International Baccalaureate
VSA: Victoria Shanghai Academy
International Baccalaureate DP
English A: Literature
Part 4: Like Water For Chocolate
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Contents
| |Page |
| | |
|Biography |3 |
|Context |5 |
|Historical Context |6 |
|Magical Realism |8 |
|Romance / The Romantic Novel |11 |
|Overview |12 |
|Main Characters |14 |
|Characters |16 |
|Themes / Motifs |21 |
|Style |25 |
|Chapter-by-Chapter Guide |27 |
|Important Points for Consideration |47 |
|Critical Reception |55 |
|Internal Assessment – Part 4 Works: Options |81 |
|Appendix |82 |
Biography
Esquivel was born in 1951 in Mexico, the third of four children of Julio Caesar Esquivel, a telegraph operator, and his wife, Josephina. In an interview with Molly O'Neill in the New York Times, Esquivel explained, "I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. The smell of nuts and chilies and garlic got all mixed up with the smells from the chapel, my grandmother's carnations, the liniments and healing herbs." These experiences in her family's kitchen provided the inspiration for Esquivel's first novel.
Esquivel grew up in Mexico City and attended the Escuela Normal de Maestros, the national teachers' college. After teaching school for eight years, Esquivel began writing and directing for children's theater. In the early 1980s she wrote the screenplay for the Mexican film Chido One, directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, and released in 1985. Arau also directed her screenplay for Like Water for Chocolate, released in Mexico in 1989 and in the United States in 1993. First published in 1989, the novel version of Like Water for Chocolate became a best seller in Mexico and the United States and has been translated into numerous languages. The film version has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In her second, less successful novel, Ley del amor, published in English in 1996 as The Law of Love, Esquivel again creates a magical world where love becomes the dominant force of life. The novel includes illustrations and music on compact disc to accompany it. Esquivel continues to write, working on screenplays and fiction from her home in Mexico City.
In addition to these novels, she has also written three screenplays and several other novels including, Tan Veloz Como el Deseo (Swift as Desire), and Malinche. The film for Like Water for Chocolate, released by Miramax in 1993, became one of the highest-grossing independently produced foreign films in history, according to a New York Times review. The film is a faithful representation of the novel in all aspects. Esquivel actually originally conceived of the novel as a screenplay, but the daunting cost of financing a period film led to her writing the novel. Perhaps this points to the particularly visual quality the novel has.
Esquivel’s writing records the “secrets of love and life as revealed by the kitchen,” says Washington Post reviewer Mary Batts Estrada. Esquivel grew up in a household where food was always important and believes that “cooking is a constant reminder of the alchemy between perceived and unseen forces.” Esquivel cites the influence of her grandmother’s kitchen, where she learned much of the lore that shaped Like Water for Chocolate.
“When I serve food,” says Laura Esquivel, “I feel that the gender roles are inverted: the male becomes the receptor. Through serving food, I become the one who penetrates. Furthermore, you are what you eat and with whom and how you eat it. In my family, food was always very important, and for my mother, it was a medium of communication and ritual in every sense. For those reasons, we enjoy each dish. It is an act that reaffirms the union of a couple, living with the offspring, and fellowship with friends. A family’s history is its recipes, and it is imperative to keep them alive.”
“Food always brings back the past to me,” says Esquivel. “This knowledge gave me the idea of writing a novel in which recipes were the foundation. As a young girl I was shocked to learn that my grandmother’s sister was prohibited to marry so that she could take care of her mother in old age, and so I created Tita, my protagonist. Sacrificed by her mother, Tita is able to bring to fruition her love and do away with that terrible tradition of the youngest taking charge of the mother.”
Context
Mexican screenwriter Laura Esquivel’s first novel, Like Water For Chocolate, met with unusual success when it was published in 1989. The enthusiasm about the book led to a Spanish-language movie of the same title, which also was immensely popular. Upon translation from Spanish into English in 1992, the novel incited similar excitement, becoming a best-seller; subsequently, the English-subtitled film became one of the most popular foreign language films in American film history. In addition to this popular success, Like Water For
Chocolate received critical acclaim, as it emerged during the early 1990s, when new ideas about multiculturalism in literature brought attention to the work of previously ignored minority women authors.
Like Water For Chocolate belongs to the genre of magical realism. This literary style, first developed by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in his 1949 essay "Lomaravilloso real, "generally describes novels by Latin American writers (though it is increasingly applied to writers of any background) that are infused with distinct fantastic, mythical, and epic themes.
Magical realism is often explained as a unique product of the Latin American condition, particularly its history of European colonialism, which resulted in a delicate relationship between the contradictory yet co-existing forces of indigenous religion and myth and the powerful Catholic Church. In the case of Mexico, Esquivel’s homeland, one need only look as far as two of the country’s dearest cultural narratives for an example of this balance. The first is the Aztec myth describing the founding of Tenochitlan, which later became Mexico City. The myth tells the story of the Mexica, wandering hunters who received the vision that their empire would be built upon an island where an eagle sat on a cactus devouring a serpent. The fulfillment of this apparition is still held today as the historical beginning of the Aztec empire and modern-day Mexico. The second cultural narrative involves the Virgen de Guadalupe, who, according to legend, appeared to the indigenous man Juan Diego as a brown-skinned Madonna amidst a flurry of rose petals. Catholicism came to the conquered atives thus embodied, and the Virgen eventually became the patron saint of the country.
Both stories rely on potent visual imagery that heightened natural elements and events by adding an element of the fantastic.
The characters in Like Water for Chocolate are set against the backdrop of the most important modernizing force in Mexican history, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17. During this time, peasants and natives banded together under the leadership of figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata to reject the old order’s dictatorship, revive democracy, and claim Mexico for the everyday man and woman. Esquivel uses the revolution to explore themes of masculinity and gender identity, and examine how individuals appropriate for themselves the revolution’s goal of liberty.
Historical Context
The Mexican Revolution
Although Mexico had been independent from Spain since the early nineteenth century, their governments were continually beset by internal and external conflicts. In the early part of the twentieth century, revolution tore the country apart. In November 1910, liberal leader Francisco Madero led a successful revolt against Mexican President Porfirio Diaz after having lost a rigged election. Diaz soon resigned and Madero replaced him as president in November 1911. Considered ineffectual by both conservatives and liberals, Madero was soon overthrown and executed by his general, Victoriano Huerta. Soon after the tyrannical Huerta became president, his oppressive regime came under attack. Venustiano Carranza, Francisco "Pancho" Villa, and Emiliano Zapata led revolts against the government. In 1914 Carranza became president as civil war erupted. By the end of 1915, the war ended, but Villa and Zapata continued to oppose the new government and maintained rebel groups for several years.
A Woman's Place
Richard Corliss, in his Time review of Like Water for Chocolate, writes that "Laura Esquivel brought Gabriel Garcia Marquez's brand of magic realism into the kitchen and the bedroom, the Latin woman's traditional castle and dungeon." Traditionally, a Latin woman's place is in the home. In the patriarchal society of the early part of the twentieth century, Mexican women were expected to serve their fathers and brothers and then when married, their husbands, sons, and daughters. These women often turned to the domestic arts—cooking, sewing, and interior decoration—for creative outlets, along with storytelling, gossip, and advice. As a result, they created their own female culture within the social prison of married life.
Maria Elena de Valdes, in her article on Like Water for Chocolate in World Literature Today, notes that little has changed for the Mexican woman. She defines the model Mexican rural, middle-class woman: "She must be strong and far more clever that the men who supposedly protect her. She must be pious, observing all the religious requirements of a virtuous daughter, wife, and mother. She must exercise great care to keep her sentimental relations as private as possible, and, most important of all, she must be in control of life in her house, which means essentially the kitchen and bedroom or food and sex."
Reading women's magazines became a popular pastime for many married Mexican women. These magazines often contained fiction published in monthly installments, poetry, recipes, home remedies, sewing and decoration tips, advice, and a calendar of religious observances. Valdes finds similarities between the structure of Like Water for Chocolate and these magazines. She explains that "since home and church were the private and public sites of all educated young ladies, these publications represented the written counterpart to women's socialization, and as such, they are documents that conserve and transmit a Mexican female culture in which the social context and cultural space are particularly for women by women."
Magical Realism
Magic realism (or magical realism) can be defined as a literary genre or a literary mode in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting. As used today the term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous. The term was initially used by German art critic Franz Roh to describe painting which demonstrated an altered reality, but was later used by Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe the work of certain Latin American writers. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (a friend of Uslar-Pietri) used the term "lo real maravilloso" (roughly "marvelous reality") in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of this World (1949). Carpentier's conception was of a kind of heightened reality in which elements of the miraculous could appear without seeming forced and unnatural. Carpentier's work was a key influence on the writers of the Latin American "boom" that emerged in the 1960s.
Magical realism aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites. For instance, it challenges polar opposites like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present. Magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society. According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy". The presence of the supernatural in magical realism is often connected to the primeval or "magical’ Indian mentality, which exists in conjunction with European rationality. According to Ray Verzasconi, as well as other critics, magical realism is "an expression of the New World reality which at once combines the rational elements of the European super-civilization, and the irrational elements of a primitive America." Gonzalez Echchevarria believes that magical realism offers a world view that is not based on natural or physical laws nor objective reality. However, the fictional world is not separated from reality either.
Characteristics of Magical Realism
The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change. Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magical realism: a more deep and true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate.
Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective—The writer must have ironic distance from the magical world view for the realism not to be compromised.
Authorial Reticence—Authorial reticence refers to the lack of clear opinions about the accuracy of events and the credibility of the world views expressed by the characters in the text. This technique promotes acceptance in magical realism. In magical realism, the simple act of explaining the supernatural would eradicate its position of equality regarding a person’s conventional view of reality.
The Supernatural and Natural—In magical realism, the supernatural is not displayed as questionable. While the reader realizes that the rational and irrational are opposite and conflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world.
Common Themes
• The reality of revolution, and continual political upheaval in certain parts of the world, also relates to magical realism. Specifically, South America is characterized by the endless struggle for a political ideal.
• The idea of terror overwhelms the possibility of rejuvenation in magical realism. Several prominent authoritarian figures, such as soldiers, police, and sadists all have the power to torture and kill.
• Time is another conspicuous theme, which is frequently displayed as cyclical instead of linear. What happens once is destined to happen again. Characters rarely, if ever, realize the promise of a better life. As a result, irony and paradox stay rooted in recurring social and political aspirations.
• Another particularly complex theme in magical realism is the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque is carnival’s reflection in literature. The concept of carnival celebrates the body, the senses, and the relations between humans. "Carnival" refers to cultural manifestations that take place in different related forms in North and South America, Europe, and the Caribbean, often including particular language and dress, as well as the presence of a madman, fool, or clown. In addition, people organize and participate in dance, music, or theatre. Latin American magical realists, for instance, explore the bright life-affirming side of the carnivalesque.
Common Aspects of Magical Realist Novels
The following elements are found in many magical realist novels, but not all are found in each novel and many are found in novels that fall under other genres.
• Contains a magical element
• The magical element may be intuitive but is never explained
• Characters accept rather than question the logic of the magical element
• Exhibits a richness of sensory details
• Distorts time so that it is cyclical or so that it appears absent; another technique is to collapse time in order to create a setting in which the present repeats or resembles the past
• Inverts cause and effect; for instance, a character may suffer before a tragedy occurs
• Incorporates legend or folklore
• Presents events from multiple perspectives, such as that of belief and disbelief or the colonizers and the colonized
• May be an overt rebellion against a totalitarian government or colonialism
• May be set in or arise from an area of cultural mixing
• Uses a mirroring of either past or present, astral and physical planes, or of characters
Like Water For Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate) is a wonderful example of how magical realism is used to portray political as well as cultural issues that the author wanted to focus the reader on. Laura Esquivel effectively combines reality and the supernatural to distance Tita from the miserable life she is forced to live.
Romance / The Romantic Novel
The term romance refers to works replete with excitement, passion, mystery, and action. A number of critics have described Esquivel’s novel as a romance.
According to Holmon and Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature (Sixth Edition), a Romance refers works with highly extravagant characters, remote and exotic places, highly exciting and heroic events, passionate love, or mysterious or supernatural experiences. In another and more sophisticated sense, Romance refers to works relatively free of the more realistic aspects of realistic verisimilitude.
The romantic novel is marked by strong interest in action, with episodes often based in love, adventure, and combat. The term romantic owes its origin to the early type of story embraced by the romance of medieval times, but with the march of time other elements have been added. The fabliau and novella, particularly, have added qualities. A romance , in its modern meaning, signifies that type of novel more concerned with action that with character; more properly fictional than legendary because it is woven so largely from the imagination; read more as a means of escape from existence than of engagement with the actualities of life.
Overview
In a style that is epic in scope yet intensely personal in focus, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate tells the story of Tita De La Garza, the youngest daughter in a family living in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. Through twelve chapters, each marked as a "monthly installment" and thus labeled with the months of the year, we learn of Tita’s struggle to pursue true love and claim her independence. Each installment features a recipe to begin each chapter. The structure of Like Water For Chocolate is wholly dependent on these recipes, as the main episodes of each chapter generally involve the preparation or consumption of the dishes that these recipes yield. The details of additional secondary recipes are woven throughout the narrative.
Like Water For Chocolate tells the story of Tita De La Garza, the youngest daughter in a family living in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. Tita’s love, Pedro Muzquiz, comes to the family’s ranch to ask for Tita’s hand in marriage. Because Tita is the youngest daughter she is forbidden by a family tradition upheld by her tyrannical mother, Mama Elena, to marry. Pedro marries Tita’s oldest sister, Rosaura, instead, but declares to his father that he has only married Rosaura to remain close to Tita. Rosaura and Pedro live on the family ranch, offering Pedro contact with Tita. When Tita cooks a special meal with the petals of a rose given to her by Pedro, the still-fiery force of their love (transmitted through the food) has an intense effect on Mama Elena’s second daughter, Gertrudis, who is whipped into a lustful state and flees the ranch in the arms of a revolutionary soldier. Meanwhile, Rosaura gives birth to a son, who is delivered by Tita. Tita treats her nephew, Roberto, as if he were her own child, to the point that she is able to produce breast milk to feed him while her sister is dry.
