Given the trilogy’s repeated crossings of three continents, in terms both of mapped spaces and of her characters’ own bodyspaces, and Allende’s predilection for playing out narrative action in complex and contradictory sites – the brothel, the battlefield, the frontier, the stage, the labyrinthine home, the photographer’s studio, the basement, the ship’s belly, to name only a few – her works practically cry out for a spatial analysis. This chapter will review and synthesize the work of cultural geographers and literary critics who together provide a framework for a kinesthetically based approach to narrative, one which calls into question the supposed neutrality of built space. This approach reads text not strictly in terms of plot or linearity, with setting as a static backdrop for the true literary action of a work. Rather, setting itself is a dynamic player in the development or stagnation of plotted events and characters’ navigation of textual hurdles. The study focuses particularly on the means by which disenfranchised characters or groups are positioned within the narrative, on what this placement reveals about the socio-political, socio-ethnic, and socio-sexual power structures who orchestrated it, and on the effects of this positioning – or the resistance to it – on cultural stasis. For example, Chapter 3 studies Tao Chi’en’s socio-cultural positioning as a Chinese healer in San Francisco, and the means by which the white community’s desperate need for his medical skills permits his migration between Chinatown and the white heart of the city. A plot-based reading might ignore the descriptors that indicate that his home is positioned on the margins of the Chinese and white sectors of town, yet a spatial analysis makes it clear that understanding his placement and inscription within the ethnic sector to which he must always return is key to reading both this character and his multi-racial daughter who narrates the trilogy’s final novel. In a spatially-anchored reading the relevant questions regarding dramatic intrigue and character positioning become “who put her there, with what authority and methodology, whether that placement is tolerable, and whether it is alterable” (1).

In their groundbreaking work Writing Women and Space, geographers Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose broaden what they describe as the traditional Western feminist emphasis on “spatial politics of difference” to include the non-privileged perspectives of feminists of color and poststructuralist emphases on de-centering and non-essentialist cultural paradigms (1).