The Gilmore Book Club

Does Isabel Allende know why I’m single?

If I were to choose a mythical creature I had the most in common with, there are several answers that come to mind. First, I’d choose a Phoenix, a fiery bird that carries ten times it’s bodyweight and is reborn from its own ashes. Or perhaps the warrior goddesses Artemis or Athena from Greek Mythology. Or, if sticking to the half-human, half animal variety, Sekmet, the Egyptian goddess with the head of a lion. But a mermaid would not be on my list. But that list began to change when I met Rosa del Valle, Isabel Allende’s mermaid in The House of The Spirits.

As different as I am from the novel’s mermaid, Rosa, we seem to one quality in common. I call that quality, the intimidation factor.

I vividly remember my friends telling me that boys (at this point we were in high school, so I’m calling them boys) were intimidated by me, and that was the reason I was single. To me, this sounded like a cliché coverup for saying I was a weirdo, like saying someone unattractive had a “nice personality”. You’re not fooling anyone, I thought. There may have been a little truth to what they were saying, I was and am fiercely independent, and I understand that some boys may not be comfortable with that, but all of them? No way. I had (and still have) other really awesome qualities that should totally overshadow any intimidation I may be causing. But I don’t understand why my combination of qualities seems to be so intimidating? Don’t we all have different qualities? Isn’t that what makes us unique and special?

Apparently only some awesome qualities are approachable. Mine are not. And neither were Rosa’s. Though she had the irresistible allure of a mermaid, she didn’t have any suitors. If Rosa had grown up with me, people would be telling her it would happen when she stopped looking, or when she moved to a new city, or got a new job, or whatever the current excuse is that people use when they’ve pried into your personal life and didn’t receive the easy or expected answer in return, so they panic, and pull out one of these excuses. Believe me, I’ve heard them all. And in all probability, so did Rosa.

Because I’m a nice person, I usually gave these high-school boys the benefit of the doubt, they were boys, after all. I’d graduate high-school, go through college, and then I’d be amongst men instead of boys. A man would not be so easily intimidated, or at least, that’s what I told myself.

I was at a party a while ago, and the dreaded ‘I’ word resurfaced. I was talking with a man whom I had just met, and he complimented my outfit.  After I had thanked him and explained that I like to be fancy on a normal basis, he admitted that he had felt rather intimated by me because of my appearance. Just in case you’re thinking, “oh he liked you and was nervous to talk to you”, think again. The man in question attended this party with a date, and his date knew me and we were good acquaintances, so his date would have talked to me , and he probably would’ve accompanied her to that interaction. And I know what it feels like when someone is hitting on you, and this man was not. I was easily approachable. I wasn’t sitting in a corner with my arms crossed, not talking to anyone, silently judging everyone who crossed my path. I didn’t have a stern-looking bodyguard, or a date or a friend on whom my attention could have been focused. I was socializing, eating appetizers, bonding with strangers over our love of Gilmore Girls, and being my very best introvert as an extrovert. As I said, approachable. 

But there it was again. Intimidating. A word I usually don’t associate with. I relegate the use of that word for Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, enormous tomes of Russian literature like War & Peace, and mountains like Mt. Kilimanjaro on whose peaks people have died trying to make the ascent to the top. I’d even somewhat allow the intimidation excuse if I had won various and well-known accolades, was the author of numerous New York Times Bestsellers, and whose forays into the worlds of TV, film, and theater had been smashing successes. But I cannot yet claim such things.

Of course, we all find different things intimidating, and I understand that, but so many different people over many years have all thought the same thing: that I was intimidating. After repeatedly hearing this description of myself, I began to wonder: is there a chance they could they be right?

How is smiling and participating in social activities intimidating? Since when did carrying yourself with confidence and putting effort into your appearance become intimidating? Why is dressing up intimidating? It’s true that I’m usually more dressed up than everyone around me, but in this case, we were at a birthday party, in a penthouse overlooking the Manhattan skyline. I think my outfit was pretty appropriate.