Sensing that Roberto is drawing Pedro and Tita closer together, Mama Elena arranges for Rosaura’s family to move to San Antonio. This separation devastates Tita. A short time later, news arrives that Roberto has died, most likely due to his removal from Tita’s care. The death of her nephew causes Tita to have a breakdown, and Mama Elena sends her to an asylum. Dr. John Brown, a local American doctor, takes pity on Tita and brings her to live in his house. He patiently nurses Tita back to health, caring for her physical ailments and trying to revive her broken spirit. After some time, Tita is nearly well, and she decides never to return to the ranch. No sooner has she made this choice than Mama Elena is injured in a raid by rebel soldiers, forcing Tita to return. Tita hopes to care for her mother, but Mama Elena bitterly rejects Tita’s good will. She refuses Tita’s cooking, claiming that it is poisoned. Not long after, Mama Elena is found dead from an overdose of a strong emetic she consumed for fear of poisoning.
The death of Mama Elena frees Tita from the curse of her birthright and she accepts an engagement proposal from John Brown, with whom she has fallen in love. In the meantime, Rosaura and Pedro have returned to the ranch and have produced a second child, Esperanza. Immediately, Pedro’s presence throws into question Tita’s love for John. The night that John officially asks Pedro to bless the marriage, Pedro corners Tita in a hidden room and makes love to her, taking her virginity. Soon after, Tita is certain that she is pregnant and knows that she will have to end her engagement to John. The affair between Pedro and Tita
prompts the return of Mama Elena, who comes in spirit form to curse Tita and her unborn child. Tita is distraught and has no one in whom she can confide.
In the midst of Tita’s despair, the long-lost Gertrudis returns to the ranch as a general in the revolutionary army, at the helm of a regiment of fifty men. Tita is overjoyed at the return of Gertrudis, who is just the companion she seeks. Gertrudis forces Tita to tell Pedro about the pregnancy. He is gladdened at the news, and he drunkenly serenades Tita from below her window. Outraged, Mama Elena’s ghost returns, violently threatening Tita and declaring that she must leave the ranch. For the first time, Tita stands up to Mama Elena and, in forceful words, declares her autonomy, banishing her mother’s spirit, which shrinks from an imposing presence into a tiny fiery light. As she expels the ghost, Tita is simultaneously relieved of all her symptoms of pregnancy. The light from Mama Elena’s ghost bursts through Tita’s window and onto the patio below where Pedro still sits, setting fire to his entire body. After rescuing Pedro, Tita is consumed with caring for him and helping him recover. John Brown returns from a trip to the United States and Tita confesses to him her relations with Pedro. John replies that he still wishes to marry her but that she must decide for herself with whom she wishes to spend her life.
Years pass, and the ranch focuses its attention on another wedding, this time between Esperanza and Alex, the son of John Brown. Rosaura has died, freeing her only daughter, Esperanza, from the stricture that had previously forbidden her, as it had Tita, from marrying. With Rosaura dead and Esperanza married, Tita and Pedro are finally free to express their love in the open. On their first night together, Tita and Pedro experience love so intense that both are led to a tunnel that will carry them to the afterlife. Tita turns back, wanting to continue in life and in love with Pedro. Once she does, she realizes that Pedro has already crossed over. Wanting desperately to be with him, Tita attempts to ignite her inner fire by eating the candles that had lit the room until they extinguished themselves at the moment of Pedro’s death. When she succeeds in recreating the climate of true passion, she reenters the luminous tunnel and meets Pedro in the spirit world. The final union of their bodies and spirits sets fire to the entire ranch, and the only remnant left of their love is the recipe book in which Tita recorded her wisdom.
Main Characters
Like Water For Chocolate can be distilled into the stories of two women, Tita De La Garza and her mother, the formidable Mama Elena. The trajectory of their struggle against one another is the axis around which the entire novel turns. Tita, the protagonist, strives for love, freedom, and individuality, and Mama Elena, the chief antagonist, stands as the prime opposition to the fulfillment of these goals. This mother-daughter relationship is fraught with difficulty from its inception, when Tita is brought into the world prematurely after her father’s sudden death. Mama Elena is the opposite of a nurturer, never forging any bond with Tita. Tita develops a relationship with food that gives her the power to nurture and give outlet to her emotions.
As with most literary pairings, Tita and Mama Elena share a central characteristic that defines both their individual struggles and their conflict with each other. The revelation that Mama Elena herself suffered the pangs of lost love is an important thematic complement to Tita’s deprivation. The reaction of each woman to her predicament helps delineate their differing characters. Whereas Mama Elena lets the loss of love turn her into a sinister and domineering mother, Tita, while obeying her mother’s command outwardly, engages in a lifelong struggle for love, which she eventually wins through the strength of spirit.
Structure
The structuring of Like Water for Chocolate as "A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies," as it is subtitled, establishes the filter through which the reader will experience the world of the novel. Like Tita–whose knowledge of life is "based on the kitchen"– the reader must explore the work through the role and power of food, guided by the recipes that begin each chapter. The division of the novel into "monthly installments" conjures up the image of serial narratives published in periodicals (often women’s magazines). This organization, along with the matter-of-fact weaving of recipes and remedies into the fabric of the narrative, underscores the fact that the novel offers substantial opportunities for feminist analysis.
Symbolism
In addition to serving as a central organizing principle, food is often a direct cause of physical and emotional unrest, and serves as a medium through which emotions can be transmitted. Tita prepares most of the food in the novel, and she uses food to express her emotions because her lowly cultural status affords her no other opportunity to do so. The vomiting and moroseness at Rosaura’s wedding results from the guests’ eating the cake that bears Tita’s tears. Likewise, the sexual frenzy that compels Gertrudis to leave the ranch is occasioned by the transmission of Tita’s passion for Pedro into the dish she prepares for dinner. These incidents suggest a simultaneous commodification and uncontrollability of emotion; food is a potent force in the world of the novel, and it lets Tita assert her identity. Images of heat and fire permeate the novel as expressions of intense emotion. Because heat is the catalyst that causes food to undergo chemical change, substantial waves of it are present at many of the moments when food is being prepared. In the science of cooking, heat is a force to be used precisely; the novel’s title phrase "like water for chocolate," refers to the fact that water must be brought to the brink of boiling several times before it is ready to be used in the making of hot chocolate. However, the heat of emotions, cannot be so controlled. Heat is a symbol for desire and physical love throughout the text: in Gertrudis’ flight from the ranch; Pedro’s lustful gazing at Tita in the shower; and the post-coital death of Pedro, among many other instances. The inner fire of the individual constitutes an important theme in the novel, and much of Tita’s struggle centers on cultivating this fire. These uses of fire point toward a duality in its symbolism, as a source of strength and a force of destruction. The coupling of death and desire that occurs when the love between Tita and Pedro is freed epitomizes this duality.
In Like Water for Chocolate, Esquivel extends the religious-mythical themes of magic realism to the everyday world of the domestic realm of a female-dominated household. Though not a story of the battles, great figures, and moral challenges generally associated with the epic form, Esquivel elevates this story of women, and one woman in particular, to such proportions. This strategy leads the reader to explore the feminist properties of Like Water For Chocolate, which are evident in the depictions of Tita’s struggle to gain independence and develop her identity, and also in the fact that this struggle is depicted at all. In creating this female-centered cast of characters, Esquivel imagines a world in which men are physically present only occasionally, though the legacy of sexism and the confinement of women to the domestic sphere persist. Esquivel does not offer her readers the vision of a utopian sisterhood, but rather insight into the way women are restricted by standards of societal propriety perpetuated by other women.
Characters
Tita—The protagonist of the novel, Tita is the youngest daughter of Mama Elena, prohibited by family tradition from marrying so that she will be free to take care of her mother later in life. The novel follows Tita’s life from birth to death, focusing mostly on her tortured relationship with Pedro, and her struggle and eventual triumph in pursuit of love and individuality.
Tita De la Garza is the obedient but strong-willed youngest daughter of Mama Elena. On the surface she accepts her mother's dictates, even when they cause her to suffer the loss of the man she loves. Yet, she subtly rebels by rechannelling her feelings for him into the creation of delicious meals that express her passionate and giving nature. She obeys her mother's order to throw away the roses Pedro has given her, but not before she creates an exquisite sauce from the petals. Through her cooking, she successfully communicates her love to Pedro. Tita's caring and forgiving nature emerges as she takes over the feeding of Rosaura's two children when their mother is unable to nurse them and as she tends to her mother after being banished from the ranch. Even after Mama Elena accuses Tita of trying to poison her so she will be free to marry John, Tita patiently prepares her meals. When Rosaura suffers from severe digestive problems, Tita also comes to her aid. Even while Rosaura rails against Tita about her feelings for Pedro and threatens to send Esperanza away to school, Tita serves a special diet to help her sister lose weight and ease her suffering. Tita does, however, have a breaking point. Her strength crumbles when Mama Elena sends Pedro, Roberto, and Rosaura away, and later she hears the news of Roberto's death, which pushes her into madness. After she regains her sanity, she seems to redouble her will. She stands up to Mama Elena's spirit and thus refuses to be influenced by her. She also holds her own with Rosaura, and works out an arrangement where she can continue to have a relationship with Pedro and Esperanza. Her passion, however, is her most apparent characteristic. For over two decades, her intense feelings for Pedro never fade. Tita ultimately sacrifices her life for him when she lights herself on fire after his death so that their souls can forever be united.
Mama Elena—The tyrannical, widowed matriarch of the De La Garza clan, Mama Elena is the prime source of Tita’s suffering. Her fierce temperament inspires fear in all three of her daughters. She keeps Tita from her true love, Pedro, and it is later revealed that Mama Elena herself once suffered from a lost love, embittering her for the rest of her life.
Mama Elena De la Garza is an authoritarian, middle-class matron who runs her daughters' lives along with the family ranch. Not only does she enforce the tradition that compels the youngest daughter to care for her widowed mother for the remainder of her life, but she compounds Tita's suffering by forcing her to prepare the wedding feast for Pedro and her sister. Suspecting a secret relationship between Pedro and Tita, she sends Rosaura, Pedro, and Roberto to her cousin's in San Antonio. When Roberto subsequently dies, Tita blames her mother because she separated the child from Tita, who fed and nurtured him. Mama Elena doles out severe beatings and/or banishment from the family in response to any acts of rebellion. She beats Tita after the wedding guests eat Tita's meal and become ill, and breaks her nose with a wooden spoon when Tita blames her for Roberto's death. She banishes Tita from the ranch after Tita shows signs of madness and disowns Gertrudis for working in a brothel. Her need for control over her daughters is so strong that it does not end with her death. Her spirit appears to Tita to warn her to stay away from Pedro. When Tita refuses, Mama Elena becomes so angry that she causes Pedro to be severely burned. Her proud and stubborn nature also emerges after the bandits who raid the ranch injure her health. She feels humiliated by her need for Tita's assistance and thus cannot accept her daughter's offer of food and comfort—a rejection that ultimately leads to her death. Mama Elena does appear more human, though, when Tita discovers letters in her closet that reveal a secret passionate love affair from her past. After her lover and her husband died, Mama Elena suppressed her sorrow and never again was able to accept love.
Pedro—Tita’s true love, and the eventual father of Roberto and Esperanza. Denied marriage to Tita by Mama Elena, he agrees to marry Rosaura only so he can stay close to Tita, however this breaks Tita’s heart. He loves Tita, but shows little strength of character. He allows Mama Elena to run his life and separate him from the woman he loves. He also observes Tita's suffering under Mama Elena's domination and does little to intervene on her behalf. At one point Tita berates him for not having the courage to run off with her instead of marrying Rosaura. Nevertheless, he asserts his continued love for Tita throughout the novel and pursues her secretly. Pedro dies after he and Tita are finally blissfully united while making love at the novel’s end. Marisa Januzzi, in her article in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, claims that "Pedro sometimes seems so unimaginative that only in fantasy ... could such an underdeveloped male character and magical ending satisfy Tita."
Rosaura—The second daughter of Mama Elena, Rosaura marries Pedro, much to the despair of Tita. Rosaura leaves the ranch when Mama Elena sends her and Pedro to San Antonio to keep Pedro and Tita apart. Her first child, Roberto, dies as an infant; her second, Esperanza, prohibited like Tita from ever marrying, weds Alex after Rosaura dies.
Rosuara causes Tita further pain when she determines that her only daughter will care for her and never marry, according to family tradition. Maria Elena de Valdes, in her article in World Literature Today, notes that Rosaura tries to model herself after Mama Elena in her treatment of Tita and Esperanza. She becomes, however, "an insignificant imitation of her mother. She lacks the strength, skill, and determination of Mama Elena." She also lacks her mother's passion. Tita discovers that Mama Elena has suffered from the loss of her true love and suppressed her emotions. Rosaura, on the other hand, never seems to display any capacity for love. Rosaura does, however, share some similarities with her mother. Like Mama Elena, she is unable to provide nurturance for her children. Tita must provide sustenance for both of Rosaura's children, just as Nacha had done for Tita. Also, Rosaura dies as her mother did, because of her inability to accept nurturance in the form of food from Tita.
Gertrudis— Gertrudis De la Garza is Tita's strong-willed, free-spirited sister. The eldest of the sisters, she is a passionate woman who takes sensual pleasure in life. Tita's cooking arouses such strong emotions in her that she runs off with a soldier in the revolutionary army and thus away from her mother's oppression. When Mama Elena discovers that Gertrudis is working at a brothel soon after her disappearance from the ranch, she disowns her. Only after Mama Elena's death does Tita ironically discover that Gertrudis was the product of their mother's illicit affair with a man who was half-black. Gertrudis returns to the ranch after Mama Elena's death, now married and a general in the revolutionary army. She advises Tita to follow her heart as she has done.
Dr. John Brown—The family doctor, of American origin, who lives in Eagle Pass. When he comes to attend Rosaura after Roberto's birth, he is astounded by Tita's beauty as well as her ability to assist her nephew's difficult birth. He returns to the ranch when Mama Elena De la Garza calls him to take Tita to an insane asylum. He instead takes Tita to his home and nurses her back to health. John eventually falls in love with Tita and helps rehabilitate her soul, revealing to her the nature of the fire that resides in each individual. Tita responds to his kindness and patience and agrees to marry him. His understanding of her dilemma after she confesses her infidelity with Pedro leads her to reconsider her decision to call off the wedding: "What a fine man he was. How he had grown in her eyes! And how the doubts had grown in her head!" At the last minute, however, she realizes that her love for Pedro is stronger than her affection for John. She eventually denies him marriage to pursue Pedro. John Brown is the father of Alex.
