Jane Eyre, Eva Luna, Pride and Prejudice, G. B. Shaw and Fairy Tales,

Just like Jane Eyre, Eva Luna travels from town to town meeting new characters and their lifestyles. After each journey, a new stage in Jane and Eva's lives begins and their personalities evolve.
Along their lives they create life, their lives, and they create the world, guided by their inner force, that force which B. Shaw talked about. But they create two worlds which are miles apart, one is in the north hemisphere and the other one in the south. However, they grow up in a similar way, experiencing similar feelings and learning to fight and defend themselves from those who are prejudiced against them.
When talking about prejudice we cannot help alluding to Elizabeth's clash with Lady Catherine and Mr. Darcy and so we can infer that prejudice against women must be something taking place around the globe.
Although Isabel Allende must have read Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen's novels, I don't think she was inspired in such stories when telling about Eva Luna at all. Yet, the similiraties in all the women in these works are there, quite explicitly displayed. This might indicate that women's experience are basically quite the same regardless their age, nationality or ethnicity. We can even compare these characters to those of fairy tales and other short stories, all of them suffer from prejudice: the princess who loves whistling, Cinderella for being an orphan, Belle for being a bookworm, the little mermaid for being a day dreamer who will not settle for life under the sea, Desiree for being thought not to be purely white, the Wife of Bath for being considered a slut :P, etc. Now, talking about fairy tales and short stories, the difference between them basically is that one is aimed to allow for identification, and the other is not.
But can we help feeling identified with these women at any extent? We might feel tempted to sort of force the similarities between our lives and these heroines' but somehow, those similarities are there and can be seen.
Reading all these works and further that I have read, after these years of Language and Literature and the years before which I spent reading without academic purposes, this brunch of literary criticism which I was so prejudiced against, which is feminist criticism, seems to me now a most fascinating world and wonderful way of reading allowing for identification to take place.


Way more than readings allowing for identification.