In The House of the Spirits, no one ever used the word ‘intimidating’ when referring to Rosa, but it was there all the same, hanging in the air like the mist off the sea.

At a certain point in the novel, Esteban, one of Rosa’s long-time admirers, finally plucks up the courage to actually talk to Rosa and her family, shocking, I know. But because he was the only one who spoke up, he was also the lucky one who would become her fiancée. And it was all because no one else had even tried. Not a single one.  Now at this point, we don’t really know Esteban, we don’t know the tortured soul he would become, but even so, it seems rather appalling that the del Valle family would accept any random guy that asked for Rosa’s hand. I know it’s a different culture, and a different time, but if you’re daughter is a mermaid, some kind of standards should be in place. But for me, that’s not the worst part.

Rosa had no other wooers. Despite all of the amazing, wonderful, supernatural things that she was, no one would even go near her. Allende doesn’t give us any insight to Rosa’s thoughts, but I could easily imagine the pained inner dialogue that replayed over and over in Rosa’s mind. How lonely she must have felt. How confusing and frustrating it all must have been. How doubtful she must have been about finding love. How easily she could have seen their distance as signs of her unworthiness.

As much as I’d like to believe that everyone feels seen and loved and wanted, I know that thoughts such as these have passed through the minds of others. How much damage are we causing with our fear of rejection? How many people are left feeling unwanted and unworthy because others deem them too intimidating to even smile at or talk to? What if we dealt with our own issues instead of making excuses and labeling other people as intimidating or scary and putting the blame on them?

We’re all human. We all have doubts and fears and baggage caused by those doubts and fears building up over the years. What if we just treated each other with kindness? What if we didn’t avoid people at parties because of how they were dressed? What if we didn’t ignore people because of how they made us feel? Because this world is unpredictable and you never know what fate has in store.

In the House of Spirits, the aforementioned poisoning occurs, leaving Esteban mourning the death of his lover and grasping for other ways to find love in the world. Because of her premature death, Rosa never experiences love. She never knows what it’s like to get married or have children. And from what I infer from the text and the time period’s standards for courtship, I doubt that she and Estaban ever spent any great amount of time alone together. Maybe she died without even knowing what it’s like to be kissed or to hold her lover’s hand. How terrible to be such a wonderful person, so deserving of love and yet never get to experience that love which is one of the greatest gifts the world has to offer. There are many tragedies in Allende’s novels, but this absence of knowing and experiencing love, is the hardest for me to bear.

The thing about AIlende’s novels, is that they seem to reflect real life, a life it’s easy for the reader to identify with. If this was a Jane Austen novel, sure there would be setbacks, but not tragedy, not the death of possible heroines, not the complete loss of the way people lived their lives. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jane Austen- books and movies. But at times, it just seems like another fairy tale- without magic and mystical beasts, but still, a love conquers all type of story. That’s not how life is. People get sick and never recover. Homes are destroyed by natural disasters. Countries are torn apart by war. That’s the world in which we live. Sometimes it is good to escape into the witty banter and flirtatious dances of a Jane Austen novel, and sometimes it feels better to see a world that, though it’s not your own, has similar trials and pains. Sometimes it hurts too much to see a world in which your biggest problem is what ribbon to wear in your hair, because we crave the comfort of knowing that others have born pain similar to ours. The House of the Spirits is a love story in so many ways, but I believe it to be a more accurate love story than most of the ones we read or see on TV. If everyone had a happy ending, would we even know that it was a happy ending? Wouldn’t it just be normal? It’s said you only know what’s good by experiencing what is bad, and perhaps that’s true.

And bad things will happen; that’s out of our control. What we can control, is how we treat others. Literature is full of people who are ignored because of their appearance or because of what they make others feel. Frankenstein’s monster, Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and of course, Rosa from The House of the Spirits. And so many terrible things occurred to those people, sometimes because people ignored them or because the occurrences were made worse by the avoidance of others. But we can choose to show love and kindness to others. We can choose to question our feelings and our motives to determine if we are to blame instead of others.  We can choose to stop treating each other like mermaids. 

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