Nacha—The ranch cook, of unspecified indigenous background, Nacha is the prime caretaker for Tita throughout her childhood, and provides her with the love and support that Mama Elena fails to give. She is also the source for most of the recipes in the novel.
Soon after Tita is born, a close relationship is established between Nacha and Tita. Nacha. Since Tita's mother is unable to nurse her, Nacha takes over the task of feeding her and exposes her to the magical world of the kitchen. During her childhood, Tita often escapes her mother's overbearing presence and finds comfort in Nacha's company. Nacha becomes Tita's surrogate mother and the kitchen her playground and schoolhouse as Nacha passes down traditional Mexican recipes to her. Unfortunately, Tita loses Nacha's support when, after tasting the icing Tita has prepared for Rosaura's wedding cake, Nacha is "overcome with an intense longing" for her lost love, and she dies of a broken heart. Her spirit continues to aid Tita after her death, however, coming to her aid when she is delivering Rosaura's first baby.
Chencha—The ranch maid, also of indigenous descent, Chencha possesses a somewhat flighty disposition. She becomes Tita’s companion in the kitchen after Nacha’s death.
Chencha becomes Tita's confidante. She takes pity on Tita after Mama Elena banishes her from the ranch and pays her a secret visit at John Brown's home. The soup she brings restores Tita's sanity. When she returns to the ranch, she is brutally raped, but is strong enough to survive the ordeal. Tita allows her to leave the ranch after this trauma, knowing that "if Chencha stayed on the ranch near her mother, she would never be saved." Chencha eventually marries her first love, Jesus Martinez, and returns to the ranch.
Juan Alejandrez
Juan is a captain in the revolutionary army when he first sees Gertrudis. He is known for his bravery, but when he smells the scent of roses emanating from Gertrudis' body after she eats one of Tita's magical dishes, he leaves the battlefield for the ranch. Juan sweeps Gertrudis up on his horse and carries her away from her home and her mother's tyranny. The two later marry and return for a visit to the ranch as generals.
Roberto—The first child of Rosaura and Pedro, Roberto dies in America after being taken away from Tita’s care.
Tita establishes a mother-child bond with him when his mother is too ill to feed him. When Pedro observes Tita nursing his son, their relationship is further strengthened. After Roberto's death, Tita is unable to cope with the sorrow and descends into madness.
Esperanza—The second child of Rosaura and Pedro, and the mother of the narrator of the novel. She is raised by Tita in the kitchen. Tita insists that they name the child Esperanza instead of Josefita, because she does not want to "influence her destiny." Nevertheless, Rosaura tries to impose on Esperanza the same kind of fate that Mama Elena imposed on Tita, but Rosaura's death frees Esperanza to marry Alex Brown, the man she loves. Her marriage to Alex breaks the De La Garza family tradition that disallows the marriage of youngest daughters.
Alex—The son of Dr. John Brown, and the father of the narrator. His mother died during his birth He marries Esperanza at the end of the novel.
Paquita Lobo
The De la Garzas' neighbor, who has unusually sharp senses. She is able to tell something is wrong with Tita when she is overcome by Pedro's presence at their first meeting. She also suggests that Tita appears pregnant at the very time when Tita suspects the same thing.
Morning Light
John Brown's grandmother, a Kikapu Indian, whom his grandfather had captured and brought back to live with him. Rejected by his grandfather's proud, intensely Yankee family, Morning Light spent most of her time studying the curative properties of plants. After her medicines saved John's great-grandfather's life, the family and the community accepted her as a miracle healer. While at John's home, Tita sees her, or her spirit, making tea on the patio As Tita spends time with her, they establish a silent communication with each other. Her spirit helps calm Tita. Later John tells Tita about his grandmother's theory that we all need love to nourish our souls: "Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves.... Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live." Tita comes to accept and live by this theory.
Jose Trevino
Jose Trevino was the love of Mama Elena's life. Because he was mulatto—half-black—her parents forbid her to see him and forced her to marry Juan De la Garza instead. Mama Elena continued a relationship with him, however, and Gertrudis is his daughter. Tita only discovers this secret relationship after her mother's death.
Narrator
Esperanza's daughter and Tita's grandniece. The narrator explains that her mother found Tita's cookbook in the ruins of the De la Garza ranch. Esperanza told her daughter the story of Tita's life as she prepared the cookbook's recipes. The narrator has combined those recipes and the stories her mother told her about Tita, explaining that Tita "will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes."
Themes
Duty and Responsibility
The first chapter begins the novel's exploration of duty, responsibility, and tradition as they present Tita's main conflict. Family tradition requires that she reject Pedro's marriage proposal so she can stay at home and take care of her widowed mother for the rest of her life. If she turns her back on this tradition, she will not fulfill what society considers her responsibility to her mother. Rosaura decides that she also will impose this tradition upon her daughter Esperanza and so prevent her from marrying Alex Brown. Tita recognizes, however, that the tradition is unfair; if she cannot marry and have children, who will support her in her old age? She tells Rosaura that she will go against tradition as long as she has to, "as long as this cursed tradition doesn't take me into account." Nevertheless, she and Pedro respect his duty toward his wife and child, for they remain discreet in their love as long as she lives.
Tradition
Like Water for Chocolate focuses almost exclusively on the legacy of one family, the De la Garzas. The De la Garza family comes with its own set of traditions, which are both favorable and inhibiting. The cooking tradition is passed along from Nacha to Tita and later to Esperanza’s daughter. By keeping alive the recipes, the future generations of De la Garzas are able to remember and honor their ancestors. However, the tradition of keeping the youngest child from marrying threatens to inhibit two of the work’s characters from finding true love. Unlike the cooking tradition which exists only to serve and please its adherents, this tradition is abandoned because of the displeasure it produces.
Obedience
In order to fulfill her responsibilities toward her mother, Tita must obey her—a difficult task, given Mama Elena's authoritative nature. Mama Elena makes harsh demands on Tita throughout her life and expects her to obey without question. Mama Elena feels that Tita has never had the "proper deference" towards her mother, and so she is particularly harsh on her youngest daughter. Even when Tita sews "perfect creation" for the wedding, Mama Elena makes her rip out the seam and do it over because she did not baste it first, as Mama instructed. After Mama Elena decides that Pedro will marry Rosaura, she insists that Tita cook the wedding feast, knowing how difficult that task will be for her. When Nacha dies, Mama Elena decides Tita must take full responsibility for the meals on the ranch, which leaves Tita little time for anything else. Tita's struggle to determine what is the proper degree of obedience due to her mother is a major conflict in the novel.
Cruelty and Violence
Mama Elena often resorts to cruelty and violence as she forces Tita to obey her. Many of the responsibilities she imposes on Tita, especially those relating to Pedro and Rosaura's wedding, are blatant acts of cruelty, given Tita's pain over losing Pedro. Mama Elena meets Tita's slightest protest with angry tirades and beatings. If she even suspects that Tita has not fulfilled her duties, as when she thought that Tita intentionally ruined the wedding cake, she beats her. When Tita dares to stand up to her mother and to blame her for Roberto's death, Mama Elena smacks her across the face with a wooden spoon and breaks her nose. This everyday cruelty does not seem so unusual, however, in a land where a widow must protect herself and her family from bandits and revolutionaries.
Victim and Victimization
When Mama Elena coerces Tita into obeying her cruel dictates, she victimizes her. Tita becomes a victim of Mama Elena's obsessive need for power and control. Mama Elena confines Tita to the kitchen, where her life consists of providing for the needs of others. She rejects Tita's individuality and tries to force her to suppress her sense of selfhood. Tita's growth as an individual depends on her ability to free herself from the role of victim.
Redemption
Redemption for the victimized is a common theme in the work. Those who commit wrongs are typically punished for their actions later. Mama Elena, who disciplines her daughter and keeps her from marrying, must later rely on the care of that daughter after she becomes paralyzed. Rosaura, who steals her sister’s lover and is obsessed with her public image, dies while passing gas and is shunned by her husband and friends because of her foul odor. Tita, who withstands the most abuse in the novel from family and lovers, is also the most triumphant by the novel’s end.
Gender Roles
The novel closely relates Tita's victimization to the issue of gender roles. When Tita's mother confines her to the kitchen, she relegates her to a limited domestic sphere. There Tita's role becomes a traditionally female one—that of selfless nurturer, placing the needs of others before her own. In this limited role, Tita struggles to find a sense of identity. When Tita is taken to Dr. Brown's house, she marvels at her hands, for she discovers "she could move them however she pleased." At the ranch, "what she had to do with her hands was strictly determined." She learns of Dr. Brown's grandmother, Morning Light, who experimented with herbs and became a respected healer.
Love and Passion
The forces of love and passion conflict with Tita's desire to fulfill her responsibilities toward her mother. In obeying her mother, Tita must suppress her feelings for Pedro. Her sister Gertrudis, on the other hand, allows herself to freely express her passion when she runs off with Juan and soon begins work at a brothel. Tita's and Gertrudis's passionate natures also emerge through their enjoyment of food. Both relish good meals, although Tita is the only one who knows how to prepare one. At one point, Gertrudis brings the revolutionary army to the De la Garza ranch so she can sample her sister' s hot chocolate, cream fritters, and other recipes. The food analogy also applies to the love of John Brown for Tita. Although he is captivated by her beauty, he feels no passionate jealousy over her relationship with Pedro. He comes from a North American family where the food, as Tita finds, "is bland and didn't appeal."
Sanity and Insanity
As the need to obey her mother clashes with her own desires, Tita begins to lose her sanity. When Mama Elena sends Rosaura, Pedro, and Roberto away, Tita loses all interest in life. The news of Roberto's death pushes her over the edge and she escapes to the pigeon house, refusing to come out. When John removes her from the oppressive atmosphere her mother has created, and he and Chencha offer her comfort and love, her sanity returns. Mama Elena never questions her own state of mind, although she is obsessive in her need to dominate her daughters. When Tita is found in the pigeon house, Mama Elena ironically states that "there's no place in this house for maniacs'"
Creativity and Imagination
Through Tita's creativity in the kitchen, she finds an outlet for her suppressed emotions. Thus, ironically, while Mama Elena tries to control Tita by confining her to the kitchen and forcing her to prepare all of the family's meals, Tita is also able to strengthen her relationship with others and to gain a clearer sense of herself. She pours all of her passion for Pedro into her meals, which helps to further bond the two. Her cooking also creates a bond with Pedro's two children, easing her pain over not being able to have children of her own with him. Tita's imaginative cooking is also a way for her to rebel against her mother; she recalls that whenever she failed to follow a recipe exactly, "she was always sure ... that Mama Elena would find out and, instead of congratulating her on her creativity, give her a terrible tongue-lashing for disobeying the rules."
Supernatural
The final important element of the novel is Esquivel's use of the supernatural. Tita's magical dishes, which produce waves of longing and uncontrollable desire, become a metaphor for creativity and self-expression. Like an artist, Tita pours herself into her cooking and produces works of art that evoke strong emotions in others. Her careful preparation of her family's food also reveals her loving nature. Another supernatural aspect, the spirits of the dead that appear to Tita throughout the novel, suggests that one's influence does not disappear after death. Nacha's spirit gives Tita confidence when she needs it, much like Nacha had done while she was alive. Mama Elena's spirit tries to control Tita from the grave, making her feel guilty about her passion for Pedro.
Food and Cooking
Food as a means of communication and transferal is a common theme in this novel. Tita uses food to convey her emotions to others. Through one dish, she communicates her passion to Pedro; through another, she communicates her longing and sadness to Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding guests. Food is also a means of transferring family history. The structure of the work relies largely on food as a means to narrate the memories and lives of the De la Garza family. Finally, the kitchen is a site of birth, heritage, and nourishment. There, children are born, raised, and fed, and the family recipes and stories are passed down to future.
Motifs
Tears
Tita’s onion-induced crying brings her into the world prematurely. Thereafter, tears reemerge in the novel as symbols of Tita’s deep emotional connections. While cooking with Nacha, Tita realizes that her tears come not only from sadness but also appear when she is deeply moved. Tita’s tears often cause flooding, as on the day of her birth and on the day Chencha brings ox-tail soup to end Tita’s days of silence. Tita’s tears renew and cleanse. They are the physical manifestation of her emotional catharsis.
Sight and Seeing
Sight, like food, sometimes dictates characters’ actions and feelings. Mama Elena is most noted for her powerful gaze that has the ability to both start and stop conversations and the force of which prevents the rebel army from raiding her ranch. The look Pedro gives Tita is so strong that it causes her entire body to heat up. The power of a look is often stronger than that of any physical force. Though the eyes, characters communicate desires and demands without needing to speak at all.
Magic/Fantasy
Magical happenings blend seamlessly into the quotidian for the De la Garza women. Esquivel combines symbolism with realism and fuses the fantastical with the real. Characters literally burn with passion, eat their feelings, and come back from the dead.
Other important motifs to trace throughout the novel
Fire / Ice (Heat and the cold)
Sickness / illness
Style
Point of View
In fiction, the point of view is the perspective from which the story is presented The unique point of view in Like Water for Chocolate helps convey the significance of the narrative. Esperanza, Tita De la Garza's niece, finds her aunt's cookbook in the ruins of the De la Garza ranch. As she recreates the recipes in her own home, she passes down the family stories to her daughter. Her daughter becomes the novel's narrator as she incorporates her great-aunt's recipes, remedies, and experiences into one book. She justifies her unique narrative when she explains that Tita "will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes."
Setting
The turbulent age of rebellion in Mexico provides an appropriate setting for the novel's focus on tyranny and resistance. Soldiers, bandits, and rebels are regularly mentioned in the novel, and often make appearances important to the narrative. It is a bandit's attack, for instance, that compels Tita's return home after her mother has disowned her. As Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces clash with the oppressive Mexican regime, Tita wages her own battle against her mother's dictates.
Structure
The narrative structure, or form, of the novel intersperses Tita's story with the recipes and remedies that figure so prominently in her life. By placing an actual recipe at the beginning of each chapter, the author is reinforcing the importance of food to the narrative. This structure thus attests to the female bonding and creativity that can emerge within a focus on the domestic arts.
