The Subaltern in Memoir: Representation, Voice, and Epistemic Violence in Isabel Allende’s The Soul of a Woman

Abstract

This study offers a Spivakian reading of Isabel Allende’s The Soul of a Woman (2021), through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of the “subaltern” and the violence of speaking for others. In The Soul of a Woman (2021), Isabel Allende offers a vibrant memoir–manifesto that chronicles her life as a feminist activist and writer. Through Spivak’s lens “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), the current study argues  that Allende’s memoir consciously contests epistemic violence by recovering women’s histories and demanding justice, but it can also slip into the very patterns Spivak critiques. Allende’s global platform invites us to ask: whose voices are actually being heard in this memoir? The trouble of “speaking into silence” is precisely what Gayatri Spivak diagnosed in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). Spivak argued that members of subordinated groups especially colonized women are often silenced not only by systemic oppression, but by attempts to represent them, which can distort or overwrite their subjectivity. This research investigates whether these women emerge as subjects with agency or whether their experiences are mediated, interpreted, and ultimately spoken for by Allende’s privileged narrative voice. The researchers have employed the method of textual analysis for this study. Spivak’s concept of the subaltern has been used in readings of Allende’s earlier fiction, there is little to no sustained work applying “can the subaltern speak?” specifically to the soul of a woman. By foregrounding this tension between representation and epistemic violence, the paper situates Allende within debates on feminist memoir, global South feminisms, and the politics of voice, suggesting that her text is most critically valuable when read not as a transparent platform for the subaltern, but as a site where the limits and risks of writing subaltern lives are exposed. Thus this study explores how Allende’s portrayal of marginalized women enables their agency and how her narration risks reproducing the epistemic violence Spivak attributes to elite feminist discourse.