy, she is terrified at the idea of being stigmatized like Joaquín’s mother for giving birth to an illegitimate child. Although Eliza does not really want to have an abortion, she feels trapped. Mama Fresia has been a second mother to her, protecting her from illness and teaching her about life’s mysteries. Eliza reluctantly agrees to Mama Fresia’s planned attempt to help her by aborting the baby. However, Captain John Sommers’s unexpected conversation with Eliza thwarts the women’s scheme. Allende utilizes paradox to frame Eliza’s uncertainty about the possible abortion outcome: She might die at the hands of the person who loves her the most.

“She was curious to know why her uncle was so furtive when he carried Miss Rose’s notebooks away, but without anyone’s stating it she knew that this was one of the fundamental secrets upon which the family’s equilibrium depended, and to violate it would be to bring down with one puff the house of cards they lived in.”

Allende uses the phrase “house of cards” to indicate that the Sommers family relationships rest on an insecure and unstable foundation—the keeping of secrets. Eliza perceives that at least one of the secrets concerns Miss Rose’s notebooks. Her uncle tries to avoid attention as he carries the notebooks away, perhaps indicating their disreputable content. 

“Lin did not fit into either of those categories, she was a mysterious and complex person capable of disarming him with her irony and challenging him with her questions.”

Tao Chi’en was raised in a Chinese culture that taught him to view women as either workers or courtesans to be exploited. In the patriarchal society, newborn females were often killed because they were not considered valuable enough to feed. When Tao marries Lin, he learns that a woman can be an interesting individual in her own right—charming and intellectually stimulating.

“He could feel the critical gaze of his master reminding him of the duty to serve without expecting a return, for ‘he who knows most has the greatest obligation toward humanity.’”

The aged master who trained Tao Chi’en to be a zhong yi (Chinese physician) taught him that part of his duty was to do good for humanity. In his haste to provide comforts for his dying wife, Tao begins to harass his patients to pay. Later in the text, however, Tao’s efforts to rescue the singsong girls illustrate the fruit of his aged master’s teachings.

“Eliza’s legs were trembling; she hadn’t used them in two months, and she felt as landsick as she had before at sea, but the man’s clothing gave her an unfamiliar freedom; she had never felt so invisible.”

From a young age, Eliza has had a talent for making herself invisible, able to become such a quiet observer that the Sommers siblings barely realized that she was there. However, when Eliza dresses in Tao Chi’en’s clothes to disembark unobtrusively in San Francisco, she is surprised by the freedom she feels since “she is accustomed to the prison of her petticoats.”

“She concluded that at the time loving someone of another race seemed impossible; they believed there was no place for a couple like them anywhere in the world.”

Allende moves forward in time to enable Eliza to review her life and add commentary. Using this method, Allende provides the reader with Eliza’s later insight on why she and Tao Chi’en shared an unacknowledged chaste intimacy at night but feigned coolness during the day. There was a reason for Eliza and Tao to feel like they could not be accepted as a couple. Codifying the opposition to miscegenation, California passed a law forbidding the marriage of a white person with an Asian person in 1880.

“With streaming tears she poured out the losses she had kept silent all her life, the rage hidden beneath good breeding, the secrets carried like invisible shackles to save appearances, and the exuberant, youthful years wasted by the simple bad fortune of having been born a woman.”

When Miss Rose visits Joaquín Andieta’s mother, she is overcome by deep compassion for the wretched and unfair circumstances of that woman’s life, which evoke in Rose compassion for Eliza’s plight and for her own unfulfilled potential. The commonality among all three women is the double standard in society’s treatment of males and females. This realization prompts Miss Rose’s outpouring of emotions and secrets that she has carried to maintain appearances in a judgmental culture. Allende compares the burden of hiding secrets to being shackled like a prisoner. 

“She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear.”

As Eliza travels across California in search of Joaquín, she falls in love with freedom. Her new sense of liberation makes her realize the constraints of her Chilean upbringing. Allende uses the metaphor of “impenetrable armor” to convey the rigidity of the social conventions of Eliza’s girlhood and the verb “bound” to symbolize the ways in which she was restrained, both physically and emotionally.

“When she had given herself to Joaquín Andieta in the room of the armoires she had committed an unpardonable sin in the eyes of the world, but in hers love justified everything.”

Sixteen-year-old Eliza decided that her love for Joaquín justified her choice to sacrifice her virtue. Years later she questions society’s definition of virtue and feels that her decisions and endurance of their consequences have made her a stronger person. A woman’s freedom to choose is an important feminist theme in this novel.

“Mr. Sommers would say that this is an uncultivated land: no morality, no laws; the vices of gambling, liquor, and brothels rule, but for me this land is a blank page; here I can start life anew and become the person I want.”

Allende uses the metaphor of a blank page to describe the undeveloped territory of California. The text contrasts Jeremy Sommers’s view that the land is ruled by vices with Eliza’s perspective that California is the place for self-invention—a blank page on which she can write her own story. 

“The investigations of that day changed the course of Tao Chi’en’s destiny.”

This book explores the theme of freedom of choice versus destiny through the trajectories of its characters. Tao Chi’en started with the belief that his life was predetermined by the actions of his ancestors before him (karma). He originally felt compelled to return to China, but his compassion for the singsong girls, the enslaved young prostitutes in Chinatown, propels him into a different life of rescuing them. Tao has learned through his experiences with Lin and Eliza, realizing that he can alter the fate of these trapped young girls.

“In California neither past nor scruples counted; eccentricity was welcomed and guilt did not exist as long as the offense remained hidden.”

For Paulina del Valle, her Chilean upbringing was focused on the past, emphasizing divine punishment and social conformity. The openness and acceptance of California’s young society appeals to Mrs. Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz because it is the exact opposite of the hypocritical Chilean society.

“Somewhere along the way she had lost what made her a woman and turned into a strange, asexual creature.”

Eliza’s sense of desire or interest in romantic love receded after the pain of feeling abandoned by Joaquín, the trauma of miscarriage, and the fear of getting hurt again. Gradually, as she heals and develops a loving relationship with Tao, Eliza feels empowered to embrace her femininity in a more mature way. Now when Eliza recalls Mama Fresia’s early warning that “any man will be able to do what he wants with you,” Eliza does not fear that risk. Allende symbolically illustrates Eliza’s evolution by having her take off her costume of men’s clothing and don her women’s attire again, but she leaves the binding corset in her suitcase.