Symbolism
A symbol is an object or image that suggests or stands for another object or image. Food is the dominant symbol in the novel, especially as expressed in the title. "Like water for (hot) chocolate" is a Mexican expression that literally means water at the boiling point and figuratively means intense emotions on the verge of exploding into expression. Throughout the novel, Tita's passion for Pedro is "Like Water for Chocolate" but is constantly repressed by her dictatorial mother. An incident that symbolizes Mama Elena's oppression occurs when Tita is preparing two hundred roosters for the wedding feast. As she castrates live roosters to insure that they will be fat and tender enough for the guests, the violent and gruesome process makes her swoon and shake with anger. She admits "when they had chosen something to be neutered, they'd made a mistake, they should have chosen her. At least then there would be some justification for not allowing her to marry and giving Rosaura her place beside the man she loved." Food becomes a symbol of Tita's love for Pedro as she uses it to communicate her feelings. Even though Tita remains confined to the kitchen, her creative preparation of the family's meals continues to serve as a vehicle for her love for Pedro and his children, and thus as an expression of her rebellion against her mother's efforts to separate them.
Magical Realism
Magic realism is a fictional style, popularized by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that appears most often in Latin American literature. Authors who use this technique mingle the fantastic or bizarre with the realistic. Magic realism often involves time shifts, dreams, myths, fairy tales, surrealistic descriptions, the element of surprise and shock, and the inexplicable. Examples of magic realism in Like Water for Chocolate occur when Tita's recipes have strange effects on those who eat them, when spirits appear to her, and when she cries actual rivers of tears. The fantastic element in Tita's cooking is that it produces such strong emotions in her family. The art of cooking, however, does reflect the patience and talent of the cook—qualities that are appreciated by those who enjoy the results. The spirits who appear to Tita symbolize the long lasting effects of those who impact our lives and our own feelings of responsibility and guilt.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device used to create an expectation of future events. In Like Water for Chocolate, foreshadowing occurs when John tells Tita about his grandmother's theory of love and life. She said that "each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves." We need the breath of the person we love to light them and thus nourish our souls. She warns, however, that lighting the matches all at once would be fatal. This process occurs at the end of the novel when Pedro's suppressed passion for Tita is finally "lit," and the intense flame is too much for him to bear.
Paradox
A paradox is a statement or situation that seems contradictory or absurd, but is actually true. The kitchen becomes a paradoxical symbol in the novel. On the one hand, it is a place where Tita is confined exclusively to domestic tasks, a place that threatens to deny her a sense of identity. Yet it is also a nurturing and creative domain, providing Tita with an outlet for her passions and providing others with sustenance and pleasure.
Chapter-by-Chapter Guide
January (Chapter 1)
Summary
Like Water for Chocolate opens with a bit of wisdom from one of its central settings, the kitchen: to avoid tears when chopping onions, one must simply place a slice of onion on one’s head.
Onion-induced weeping quite literally sweeps the protagonist, Tita, into the world, as she is born in the kitchen, crying, amidst of flood of her mother’s tears. Her mother, Mama Elena, is unable to produce milk (due to shock at the recent death of her husband) and consequently hands off Tita almost immediately to the house cook, Nacha, who rears the child in the kitchen. Surrounded by the colors, smells, and routines of Nacha’s kitchen, Tita grows up understanding the world in terms of food. She enjoys her isolation in the domain of the kitchen.
Outside the kitchen, Tita follows the demanding regimen that Mama Elena sets for her daughters. Life is full of cooking, cleaning, sewing, and prayer. This routine is interrupted one day by Tita’s timid announcement that a suitor, Pedro Muzquiz, would like to pay her a visit. Mama Elena greets this announcement with indignation, invoking the De La Garza family tradition that the youngest daughter is to remain unmarried so that she can care for the matriarch in the matriarch’s old age. Tita is dismayed by this rigid tradition. Outwardly, she submits to Mama Elena’s wishes, but privately she questions the family tradition and maintains her feelings for Pedro. The next day, Pedro and his father arrive at the house unannounced to ask for Tita’s hand. Mama Elena refuses this marriage proposal, offering instead the hand of her second daughter, Rosaura.
Mama Elena’s bold disregard for Tita’s feelings shocks the household, but Pedro and his father agree to the arrangement. Nacha, the maid, claims to have overheard Pedro confess to his father that he has accepted the marriage to Rosaura because it is the only way to be near Tita. However, Tita is not consoled by the report of this admission. Not even the Christmas Roll, her favorite food, can cure Tita of her sadness. She is struck by a feeling of cold; to warm herself, she resumes work on a bedspread, which she had begun crocheting when she and Pedro first began to talk of marriage.
Commentary
The story of Tita’s entry into the world marks the first fantastical image of Like Water for Chocolate, initiating the reader into the novel’s magical realism and illustrating the intensity and improbability that characterize the events of the story. The image of Tita flowing into the world in a flood of tears prefigures the sadness and longing that will pervade her life. After Tita’s birth, the flood of tears dries to leave ten pounds of salt to be collected and used for cooking. The practical attitude with which the characters greet this surreal happening helps to establish the supernatural as an accepted part of the characters’ lives.
Her isolated childhood in the kitchen gives Tita an outlook on life different from that of her sisters, Gertrudis and Rosaura, and she comes to develop different ideals for herself as she matures. As a young woman, Tita rebels against the family tradition that confines her to a life without love. Her insistent questioning (even though she does not petition Mama Elena directly) of her lot in life can be identified as one of the feminist impulses in the novel. This refusal to accept an assigned and undesirable social role marks the beginning of Tita’s path to self-assertion and freedom.
The overwhelming sense of cold that descends upon Tita after Pedro and Rosaura become engaged is an early instance of a theme that will figure prominently in the novel: an emotional state manifesting itself physically. Tita’s nights of insomnia spent feverishly crocheting a bedspread represent her desperate desire for the heat of love and help establish the pattern of Tita’s channeling her passion into domestic activities (she later transmits her passion for Pedro through cooking). As with many of the behaviors in the novel, Tita’s reaction to the feeling of cold is exaggerated so as to highlight the intensity of the emotion behind the action.
Another important aspect of Tita’s sadness about the engagement is that not even the Christmas Roll can lift her spirits. The warmth that Tita would normally receive from her favorite food cannot overcome the coldness induced by her starved love. Tita’s understanding of life through food fails to comfort her, and the inadequacy of food as a substitute for love is demonstrated.
February (Chapter 2)
Summary
The fateful wedding of Pedro and Rosaura has the De La Garza household in a tremendous blur of activity. The kitchen is consumed with the preparation of the Chabela Wedding Cake, the recipe for which begins this chapter. The wedding feast requires gigantic proportions of food –170 eggs for the cake and 200 roosters to be fattened up and served as capons. Nacha and Tita shoulder the bulk of this effort. In shock from the circumstances and fatigued by the work required to prepare the feast, Tita is plagued by hallucinations. Mama Elena sternly declares that she will not have Tita ruin the wedding. Tita continues to cook, but eventually she and Nacha near the point of breakdown. When Mama Elena leaves the kitchen, Nacha encourages Tita to release her emotions before the wedding. Finally able to express herself, Tita breaks down into endless tears. After weeping profusely, Tita continues cooking and finds that her tears have made the cake batter soggy.
Later, Tita accidentally runs into Pedro in the garden while picking apricots. He makes it clear that he still desires her, wishing to explain himself; however, Tita refuses to hear him out. Back in the kitchen and fixating on the whiteness of the cake icing she is preparing, Tita is continually affected by hallucinations. Nacha insists that Tita get some rest. Alone in the kitchen, Nacha tastes the cake icing to see if Tita’s tears have made it salty. She finds the flavour unchanged, but is suddenly overcome with a sense of immense loss. She remembers her own lost, youthful love and takes sick with an ache so terrible that she cannot attend the wedding.
However, Tita must attend the wedding and suffer the intense scrutiny of the assembled guests, all of whom know about her feelings for Pedro. She is harassed by their comments and stares, but maintains a stoic appearance. As she passes through the receiving line where guests congratulate the newlyweds, Tita is forced to face Pedro, who uses the opportunity to whisper to her that his love for her is undying. Mama Elena witnesses the uncommonly long embrace and questions Tita as to the words exchanged. Tita does not divulge what happened, but is scared by Mama Elena’s threats and tries to stay away from Pedro and Rosaura.
Tita spends the rest of the wedding in newfound glee, basking in the warmth of Pedro’s confession. The guests begin to eat the wedding cake, and everyone is reduced to the same fit of longing and wailing that struck Nacha earlier. The heartache is coupled with bouts of vomiting, and the entire wedding party is ruined.
Having left immediately after eating a single piece of cake, Tita is the only person to escape the scourge. Her gaiety over Pedro’s love is tempered by the physical pain of the vicious beating she suffers at the hands of Mama Elena, who is certain that Tita purposefully poisoned the wedding cake. Tita is unable to convince her mother otherwise and unable to seek defense in Nacha, who is found dead, clutching a portrait of her lost lover.
Commentary
The weakness and hallucinations that Tita experiences while preparing the wedding feast are physical manifestations of the heartache that begins with her terrible cold. She fixates on the wedding cake and wedding gown, which serve as dreadful symbols of her hopeless love. The focus of her hallucinations on the whiteness of these objects comments on the purity of Tita’s emotions, in contrast to the loveless, and hence impure, nature of the impending union between Rosaura and Pedro. Additionally, the color white evokes ideals of femininity and womanhood–ideals to which Tita will never be able to conform because she is forbidden to love and marry. White also represents a virginity that Tita is never supposed to escape.
The wedding of Rosaura and Pedro marks the first instance when Tita wields, albeit unknowingly, the power that food offers her. Afflicted by sadness, Tita pours her emotions into the food she prepares by means of her tears (it is relevant here to recall the flood of tears in which Tita was born). Tita’s tears induce incessant vomiting and a terrible sense of loss among the wedding guests. However, more than a mere echo of Tita’s sorrow, these effects constitute a violent and amplified expression of emotion, as the cake inflicts actual pain.
Tita’s emotions have been transfigured: For Tita, trapped in the domestic sphere and denied not only control but also the right to rage at her fate, food serves to exact the vengeance she seeks. She subconsciously transforms the emotional violence she has suffered into an act of social violence. However, Mama Elena responds with real physical violence, illustrating the limits of Tita’s expression. Though the marriage occurs, the fits of vomiting ruin the wedding party and Rosaura’s pure white dress, exposing the event for the false and impure affair it is.
March (Chapter 3)
Summary
The death of Nacha leaves Tita alone and without a confidant in the domain of the De La Garza kitchen. Inheriting the role of ranch cook, Tita comforts herself by preparing elaborate dishes. With a rose given to her secretly by Pedro, Tita prepares quail in rose petal sauce. The recipe is of pre-Hispanic origin, and it is in Nacha’s voice that the secrets are transmitted.
The meal receives an ecstatic response from Tita’s family members, especially Pedro, who always compliments Tita’s cooking. A more curious affect is observed in Gertrudis, the second sister. The meal serves as an aphrodisiac for her, arousing in her an insatiable sexual desire. This turbulent emotion pulses through Gertrudis and on to Pedro. Tita herself goes through a sort of out-of-body experience. Throughout the dinner, Tita and Pedro stare at each other, entranced.
When the meal is complete, Gertrudis goes to prepare a shower to rid herself of the pink sweat and rose-scented aroma she emits. The force of her heat and passion, still strong from the aphrodisiacal meal, causes the water from the primitive ranch shower to evaporate on contact and eventually sets the structure on fire. Fleeing naked from the burning shower, Gertrudis is scooped up onto a galloping horse by a soldier in the revolutionary army, who was drawn to the area by her intoxicating scent. The soldier and Gertrudis ride off. Unable to follow the lustful path of Gertrudis, Tita is left on the ranch.
Commentary
The escape of Gertrudis serves as a foil to Tita’s stifled passion. The intensity of the former’s reaction to the meal serves to communicate the potency of the passion that the latter possesses but is unable to express directly. With her primary form of expression limited to food, Tita takes the illicit token of love from Pedro and returns the gift, transforming it into a meal filled with lust. The manner in which Gertrudis is affected by the food and later swept away on a galloping horse is clearly fantastical, and the vivid imagery (the pink sweat and powerful aroma) exemplifies the novel’s magical realism.
The disappearance of Gertrudis reveals much about female sexuality in Like Water for Chocolate. While Tita can only articulate her sexuality within the domestic sphere, Gertrudis is able to exceed these boundaries without a second thought. Her flight can be seen as a triumph, wherein she sheds notions of social propriety to pursue her unbridled desires.
Conversely, her departure from the ranch is also a sort of expulsion: The free expression of female desire clearly has no place in the ordered domestic realm. The contrasting experiences of Gertrudis and Tita illustrate the only two possibilities for female desire, both of which are extremes: stifled and unarticulated, or hypersexualized to the point of being pornographic.
The later revelation that Gertrudis is of mixed ancestry makes it interesting to read this chapter (and further characterizations of Gertrudis) in terms of racial stereotypes. Her intense eroticism (her strong sense of rhythm is mentioned later) corresponds to typical depictions of mulatto characters. It is possible to argue that, in showering, Gertrudis is attempting to rid herself of her inherent sexuality. Additionally, her insatiable desire may also be related to the circumstances of her parentage, because she was born of a love that was never fulfilled. Yet, though there is some textual support for a reading of Gertrudis as sexualized by her background, such a reading seems out of place in a novel normally so sensitive to issues of marginality and otherness.
April (Chapter 4)
Summary
Unexpected joy comes to Tita with the birth of Roberto, the son of Pedro and Rosaura. Tita works feverishly to prepare a special baptism meal. While in the kitchen, she has another chance encounter with Pedro that dramatically alters their relationship. A simple exchange of glances communicates the layers of unspoken desire between them. After this "consummation" of sorts, Tita’s faith in Pedro’s love is restored.
During a flashback, the narrator recalls the tumultuous birth of Roberto while the village was being occupied by federal troops. No doctor was available at the time, so Tita was left alone to help Rosaura birth the baby. During the long and difficult delivery, Tita was aided by the spirit voice of Nacha, guiding her in the delicate and dangerous procedure.
Rosaura produces no milk and is thus unable to nurse her child. Tita eventually takes on the responsibility of nursing Roberto, at first with special teas that he rejects. Once she offers her breast to pacify the child, Tita discovers that she is miraculously full with milk and is able to feed her nephew. Pedro discovers Tita secretly nursing Roberto and helps her to conceal this from the rest of the family, strengthening the illicit bond between the two even further. Sharp-witted Mama Elena senses something between them and holds to her resolve to keep them apart. She arranges for Rosaura, Pedro, and baby Roberto to move to San Antonio under the guise of seeking better medical attention for Rosaura. This news devastates Tita, who loathes the thought of being separated from her nephew and the man she loves.
