The Alchemist

Having heard rave reviews for The Alchemist from numerous sources, I had to check it out. Paulo Coehlo’s modern classic has even been extolled by celebrities like Julia Roberts, Russell Crowe, and Will Smith. What the heck is everyone so excited about? I just had to know.

So I read the allegory, and while impressed, something just kept nagging at me. Sure, I read it in one sitting while monitoring my sick daughter once she’d stopped throwing up, so maybe I wasn’t in the most receptive state; but, being a woman, I guess I just tend to notice it when women are used as props in a story more than anything else.

Sure, Santiago sets off to fulfill his Personal Legend. And it’s lovely how the story wraps around itself, and all of the characters and events fall into place with some sort of meaning or lesson along his way, and how, no matter what, no matter the obstacles thrown in his path, Santiago always comes back to his Personal Legend. That, in and of itself, is an awesome tale, and the simplicity of its telling, the tiny lessons available in small passages in conjunction with the larger ones from the book as a whole, are utterly remarkable.

Yes, it’s a classic, and I’m so glad to have read it.

Then there’s that annoying but.

But… why are all of the people who have Personal Legends—fulfilled or not—men? Why does the only female character that even has a hint of a Personal Legend have finding a man as her life’s mission? The Alchemist was written in 1988, not 1948—well within the time period of women’s rights and empowerment. I’m not saying that it should be a feminist piece of literature or rewritten with a female protagonist or anything of the sort; what I am saying is that, if the story has women in it at all—and it features a couple of them—those women should be able to have Personal Legends to fulfill as well. And if the Personal Legend is to sit around and wait for a man to arrive, it’s quite different from a trek across the desert.

Had no women been in the book at all, I think I’d feel better about it. We could just assume that women, too, have their life missions and go about getting them accordingly. Instead, we are shown women as mere accessories, apparently not worthy of spiritual journeys.

And it’s funny—though most religions seem to feature male figureheads, I tend to view women as much more spiritual than men. That’s probably because the women I know go on retreats, to Buddhist meditation centers, journal, and try to delve deeper into their own psyches—while the majority of the men I know are mostly interested in sports and beer. True, they could be doing their own spiritual work privately within the privacy of their heads and hearts, but the representation remains the same.

I suppose I was just disappointed by yet another major spiritual work portraying the same aspects of male and female roles as traditional religions have done for centuries, something that naturally repels me like the wrong end of a battery. And I also suppose that my own way of seeing things, my automatic mental connection to gender, has something to do with it as well. I know that had the roles in the book been asexual or more equally represented, I would have definitely enjoyed it more.