Commentary
The interaction between Tita and Pedro in the kitchen is a landmark in their erotic relationship and is described as having transformed Tita "from chaste to experienced" without the benefit of touch. This development in Tita’s sexuality is especially noteworthy in that Tita is mostly a passive participant; the only significant action she takes in the encounter is letting her clothing fall so that Pedro may view her breasts more clearly. It is Pedro’s gaze that alters Tita’s sexuality, while her part is merely to let herself be seen. Here, as in subsequent episodes, Tita’s sexuality is depicted not as particularly independent or articulate, but rather as a reaction to Pedro’s carnal desire.
The location and circumstance of this exchange are also of significance: It occurs in the kitchen while Tita is preparing the baptism meal. This mingling of nurturing with eroticism solidifies the fact that Tita’s entire worldview is filtered through the kitchen. Tita prepares a traditional meal for a child whom she has nursed but did not birth; she exudes motherly love, and the physical act of making a meal is a substitute for the physical act of making love. In lifting her chest to Pedro, Tita offers up her flesh as though she were serving food, and her sexuality becomes an extension of her ability to nurture through food.
This "consummation" of the relationship between Pedro and Tita is also important because it is after Tita is made an "experienced" woman that she miraculously provides breast milk for her nephew Roberto. Tita’s relationship to Roberto evokes the Virgin Mary and her Immaculate Conception of Jesus; though still a virgin, Tita produces milk as though she had been pregnant. Tita’s breasts symbolize both sexuality and ability to nurture, and her ability to breastfeed Roberto is directly linked to her new status as a sexualized object.
This creates a dichotomy between Tita, the desired, sexual nurturer, and her sister Rosaura, the cold, undesired, and incomplete mother who cannot nurse her own child. Pedro’s role in hiding Tita’s means of feeding Roberto is important because it is another example of the displacement of their sexual contact onto an act of nurture. Their complicity in concealing Tita’s breast milk brings them closer, and Roberto serves as a vehicle through which their desire is transmitted.
May (Chapter 5)
Summary
In the wake of Pedro’s departure, Tita is moved to do little but tend to a pigeon she has taken as a pet. She grows despondent and ignores her duties in the household. During this time, federal troops raid the ranch. Mama Elena confronts them with a shotgun hidden in her petticoats and proves herself a formidable opponent when she shoots the chickens they have stolen from her and threatens them with her best shot. When she finally lets them search her property, they find nothing but Tita’s large dovecote filled with her cherished doves and pigeons. The soldiers trap as many birds as they can and depart. Before the arrival of the regiment, Mama Elena had skillfully hidden most of her valuable goods and livestock, ensuring that the ranch would not be totally plundered.
The absence of the doves and pigeons heightens Tita’s sense of loss after the departure of Roberto and Pedro. In the midst of this depression, word arrives from San Antonio that Roberto has died, unable to consume anything but his Aunt Tita’s breast milk. When she is rebuked for mourning the child, Tita lashes out at Mama Elena, screaming that Mama Elena is to blame for the baby’s death. Mama Elena strikes Tita across the face with a wooden spoon, breaking her nose. Tita retreats to her dovecote; when Chencha tries to retrieve her, she finds Tita in a catatonic state. Mama Elena orders Tita to be sent to an asylum. Dr. John Brown rescues Tita from the dovecote and takes her away. As Tita leaves, Chencha gives her the enormous bedspread that Tita has been crocheting. It is now a full kilometer long, the product of Tita’s endless sorrow.
Commentary
Tita’s confrontation with Mama Elena marks the first time that Tita is able to assert her beliefs, though she does so from a position of weakness in a moment of tremendous anguish.
Her grief at learning of Roberto’s death inspires Tita to challenge Mama Elena’s cruelty, and she manages, tentatively, to establish the power of her voice. This proves important, as Tita soon retreats into silence, but eventually finds power over Elena by means of words. However, her bold protest here is not triumphant; rather, Mama Elena rewards Tita with another beating. As with the beating after the spoiled wedding of Pedro and Rosaura, Mama Elena’s chief mechanism for countering Tita’s rare moments of opposition to her is physical attack. These abuses, physical and emotional, subject Tita’s body and mind to the constant threat of violence. She is unable to exert control over her emotional and physical well-being. The domestic space, in which Tita is usually able to exercise some measure of power through her motherly activities, is now entirely hostile.
The coupling of this watershed moment between Tita and Mama Elena with the raid of federal troops draws a parallel between the disruption of the ranch by outside forces and Mama Elena’s aggression. The turbulence of the revolution disturbs the domestic space, and in robbing Tita of her pet birds, the soldiers not only strip her of the opportunity to nurture, but also steal symbols of freedom. Likewise the violent attack from Mama Elena finally raids Tita’s spirit of its remaining sustenance, letting Mama Elena keep Tita under her control. Tita’s subsequent withdrawal into mental oblivion and physical detachment suggest that her only way out of this broken world is madness. Lying naked in the dovecote, covered with bird droppings, Tita’s body is no longer a source of pleasure or nurture, but merely a shell racked with pain and grief.
June (Chapter 6)
Summary
Under the loving care of Dr. Brown, Tita slowly emerges from her traumatized inner shell. Initially, she is withdrawn and numb, still suffering from the chronic sense of cold that on Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding day. Subsequently, she begins to comprehend her new life away from the oppressive ranch and Mama Elena. At John Brown’s house she encounters a figure who reminds her of Nacha. Tita is visited daily by the comforting presence of this silent woman, who turns out to be the ghost of John’s grandmother, a Native American named Morning Light. It is from Morning Light that John acquired his interest in science and medicine. His house is full of experiments that fascinate Tita.
Throughout her stay at John’s house, Tita remains silent. Nevertheless, a bond grows between her and John as they spend a great deal of time together. John shares with Tita a recipe for making matches, and with this recipe, he explains the theory that an inner fire burns in each person and describes the ways in which one must protect this fire. Eventually, John asks Tita to write on the wall (with a glow-in-the-dark stick) her reason for not talking.
When he returns, he finds that she has written, "Because I don’t want to." With this assertion of her will, Tita moves further toward her freedom and becomes certain that she wishes never to return to her mother’s house.
Commentary
For the first time, Tita is removed from the domestic world of the kitchen and the ranch. At Dr. Brown’s house, she is able to explore a new way of existing in the world, not circumscribed by the limits imposed by Mama Elena or by her role as nurturer. For the first time, she is simply an individual, not responsible for the care of anyone but herself. During this time, Tita achieves a bit of independence as she gains a sense of her desires, but she is only able to do so after returning from the depths of madness and remaining still within a very protected domestic space.
The gentle Dr. Brown is the ideal person to guide Tita toward well-being. His position as a white American male lets him offer Tita a completely different set of values (decidedly more liberal than those learned on the De La Garza ranch) with which Tita may function.
As an outsider, John offers Tita access to the independence she seeks. Yet even the option that arises out of her relationship with John Brown relies on her domesticity, as they are eventually to become engaged. Despite this, his sensitivity to her plight is crucial and is best exemplified in his explanation to her of his ideas about the internal box of matches, each one containing the explosions necessary for an individual to live. The theory allows Tita a metaphor through which to understand her own situation, for in her thoughts she realizes that "she knew what set off her explosions, but each time she had managed to light a match, it had persistently been blown out." This inner fire becomes the central image of the novel, one that pervades, and comes to symbolize, Tita’s continuing journey toward selfhood.
July (Chapter 7)
Summary
Appropriately enough, it is food that finally restores Tita to stability. Visiting from the De La Garza ranch, Chencha brings her ox-tail soup. With one spoonful Tita instantly recalls the best time of her life, her youth in the kitchen with Nacha, where she enjoyed many foods and Nacha’s love. Crying with Chencha, Tita remembers and recounts the recipe for the soup–the first recipe she has been able to remember since her breakdown.
Chencha brings news of the ranch, where Tita’s name is no longer spoken, and a letter from Gertrudis, who is living and working in a brothel. Tita asks Chencha to return to the ranch with the news that Tita has decided never to return. After Chencha leaves, John Brown proposes marriage to Tita, who, now fully recovered, looks forward to beginning a new life with him.
Before Chencha can deliver Tita’s message to Mama Elena, a group of bandits attacks the ranch. The bandits rape Chencha and thrash Mama Elena, who was trying to def Chencha, rendering her a paraplegic. Tita returns to the ranch to care for Chencha and Mama Elena. In hopes of helping her mother to a full recovery, Tita prepares the same ox-tail soup that so miraculously cured her own illness. Mama Elena rejects Tita’s care, humiliated that her disowned daughter has returned. Tita is crestfallen, confident that her meal, prepared with such love and care, would heal Mama Elena. But Mama Elena refuses to eat Tita’s food, certain that it is poisoned. Mama Elena only lets Chencha prepare and serve her food.
One day, when Chencha is unavailable, Tita secretly prepares food for Mama Elena, but Mama Elena is not fooled. She immediately detects the "bitter taste" always present in Tita’s food. Furious, Mama Elena fires Chencha. Unable to find anyone else to satisfy the demanding needs of her mother, Tita herself eventually resumes cooking for Mama Elena. Within a month, Mama Elena dies. The cause of her ailments and eventual death is revealed to be massive doses of ipecac (an emetic she took when she feared poisoning), not Tita’s cooking.
Despite the endless cruelty that she suffered at the hands of Mama Elena, Tita is moved to great sorrow by her mother’s death. Further, when dressing the dead body of Mama Elena for the wake, Tita discovers a set of keys that open a box of love letters. The letters reveal that as a young woman, Elena was deeply in love with a mulatto man. Her parents forbid this relationship and forced her into a marriage with the man who would become Tita’s father. However, Mama Elena continued the affair, and she eventually became pregnant with Gertrudis. Elena planned to run away with her lover but he was murdered, so she gave into her loveless marriage and hid the true identity of her second child’s father.
Tita mourns Mama Elena and this thwarted love. At the funeral, she swears that "she would never renounce love." She feels ready to accept John as her true love and companion, but her love for Pedro still survives, creating tension in her heart. Now that Mama Elena is dead, and with her the dictate forbidding Tita to marry, Pedro is determined to have Tita.
Commentary
The attack of the bandits represents another invasion of the domestic sphere, highlighting the vulnerability of the female-dominated ranch. In raping Chencha and injuring Mama Elena, the bandits reduce the two women to mere objects of male aggression. The absence of Tita, the customary target of Mama Elena’s abuse, leaves Mama Elena no outlet for her own aggression, thus reinforcing her vulnerability and victim status. In contrast, when the federal troops raided the ranch, Tita’s mourning for the dead Roberto provided Mama Elena a reason to explode at Tita, letting Mama Elena exercise some degree of control in her life. However, the bandits’ attack revisits upon Mama Elena the emotional and physical trauma that she created in Tita’s life.
Tita’s return to the ranch thrusts her back into the role of caretaker. She enters this role gracefully, her spirit renewed by the stint at John Brown’s. The ever-difficult Mama Elena, however, thwarts Tita’s steadfast belief in the healing properties of food. Despite her weakened condition, Mama Elena continues to wield tremendous power over Tita, reaffirming the mother-daughter hierarchy. One can interpret Mama Elena’s particular nastiness in this chapter as her desperate attempt to retain control over Tita in the face of her own mortality. Snubbing Tita’s cooking is the sole remaining means for Mama Elena to hurt her youngest daughter. More than simply rejecting the food, Mama Elena knowingly rejects the love, healing, and nourishment with which Tita always imbues her offerings. Mama Elena’s fatal self-poisoning is the literal effect of the medicine she takes to counteract Tita’s "bitter" food and the metaphorical effect of so many years of bitter living.
The revelation about Mama Elena’s own forbidden love is a crucial moment in Tita’s development, as Tita comes to understand Mama Elena’s cruelty toward her. Her ability to sympathize with her mother about the pain of restrained love–even though Mama Elena was never willing to sympathize with Tita–coupled with her initial grief at her mother’s death, demonstrates her maturity. Tita possesses the strength to confront her feelings, and with a new understanding of her mother’s life and a recognition of the fact that she is not the only one to have loved against the wishes of others, she resolves to be steadfast in her own pursuit of true love.
August (Chapter 8)
Summary
The death of Mama Elena frees Tita from her mother’s wretched sentence, and her excitement about marrying John Brown is diverted only by the birth of Rosaura’s second child, a girl, whom Tita names Esperanza. Tita chooses this name after refusing to let Pedro name the child Josefita (Tita’s real name). Tita chooses the name Esperanza, which means "hope," because she wants her niece, who is by default Rosaura’s youngest daughter, to escape the familial tradition that prevented Tita from marrying.
Tita is intimately involved in raising her niece, as Rosaura is bedridden due to a complicated delivery and unable to nurse. Esperanza is reared in the kitchen, just as Tita was, and fed with the same teas and gruels with which Nacha nurtured Tita. Rosaura is quite jealous at the closeness between Tita and the infant. One day she confirms Tita’s fears: She announces her intention to follow family doctrine and prohibit Esperanza from marrying.
This announcement, combined with Pedro’s confrontational efforts to dissuade Tita from marrying John Brown, inspires a terrible rage in Tita. It is with this rage that Tita prepares a meal called champandongo, to be served during John’s visit to ask for her hand in marriage.
While cooking, Tita experiences a sensation of tremendous heat that compounds the heat of the kitchen to create an intense steam. Anger permeates her body, and everything surrounding her aggravates her. Tita’s feeling is said to be "like water for chocolate, "referring to the preparation of chocolate, during which water is brought just short of boiling several times before use in the recipe. The heat of Tita’s anger rises until she is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Chencha, who has returned to the ranch happily married and ready to begin a new life.
Chencha’s return lets Tita take a break from cooking to prepare for John’s arrival. She takes a shower in the outdoor bathroom (a new one built on the same spot where Gertrudis’s shower episode occurred). In the shower, Tita’s rage subsides, and the heat slowly dissipates.
However, the water suddenly becomes so hot that it burns Tita’s skin. Fearing that the bathroom is once again on fire, Tita opens her eyes and sees that Pedro has been standing outside of the shower watching her intently, his eyes radiating lust. Tita flees the shower when Pedro approaches her.
John arrives during this commotion. Before dinner, John and Pedro argue about politics, adding to the tension. When John formally petitions Pedro, now head of the household, for Tita’s hand in marriage, Pedro agrees begrudgingly. John presents Tita with a beautiful diamond ring, making the engagement official. John leaves that night for America to bring back his only living aunt for the wedding.
After dinner, Tita is left to clean the kitchen. In a small room off the kitchen in which Mama Elena used to bathe, Pedro once again confronts Tita. Without any words, he takes her to a bed in the room and makes love to her, taking her virginity. Though Rosaura and Chencha see the "phosphorescent plumes" and strange glow coming from the room, they refuse to go near, fearing that the commotion is the ghost of Mama Elena, bringing fury from the other side.
Commentary
The consistent images of intense heat in this section reflect the tensions plaguing Tita, building to the release of passion in which Tita loses her virginity. Rosaura’s decision to prohibit Esperanza from marrying evokes a violent emotional reaction in Tita, as does Pedro’s lust; these emotions overwhelm Tita, suffocating her in an almost unbearable sensation of heat. Additionally, the overwhelming presence of heat surrounding Tita’s body recalls John Brown’s lesson to Tita about her internal fire. Recognition of her internal flame forces Tita to consider letting passion rule her life, throwing into focus the new conflict between Tita’s love for John, who first revealed to her the mysteries of her inner fire, and her passion for Pedro, with whom she has finally experienced it.
The presence of Tita’s rage strongly governs the events of this chapter, in contrast to the control that Mama Elena’s violence exhibited over Tita’s earlier expressions of anger. Tita’s emotions are now free to grow to nearly dangerous proportions. Tita does not directly confront Rosaura and Pedro, the triggers of her anger, but rather suppresses her rage, causing the physical manifestation of her feelings in the overwhelming waves of heat.
By showering in cool water, Tita is able to exert some control over the heat arising from her emotions, but Pedro’s lust imposes a second, equally intense wave of heat upon her. His voyeurism transforms Tita from a subject deep in contemplation of her own intense emotions into an object of his desire and the focus of his own emotional heat. Again, Tita’s involvement in her sexual relationship with Pedro is passive. Her flight from the shower as Pedro approaches her clearly echoes Gertrudis’s earlier escape from the burning shower.
However, instead of fleeing, like Gertrudis, in active pursuit of desire, Tita runs away from a sexual encounter with Pedro because it is forbidden and, to some extent, undesired, because she is engaged to John Brown.
Tita’s flight from the shower does not end Pedro’s pursuit. When Pedro confronts Tita in Mama Elena’s former bathing room, the language used to describe the encounter is hardly indicative of consensus. Tita exercises no control in the episode, but is a sort of vessel, receiving the long-stifled force of Pedro’s desire. Pedro’s forceful sexual behavior renders their sexual encounter extremely potent, as embodied by the "phosphorescent plumes" and glow emitted from the room, suggesting that the only manner in which Tita can express herself sexually is as the object of her lover’s desire. From a feminist point of view, this confined sexuality is problematic, as it serves to illustrate that though Tita may seek the "freedom" of true love, the possibilities for women of the novel’s time period and culture are rather limited.
September (Chapter 9)
Summary
Tita fears that she has become pregnant as a result of her encounter with Pedro. She has missed a period and knows she will have to cancel her engagement to John Brown now that she is not a virgin. She is preoccupied with these thoughts during the preparation of King’s Day bread. This particular recipe evokes memories of her childhood, especially the loving care of Nacha and companionship of the disappeared Gertrudis.
While Tita bakes the bread, Rosaura visits to ask for Tita’s help. Rosaura suffers from digestive problems that make her overweight and give her bad breath and flatulence, estranging her even further from Pedro. John Brown has prescribed a diet to ease her discomfort, but Rosaura asks Tita for further assistance with her illness and her marriage.
Tita agrees to help Rosaura, providing a special family recipe to cure bad breath and offering special foods to help her lose weight. She is simultaneously warmed by the good will that leads Rosaura to confide in her and desperately guilt-ridden about her encounter with Pedro, especially because Rosaura pinpoints the breakdown in her relationship with Pedro to the night she and Chencha saw flames from the "ghost" of Mama Elena.
No sooner does Rosaura leave the kitchen than the true spirit of Mama Elena enters with a cold chill. She scolds Tita for her relationship with Pedro and curses the baby growing in Tita’s stomach. Chencha enters unexpectedly, forcing Mama Elena’s ghost to flee. Tita is distraught, but there is no one to whom she can turn.
That night, during the party held for the festival of Three Kings, Gertrudis returns to the ranch. She gallops up alongside the man who swept her away on his horse so many years ago and a regiment of fifty troops. Now a general in the revolutionary army, Gertrudis is a veteran of many battles, and the ranch spends the rest of the night listening to her improbable stories. Tita is joyous at the return of her lost sister.
Commentary
That Rosaura seeks assistance from Tita reinforces the implicit power Tita has over Rosaura resulting from Pedro’s lust for her. With her physical afflictions (which one can interpret as a sort of bizarre punishment for her role in Tita’s unhappiness), Rosaura has become an unappealing, de-feminized caricature. She has no power over food, as it alters her weight and breath, and occasions flatulence in her. Tita, on the other hand, wields control over food, and is able to offer suggestions for a diet to solve Rosaura’s problems. Tita finds power and nourishment in food, whereas Rosaura is disconnected from the wisdom of the kitchen, and food becomes for her a source of discomfort and diminished self-esteem.
The return of Mama Elena in the form of a ghost epitomizes the degree to which Mama Elena exercises influence over Tita. Even in death, she has more power over Tita than Tita, in life, has over herself. However, one can argue that Mama Elena’s spirit does not appear of its own volition, but is rather invoked by Tita’s profound sense of guilt about her affair with Pedro, as though Tita seeks a reprimand that she knows she deserves. In this reading, Mama Elena’s cursing of the child echoes Tita’s own desire not to be pregnant, because she dreads the inevitable judgment that society will pass on her. Either way, it is clear that Tita will not be free of Mama Elena until she asserts her individuality.
The return of Gertrudis offers Tita a role model–a woman who has achieved success by taking risks in her search for personal freedom. Gertrudis’s only access to the power denied to her as a woman in early twentieth-century Mexico requires a rejection of the all-female world of the ranch and an embracing of the all-male world of the military (her intervening stint in a brothel proves unsatisfying). Donning the costume of an army general, Gertrudis bucks the limits of femininity; as La General, she is able to exert a power unavailable to women in the domestic realm. Recounting stories of improbable battlefield bravado, Gertrudis conforms to the stereotype of the machismo-exuding Mexican male of the early twentieth century.
The involvement of a woman such as Gertrudis in the Mexican Revolution is historically accurate (women indeed played significant roles in the war) and serves to illustrate the extreme alternative available to women in that time period; Rosaura, in contrast, exemplifies the traditional female role of wife and mother (albeit unsuccessfully).
October (Chapter 10)
Summary
The ranch is overwhelmed by the presence of so many houseguests, as Gertrudis and her army stay for more than a week. Tita longs to share her problem with her sister and finally gathers the strength to do so. Gertrudis calmly hears Tita’s story and offers steadfast support. She urges Tita to talk with Pedro about the pregnancy. At first, Pedro is joyous and wants to run away with Tita, but he then remembers his family. Neither is sure what should be done.
That night, the ghost of Mama Elena appears, angered by the sight of Pedro drunkenly serenading Tita under her window. The ghost threatens Tita violently, ordering her to leave the house. Tita stands up to the ghost, expelling her with severe words: "I know who I am! A person who has a perfect right to live her life as she pleases. Once and for all, leave me alone, I won’t put up with you! I hate you, I’ve always hated you!"
This proclamation banishes the haunting spirit of Mama Elena, which shrinks into a small, spinning light. At the same instant, Tita feels changes in her body: Her swollen belly is eased, her pained breasts are soothed, and she lets loose a "violent menstrual flow." Meanwhile, the spinning light has turned into a small fireball. It bursts through the window of Tita’s room and onto the patio below, where Pedro remains in a drunken stupor. The fireball causes an oil lamp near Pedro to explode, setting fire to his entire body.
Everyone rushes to Pedro’s side, with Tita weeping uncontrollably and Rosaura trying to be the dutiful wife. When Pedro cries out for Tita alone, Rosaura is humiliated and locks herself in her room for a week. Tita is consumed with caring for Pedro. Soon after this incident, Gertrudis and her regiment leave the ranch. On the same day, John returns from the United States. Tita is happy to see him, but dreads the news she must deliver.
Commentary
Tita’s clear articulation of her desires and assertion of her life force hold the key to her power over Mama Elena’s haunting spirit. The fact that Tita’s words are enough to banish the ghost demonstrates the extent to which her declaration alters her relationship with her mother. In stating that she has "a perfect right to live… as she pleases," Tita locates herself outside the realm of the stifling traditional values imposed by her mother. Tita believes that her identity
depends not on her place in a regimented hierarchy, but rather on her desires, exhibiting a fundamental American value that John Brown introduced to her in his discussion of the individual’s internal fire.
The disappearance of Tita’s pregnancy accords with Tita’s elevation from being the object of others’ emotions to asserting control over her identity. The recognition of herself as an individual lets Tita fight back against Mama Elena’s emotional abuse and shed her unwanted pregnancy, which was facilitated by Pedro’s objectification of her. The disappearance of the pregnancy brings great relief to Tita, because she will not have to suffer the stigma of having mothered a child under scandalous circumstances. It also introduces a strange paradox: Tita, depicted throughout as the consummate nurturer, is stripped of her own child.
Her desire to avoid the societal predicament that her pregnancy would put her in outweighs the power of her impulse to nurture. One can argue that Tita’s ability to assert her identity is limited, to a degree, by her fear of the crippling judgments of both Mama Elena and society at large.
The novel’s quality of magical realism illustrates the important relationship between Tita’s emotions and her pregnancy. Whether one reads Tita’s pregnancy as a real condition or an imaginary one induced by fear and shame after her encounter with Pedro, its termination is a clear sign of the emotional development that Tita’s assertion of her identity in the face of Mama Elena evidences. The fantastical termination is an abortion translated into the magical real, giving the emotionally empowered Tita control over her body.
November (Chapter 11)
Summary
Tita, busy nursing Pedro back to health, is nervous around John, because she is certain that she must call off the engagement because she is no longer a virgin. While Tita prepares tamales for dinner, Rosaura emerges from her weeklong exile, having lost sixty-five pounds.
Rosaura confronts Tita about her relationship with Pedro, claiming that she has been made a laughingstock while Tita has assumed the wifely role in caring for the injured Pedro. Tita finally voices her anger at Rosaura for marrying Pedro in the first place. Rosaura bitterly insults Tita as a "loose woman" and says that she will no longer let Esperanza be in her presence.
After her fight with Rosaura, Tita returns to cooking. Suddenly, a frenzy erupts in the yard as all the chickens on the ranch violently attack each other, filling the air with bloody feathers. Tita tries to stop them but the fury continues, such that the immaculate, embroidered baby diapers hanging outside on the clothesline become stained with blood.
The chicken fight creates a huge whirl of energy, turning into a forceful tornado. Tita attempts to save a few of Esperanza’s precious diapers, but soon has to focus her energy on not being swept away by the wind. The tornado whips so vigorously that it burrows a hole in the ground, and all but three chickens are sucked into this void.
When it is finally safe, Tita staggers back to the kitchen, where she finds that her tamales are not ready for the meal. She remembers Nacha’s wise saying that tamales don’t cook when people are arguing. In order to counteract the force of the bad blood between her and Rosaura, Tita conjures up all of her happiest memories of Pedro and sings to the beans. Just as she expects, the beans react to this infusion of joy and become ready to cook.
Tita begins the dinner with John and his aunt with much apprehension, as she knows that she must end her engagement. John senses that she is disturbed. The two talk in Spanish to keep the matter from John’s aunt (who is deaf and can only read lips in English), and Tita reveals everything to John. Though disappointed, John says that he still loves Tita and is willing to marry her despite her relations with Pedro. However, he asks her to decide for herself with which man she wants to spend her life.
Commentary
The confrontation between Tita and Rosaura illustrates the strong contrasts that delineate their personas. Rosaura counters the established dichotomy that separates Tita, the desired nurturer, from Rosaura, the undesirable failed mother, with a social construct concerning female sexuality. In calling Tita a "loose woman," Rosaura claims for herself the status of the proper, wedded matriarch. The employment of this virgin/whore dichotomy hits on Tita’s rejection of a value central to the De La Garza family and to the culture in which the family lives. By constructing Tita as a defiled woman, Rosaura deflects whatever pain she caused Tita by marrying Pedro. Further, in her declaration that she will no longer touch Pedro, thus leaving him to pursue Tita for his sexual needs, Rosaura wields sex as a weapon against both her husband and her sister. This further illustrates the limits of female sexuality in the novel: For Rosaura, sexuality is utterly divorced from desire and love, and is laden with shame.
The chicken fight symbolizes the chaos in Tita’s life and the disorder that has overwhelmed the household. Tita feels a figurative pressure equal to the intensity of the literal pressure of the vicious tornado that sucks up the chickens. The image of Esperanza’s pure white diapers recurs throughout the scene as a locus of Tita’s anxiety. Tita fixates on keeping these clean diapers from becoming bloodied because they represent her purity, which Rosaura has just challenged. When these precious diapers are spattered with chicken blood and sucked into the tornado, Tita’s status as a sinner is reinforced.
The impartial care and understanding with which John listens to Tita’s confession separates him from the other characters in the novel. Mama Elena exemplifies the belief in the subjugation of the individual to tradition, while Gertrudis, at the other extreme, embodies the reckless indulgence of individual needs and disregard for societal norms. John offers a rational approach to Tita’s situation, advising her to reason out her options. John’s values as a white man contrast with those of the Mexican De La Garza family; he is not imbued with the same passion as the De La Garzas, but is endowed with a spiritual wisdom that they do not possess. It is this quality that makes John capable of guiding Tita closer to her own heart.
December (Chapter 12)
Summary
The busy preparations for another wedding find Tita and Chencha working hard in the kitchen. It seems, at first, that this is the wedding of Tita and John; however, it is slowly revealed that many years have passed and the celebration honors the union of Esperanza and Alex, John Brown’s son. In the intervening years, Tita has lived in the household with Rosaura, Pedro, and Esperanza under the guidelines of a silent pact. Their delicate coexistence erupted when Esperanza and Alex wanted to marry: Tita and Pedro pleaded that Esperanza’s wishes be respected, while Rosaura staunchly upheld the rigid tradition that her mother had forced on Tita. After days of violent arguments, Rosaura died, still suffering from her unpleasant disorder. Her funeral was poorly attended because of the unbearable smell still emanating from her body.
Rosaura’s death left Esperanza free to marry Alex, and everyone in the household is overjoyed. Simultaneously, Pedro and Tita are somewhat free to express their true emotions, though they try doggedly to keep all desire at bay. After the beautiful wedding of Esperanza and Alex, Tita and Pedro are finally left on the ranch alone, with no one to keep them apart.
They make love for the first time without restraint or fear of interruption, and experience a bliss so wonderful that Tita views a luminous tunnel leading toward the spirit world. Remembering how John Brown told her of this possibility and how the soul will return through this tunnel, Tita calms herself so that she might continue living and experiencing her newfound joy. At the same time, she feels Pedro’s heartbeat rapidly accelerate and then cease. He has died and enters the tunnel in vision afforded him by his bliss. Tita desperately wishes to have gone with him.
In order to spark again the inner fire that opened up for her a passage to death, Tita consumes the candles that lit the room up until the moment of Pedro’s passing. The tunnel again opens itself to Tita, and this time she sees the figure of Pedro at its end. Tita leaves the world to go to him. When she meets him, their spirit bodies create sparks that set fire to the ranch. The fire is full of beautiful explosions that the townspeople mistake for fireworks celebrating the wedding of Esperanza and Alex. Upon returning from their honeymoon, Esperanza and Alex find the ranch burned to the ground. They discover, under many layers of ash, a cookbook that contains all the recipes mastered by Tita.
Commentary
The final consummation of the passion between Tita and Pedro is both tragic and triumphant in that the light of Tita’s inner fire is finally free to blaze, but only at the expense of her earthly life. It is perhaps only now that Tita’s inner fire can truly burn, as she has, for the first time, made an active decision based on her desires, leaving behind the constricting confines of the cultural role into which she was forced throughout her life. Whereas Pedro goes toward the luminous tunnel uninitiated in the idea of the inner fire, Tita approaches with full knowledge that she is fulfilling her true desire. This divergence in their experience of their final erotic encounter contrasts with their previous affairs, in which Pedro was always the active, powerful subject, while Tita was the uninitiated, powerless object. Left alone in the world by Pedro’s death, Tita makes the active choice to recreate and enter the tunnel.
The wedding of Esperanza and Alex marks the end of a cycle of repression in the De La Garza family and the beginning of a new happiness for Tita and Pedro. The fire that results when Tita and Pedro embrace in the afterlife destroys the De La Garza ranch and all the stifling cultural notions that bore themselves out there.
The demise of the physical domestic space seems an important aspect of Tita’s legacy, for though she could not completely alter the code of the domestic realm during her life, the circumstances of her death destroy the realm in which she suffered so deeply. The only item that survives the fire is Tita’s recipe book, which records not only her kitchen wisdom but also small tidbits (which come up periodically throughout the novel) about happenings in the family, preserving the De La Garza family history. However, the family will now continue in a new direction, epitomized by the cross-cultural marriage of Alex and Esperanza, from which the legacy of sorrow will be absent.
Important Points for Consideration
1. Magic realism: A style of telling a story by infusing magical elements into mundane everyday situations, conditions and practices
• The idea is to reveal essential aspects of human relations imbedded in everyday activities.
• In Like Water for Chocolate, the principal medium of magic realism is food.
• It accentuates Tita’s virtues as a nurturer.
• It also reveals the incapacity of some characters (e.g., Rosaura) to appreciate the factors that sustain life and enhance the experience of life.
• Examples of magic realism in the novel:
a. Ghosts and spirits.
b. Tita, a virgin, nursing Roberto.
c. The knitted blanket of Tita’s sorrows.
d. The salt in the tears shed at Tita’s birth.
e. The bath house fire set by Gertrudis’ passion.
f. The soldier’s ability to smell Gertrudis’ passion.
2. The organization of the novel.
• The novel is based on a Nineteenth Century tradition in Mexican women’s literature. This literature mixed recipes and stories about domestic life with admonitions to young women about moral virtues, calendars of church holy days, etc.
• This was a way to integrate the private (home) and public (church) spheres of life open to women in traditional Mexican society.
• The novel follows this outline, but uses it to offer a radical feminist perspective
in place of the conservative patriarchal and religious perspectives of the Nineteenth Century literature. (Janice Jaffe, "Hispanic American Women Writers’ Novel Recipes…." Women’s Studies, March 1993 v22 n2).
3. Like Water for Chocolate takes the form of a love story, but it can be read as a political allegory.
The Political Allegory: The De la Garza Ranch as Dictatorship
• The primary setting is the De la Garza ranch.
• Most of the action takes place there.
• Some characters (Tita, Rosaura, Pedro, and Gertrudis) wander away, but they always return. Even when they are away (except for Gertrudis), their focus is the ranch.
• Most of what we know about John Brown is revealed at the ranch or in response to Tita as she attempts to deal with her life at the ranch.
The ranch is the domain of Mama Elena. She is the dictator. She makes the rules.
• She rules by the force of her own personality: personalismo.
• When her fiat is not enough she resorts to "respectability" and "tradition."
• We are never sure whether the "tradition" is real or one of her own invention.
• She has risked respectability (her affair, from which came Gertrudis) and flagrantly violates the traditions she doesn’t like: e.g., she is a woman running a ranch in an otherwise patriarchal society.
• The rules apply to everyone else, not to her.
• The other characters, although they have personalities, all symbolize roles played by subjects of a dictatorship.
Rosaura: the ideological conformist.
• She has no will of her own. She takes all of her ideas and motivations from the dictator. She marries Pedro because that is what Elena wants her to do, not because she loves him, and despite knowing that he wants to marry Tita and that Tita wants to marry him.
• She is "soulless." Her matches are all "damp." She has no passion or imagination. She is empty. She cannot respond to the things that could make life delightful (Tita’s food). She is humorless.
• She is incapable of love, only obedience. (Compare with Bertolucci’s The Conformist.)
• She has no authority of her own. She is unable to control events without drawing on Elena’s (the dictator’s) authority. This works pretty well while Elena is alive or Elena’s spirit haunts the unconscious of her former subjects. But this derivative authority dissipates when the subjects consciously reject the ideology on which the dictatorship rested.
• She is incompetent. She has no skills. She can’t cook. She can’t knit or sew. She can’t care for her children. For her survival, she is dependent on the competencies and skills of others.
• But her life appears to be successful. She marries, has children, and lives comfortably with others to serve her.
Gertrudis: the rebel.
• She is the product of the dictator’s indiscretion. She shouldn’t be on the ranch. (When Elena gets a chance, she tries to obliterate any trace of her.)
• She is a misfit, a "sport of nature." (Compare Nadine Gordimer’s Sport of Nature.)
• She loves dancing and has a "natural rhythm," whereas her mother hated dancing and her (supposed) father couldn’t dance. In other words, she came out of nowhere: there is no precedent that can explain her emergence.
• She responds to, and is the vessel of, the passion of others.
• She is not constrained by traditional definitions of gender, race, class, or any other hierarchical notions of one’s "proper place" of "role." (She becomes a general.)
• Her motivation is honesty rather than utilitarian silence, which she sees as self-censorship and a distortion of oneself.
• But she is a "social" rebel. She does not rebel in ways that are self-destructive. Rather, she joins a movement of rebels. She is not a theorist; she has not arrived at her rebellion through reason. She simply must rebel.
Pedro: the selfish conformist.
• Pedro has only personal ambitions. He has no desire to contribute to the common good. All he wants is as much as he can get. He can’t get Tita directly, so he takes Rosaura in order to be near Tita. He sees his own good only in terms of satisfying material or physical desires: enlarging his fortune by marrying into a prosperous family, sex, respectability as a family man, etc.
• He, like Rosaura, has no imagination. Presented with Elena’s choices, he chooses the one she prefers, arguing that it is better than nothing. He tries to satisfy his ambitions and desires within the parameters provided by the prevailing system. But unlike Rosaura, he does not believe in the rules or the rule-makers. He merely accepts them because he lacks the imagination to think of alternatives. He also lacks the will to fight the rules head-on, so he merely tries to cheat, i.e., to break them in secret.
• He accomplishes nothing on his own, and leaves no legacy except some genetic material. But that genetic material, Esperanza, is shaped by the much more powerful cultural legacy she inherits from Tita, and by Tita’s example as a talented and creative provider for others.
• His love for Tita is impure, since it is motivated by jealousy and lust (the desire to possess) and does not comprehend her more essential qualities as a bearer and innovator of culture, a nurturer, and a liberator. He is not interested in being liberated. He just wants to satisfy himself. He wants Tita as the object of his desire, not as his companion.
• He also has no conception of the kind of love Tita has for him. He thinks she is motivated by the same physical longing he is. His love does not transform him, as her love for him transforms her. He remains just as he was before he fell in love.
• In short, Pedro is an "ordinary middle-class citizen," someone looking out for himself, uninterested in politics, incapable of self-criticism (his failure to obtain what he wants is someone else’s fault), and unappreciative of what others do for him.
• He has no idea of contributing anything, and, in any case, has never bothered to develop the competencies and skills by which he might contribute. He basically shows up for work and defines himself by what he has, not by what he does.
Dr. John Brown is "everyman," the composite of everything that is good in human beings.
• He is an amalgam of ethnicity: his grandmother was a Native American, he is a white man but lives in two cultures, speaks (at least) two languages fluently.
• He combines traditional and modern medicine in his practice. He is also familiar with the myths of past generations, and he is able to infuse these myths into modern life.
• He wants nothing for himself. His life is selflessly dedicated to the welfare of other. For example, he wants what is best for Tita even if it means the ruination of his dreams.
• He is comfortable with everyone: men and women, rich and poor. He is, in a sense, androgynous. Although a man, the way he practices medicine is more nurturing than intervening.
• He can love his opponents, even Pedro, because he sees them as human beings not merely as obstacles to his personal objectives.
• But he is never fulfilled. He doesn’t "get the girl." (But his son does!) He is never "finished." He is never truly satisfied. When he delivers Esperanza, he saves the mother and the baby, but Rosaura cannot have another child. When his son marries and is accepted at Harvard, the son moves away. (He is clearly miserable at Alex and Esperanza’s wedding.) He gives up Tita so that she will be happier with another man, but she dies out of dedication to a man who doesn’t appreciate her.
• In short, John Brown, like humankind in general (rather than a single individual human), is engaged in a struggle of discovery and self-invention that is never "completed." He is fundamentally "good"; he reflects the wisdom of the ages; he is competent in modern science; he serves the best interests of humanity in general, etc. But he cannot achieve all that he aspires to, nor can he overcome the barriers to fulfilment presented by the world he inhabits. He is in the world, not master of it.
• He is "good" in terms of skill and morality, but he is not perfect.
Tita is "woman."
• She grows up accepting and conforming to traditions that define and stereotype women. She finds some satisfaction in these traditional roles, i.e., she excels as a cook, at nurturing the innocent and vulnerable, her hands are constantly busy and productive. She is supremely competent in these roles, for which she receives compliments and encouragement from those around her. Less competent persons are sometimes also jealous of her achievements.
• But she is also diminished by these traditions. Her natural passion and imagination are acceptable only within the limits of activities proscribed by a traditional feminine role. She wants so much more.
• She is not a natural rebel. She is submissive to authority.
• Her first escape from the oppressiveness of her subordination is madness. She cannot rebel. She is trapped by her socialization, her feminine sense of duty. Her only escape is to abandon everything she does well. She even loses the capacity to speak, to communicate. She can only put herself at the mercy of others, as others have relied on her for nurture.
• She is brought back to her senses by the natural, uncomplicated generosity of Chencha. She finds security and acceptance with John Brown.
• But as soon as she returns to the ranch—i.e., is returned to the repressive world from which she escaped through madness, and takes up adult responsibilities—she finds herself once again diminished by her traditional role. She is rebuked by the traditions that have outlived the dictator. The spirit of patriarchy, ironically promulgated by a woman, literally haunts her.
• Only when she speaks vile words, words completely out of character for her, can she dismiss the recriminations she has internalized from the past.
• No man is worthy of her. No man can combine ferocious passion with tenderness and mercy as she does, not even John Brown. No man could be worthy of her desire or affection.
• But she, like John Brown, is ultimately unfulfilled. The moment of her fulfilment is thwarted by the ignorance, stupidity and greediness of the man on whom she has fixed her passion.
• She does, however, leave something behind. She records her passions and her transformation for future generations through her art and nurturing. She does not live to see the results of her most important work. But she has contributed to a world in which women need not be bound by traditional, limiting roles. She has also made those traditional roles less confining by leaving a legacy of creativity and caring. She has not only transmitted culture but also transformed it.
ELABORATION on SPECIFIC ISSUES
Tradition
• Tradition (a basic element of culture) is absolutely necessary in every human society. It is a fundamental basis for the shared understandings we require for daily life. Without them, we would have to invent a meaning for each new situation. We would not be able to communicate (language is based on tradition) or even decide what clothes to put on in the morning. Tradition determines our roles, how we greet friends and strangers, and how we view our prospects in the world.
• In this sense, tradition is "enabling." It normalizes social relationships and encounters so that we do not have to invent ourselves and our relationships every minute. It provides useful lessons from the past that help us interpret circumstances we have not previously encountered.
• Tradition limits choices by defining social relations and acceptable behaviour. We figure out who we are and what we can do in terms of traditional definitions that apply to the social settings we inhabit.
• In this sense, tradition is "inhibiting." We automatically discard certain alternatives, even if we can imagine them. When societies rapidly change, some traditions can become encumbrances. They can limit our capacity to respond with imagination to both hazards and opportunities.
• But tradition also has a dynamic quality. It is not unchanging. It is adapted to current conditions by people who live in a changing world. The current generation might not get the same message from a tradition as previous generations did. Sometimes parts of traditions are altered in order to make them seem appropriate to contemporary conditions.
• The message of Like Water for Chocolate is that we must not accept tradition at face value but constantly evaluate it. It can teach us well only if we interpret it in terms of real existing conditions and possibilities. For example, the medical knowledge of Brown’s Kikapu grandmother had to be reinterpreted and adjusted in order to help Tita treat Pedro’s burns. And Brown himself was trying to find a way to use that traditional knowledge in the context of modern medical practice.
• Some traditions must be abandoned altogether. In the novel, Tita’s traditionally defined future as servant to her mother stifled her yearnings for passion and autonomy. Such a tradition simply has to be wiped out. It serves the interests of oppressors and prevents fulfilment and progress.
Authoritarianism/Dictatorship
• Dictatorships rely on obedience, not commitment. The subjects of dictatorship need only conform to rules, not believe in the rules or the rulers.
• Nonconformity (failure to obey) is dealt with brutally. There is not generally a serious attempt to persuade nonconformists that the dictatorship serves their interests. Criticism of the dictator is not permitted. When Tita volunteers the opinion that Elena was responsible for Roberto’s death, Elena’s response is swift and cruel: she hits Tita in the face with a wooden spoon and snarls that no one has ever disobeyed her before and no one is going to start now.
• Traditions are selected for their service to the interests of the rulers (or ruling class). Those traditions that encourage disobedience or reflection are eradicated. If appropriate traditions are not available, "new traditions" are invented. In Like Water for Chocolate, Mama Elena invents such a tradition to enslave Tita. There is no attempt to get Tita to believe in the tradition. All Tita must do is obey it because it is what the dictator (Elena) expects of her.
• Authoritarianism works the same way. The emphasis is on order as prescribed by those in authority. The motto seems to be, "Do it this way because I said so." And, of course, one is not supposed to think about alternatives: "This is the way it’s always been, so this is the way it will remain." Change is abhorrent and intolerable.
• Dictators and authoritarians usually do not consider traditions, rules, and conventions of propriety to apply to them. Mama Elena is rude to the monsignor, even belittling the church and men.
• When the dictators have broken the rules they want their subjects to obey, they have the power to cover up their indiscretions. Elena tells Tita at one point, "I have done everything you are thinking of doing." But Elena’s rule-breaking does not make her sympathetic to Tita. Furthermore, she sees no reason to hold herself accountable to anyone for what she did in the past.
• Dictators have an Achilles heel, however: they think they are invincible. They are so used to being obeyed that they expect it as a matter of course.
• In a similar vein, dictators often do not see trouble coming. They believe in their power: might makes right, and their might is unsurpassed in their own minds. Consequently, dictators (and authoritarians more generally) are inflexible when something out of the ordinary occurs. When banditos invade the ranch, Elena shoots off both barrels of a shotgun, leaving her with no protection against people who do not recognize her authority. She simply expected to be obeyed. She did not recognize the banditos as threats.
Food as a Metaphor
• Food is the central metaphor in Like Water for Chocolate.
• It is not simply a matter of food sustaining life. Food nourishes not only the body but also passion. It transmits emotions and sustains culture.
• Tita’s special character as nurturer is revealed through the food she prepares. She also provides food from her body for Rosaura’s baby, despite never having given birth. But her food does not merely sustain physical life. It transmits her emotions and carries the culture forward, even into the next two generations.
Strong Women: the Feminist Perspective
• Implied in the novel is the idea that women carry the culture from generation to generation.
• The men in the novel are in some respects weak, less significant, unimaginative, and unaccomplished. Even John Brown, for all of his skill as a doctor, cannot cure people as well as Tita can. Although he knows his grandmother’s techniques, it is Tita who successfully applies them when Pedro recovers from his burns.
• It is women who shape other people’s lives. Elena is the dictator. Pedro is a slave to his passion for Tita.
• John Brown is the only man who comes off looking fairly good, but he does not have the culturally transforming power of the women. He is good mainly because he is nearly androgynous, not macho. But he does not transform other people as Tita and Gertrudis do. In fact, he seems to be away from the scene when he is most needed.
• Women are both keepers and destroyers of tradition and, more broadly, of culture. They maintain society, which in turn revolves around them.
The Significance of Setting the Novel during the Mexican Revolution
• In Mexican culture, the Mexican Revolution represents the moment of the creation of a nation to be proud of. It was a time of enormous change, a break with outmoded traditions. In that sense, it is regarded as a liberating experience for the whole nation.
• Mexican intellectuals regularly use the Mexican Revolution to underscore their points.
• Like Tita’s love for Pedro, it did not achieve its ultimate consummation. That is, it remains, for many, an idea, a goal to be worked towards.
• It did increase the possibilities for future generations and shaped the destinies of future generations.
• Many Mexicans believe that a new Mexican Revolution needs to be undertaken. But the principles of the new revolution would be the same as those which drove the first one.
Critical Reception
When Como agua para chocolate: novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, arores, y remedies caserns by Laura Esquivel was published by Editorial Planeta Mexicana in Mexico in 1989, it quickly became a best seller. The 1991 English version. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, translated by Carol and Thomas Christensen, also gained commercial success. The novel has been translated into several other languages.
Critical reception has been generally positive, especially when noting Esquivel's imaginative narrative structure. Karen Stabiner states in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that the novel is a "wondrous, romantic tale, fueled by mystery and superstition, as well as by the recipes that introduce each chapter." James Polk, in his review in the Chicago Tribune, describes the work as an "inventive and mischievous romp—part cookbook, part novel." Marisa Januzzi similarly notes in her assessment in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that "this short novel's got more heat and light and imaginative spice than the American literary diet usually provides."
Few scholarly articles, however, have been published on the novel. Molly O'Neill, in her interview with Esquivel in the New York Times, notes that American critics often consign the novel to the "charming but aren't we moderns above it ghetto of magical realism." Scholars also may have avoided the novel because of what some consider its melodramatic tone. In a mixed review for the Nation, Ilan Stavans finds a "convoluted sentimentality" in the novel.
The articles that have been published praise the novel's cultural focus. Dan Stavans, in the same Nation review, observes that the novel accurately "map[s] the trajectory of feminist history in Mexican society." Maria Elena de Valdes, in her article in World Literature Today, argues that the novel contains an intricate structure that serves as an effective parody of Mexican women's fiction. She also praises its main theme: "a woman's creation of space that is hers in a hostile world." Victor Zamudio-Taylor insists the work is one of those that "reactualize tradition, make different women's voices heard, and revitalize identity—both personal and collective—as a social and national cultural construction."
Esquivel's screenplay of Like Water for Chocolate, along with her husband Alfonso Arau's direction, helped the film become one of the most successful foreign films of the past few decades. Esquivel has also written the screenplay for the popular Mexican film Chido One. Her most recent novel, The Law of Love, again focuses on the importance of love and incorporates the technique of magic realism. Reviews of the novel have been mixed. Barbara Hoffert argues in her Library Journal review that the novel "is at once wildly inventive and slightly silly, and energetic." Lilian Pizzichini, however, writes in her review in the Times Literary Supplement: "Esquivel dresses her ancient story in a collision of literary styles that confirm her wit and ingenuity. She sets herself a mission to explore the redemptive powers of love and art and displays boundless enthusiasm for parody."
Magical Realism in Like Water for Chocolate
In an interview with Laura Esquivel, published in the New York Times Book Review, Molly O'Neill notes that Like Water for Chocolate has not received a great deal of critical attention because it is "often consigned to the 'charming but aren't we moderns above it' ghetto of magical realism." Some critics, however, recognize the importance of the novel's themes: Ilan Stavans, in his review of the novel for The Nation, praises its mapping of "the trajectory of feminist history in Mexican society." In an article in World Literature Today, Maria Elena de Valdes argues that the novel reveals how a woman's culture can be created and maintained "within the social prison of marriage." Esquivel's unique narrative design is also worthy of critical attention. Her employment of magic realism, with its mingling of the fantastic and the real, provides an apt vehicle for the exploration of the forces of rebellion, submission, and retribution, and of the domestic sphere that can both limit and encourage self-expression.
Tita De la Garza, the novel's central character, makes her entrance into the world in her mother's kitchen, and this female realm becomes both a creative retreat and a prison for her. As a site for the crucial link between food and life, the kitchen becomes the center of Tita's world. Here she gains physical and emotional sustenance as Nacha, the family's servant and Tita's surrogate mother, teaches her the art of cooking. The kitchen also, however, becomes a site of oppression when Tita's mother forbids her to marry the man she loves and forces her into the role of family cook. The novel's public and private realms merge under the symbol of rebellion. As Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces clash with the oppressive Mexican regime, Tita wages her own battle against her mother's dictates. As Tita prepares magical dishes that stir strong emotions in all who enjoy them, the kitchen becomes an outlet for her thwarted passion. Thus the kitchen becomes a site for hunger and fulfillment. Yet, Tita's cooking does not nourish all who sample it. In some instances her meals exact a certain retribution for her confinement to this domestic arena.
Throughout Tita's childhood, "the joy of living was wrapped up in the delights of food." The kitchen was her domain, the place where Nacha taught her the domestic and communal rituals of food preparation and encouraged her creative input. Here she lovingly prepares meals for her family, including her sister's children, who thrive under her care. The narrative structure of the novel attests to the female bonding and creativity that can emerge within this domestic realm. The narrator, Tita's grandniece, intersperses Tita's story with the recipes that figure so prominently in her life.
The kitchen, however, soon becomes a site of repression for Tita when her mother, Mama Elena, refuses to allow her to marry. Here the mother/daughter relationship enacts a structure of political authority and submission when Mama Elena enforces the family tradition that compels the youngest daughter to care for her widowed mother for the remainder of her life. Thus the walls of the kitchen restrict Tita's life as she resigns herself to the role of cook for her mother as well as the other members of her family. An incident that symbolizes Mama Elena's oppression occurs when Tita is preparing two hundred roosters for the wedding feast. Mama Elena has compounded Tita's despair over losing Pedro by announcing that her sister, Rosaura, will marry Pedro instead, and that Tita will cook for the wedding party. One task Tita must complete is the castration of live roosters to ensure that they will be fat and tender enough for the guests. The violent and gruesome process makes Tita swoon and shake with anger, as she thinks "when they had chosen something to be neutered, they'd made a mistake, they should have chosen her. At least then there would be some justification for not allowing her to marry and giving Rosaura her place beside the man she loved."
Yet ironically, Tita's passion for Pedro, her lost love, and her independent spirit find a creative and rebellious outlet in this same domestic realm. While Mama Elena successfully represses Tita's public voice, she cannot quell the private expression of her emotion. Tita subconsciously redefines her domestic space, transforming it from a site of repression into one of expression when she is forced to prepare her sister's wedding dinner. This time her creativity results in an act of retribution. As she completes the wedding cake, her sorrow over Rosaura's impending marriage to Pedro causes her tears to spill into the icing. This alchemic mixture affects the entire wedding party: "The moment they took their first bite of the cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing.... Mama Elena, who hadn't shed a single tear over her husband's death, was sobbing silently. But the weeping was just the first symptom of a strange intoxication—an acute attack of pain and frustration—that seized the guests and scattered them across the patio and the grounds and in the bathrooms, all of them wailing over lost love." Thus Tita effectively, if not purposefully, ruins her sister's wedding.
The kitchen also becomes an outlet for Tita's repressed passion for Pedro. After Pedro gives Tita a bouquet of pink roses, Tita clutches them to her chest so tightly, "that when she got to the kitchen, the roses, which had been mostly pink, had turned quite red from the blood that was flowing from [her] hands and breasts." She then creates a sauce from these stained petals that she serves over quail. The dish elicits a unique response from each member of her family that reflects and intensifies hidden desires or the lack thereof: Pedro "couldn't help closing his eyes in voluptuous delight," while Rosaura, a woman who does not appear to have the capacity for love, becomes nauseous.
The most startling response comes from Tita's other sister, Gertrudis, who responds to the food as an aphrodisiac. Unable to bear the heat emanating from her body, Gertrudis runs from the table, tears off her clothes, and attempts to cool herself in the shower. Her body radiates so much heat, however, that the wooden walls of the shower "split and burst into flame." Her perfumed scent carries across the plain and attracts a revolutionary soldier, who swoops her up, naked, onto his horse and rides off with her, freeing her, if not her sister, from Mama Elena's oppression. Private and public worlds merge as Gertrudis escapes the confinements of her life on the farm and begins a journey of self-discovery that results in her success as a revolutionary general. The meal of rose petals and quail also intensifies the passion between Tita and Pedro and initiates a new system of communication between them that will help sustain their love while they are physically separated. Even though Tita remains confined to the kitchen, her creative preparation of the family's meals continues to serve as a vehicle for her love for Pedro, and thus as an expression of her rebellion against her mother's efforts to separate the two. Her cooking also continues to exact retribution against those who have contributed to her suffering.
When Rosaura and Pedro move away from the ranch, Tita's confinement to the kitchen drives her mad, and she leaves in an effort to regain her sanity. She later returns to the ranch and to the domestic realm, willingly, to care for Mama Elena, who has become an invalid. This willingness to return to the kitchen, coupled with her mother's need for her, empowers her, yet her mother continues her battle for authority. Even though Tita prepares her mother's meals carefully, Mama Elena cannot stand the taste and refuses to eat. Convinced that Tita intends to poison her slowly in order to be free to marry, she continues to refuse all nourishment and soon conveniently dies—suggesting the cause to be either her refusal to accept Tita's offer of love and nourishment, or the food itself. Esquivel leaves this question unanswered.
When Rosaura and Pedro return to the ranch after Mama Elena's death, Tita again resumes her role as family cook. Even though she has decided to stay in the kitchen and not run off with Pedro so as not to hurt her sister, she ultimately, albeit unwittingly, causes her sister's death. Tita confronts her sister over her part in aiding Mama Elena's efforts to separate Tita from the man she loves. Rosaura, however, refuses to acknowledge her role in her sister's oppression and threatens to leave with Pedro and her daughter, whom Tita has grown to love as her own. As a result, Tita wishes "with all her heart that her sister would be swallowed up by the earth. That was the least she deserved." As Tita continues to cook for the family, Rosaura begins to have severe digestive problems Tita shows concern over her sister's health and tries to alter her diet to ease her suffering. But Rosaura's severe flatulence and bad breath continue unabated, to the point where her husband and child cannot stand to be in the same room with her. Rosaura's suffering increases until one evening Pedro finds "her lips purple, body deflated, eyes wild, with a distant look, sighing out her last flatulent breath." The doctor determines the cause of death as "an acute congestion of the stomach."
Here Esquivel again, as she did after Mama Elena's death, leaves the question of cause open. Rosaura could have died from a diseased system, compounded by her inability to receive and provide love and comfort. Or she could have died as a direct result of Tita's subconscious efforts to poison her. Either way, Rosaura's death releases Tita from the oppressive nature of her domestic realm and allows her to continue to express herself through her cooking.
In Like Water for Chocolate, magic realism becomes an appropriate vehicle for the expression of the paradoxical nature of the kitchen as domestic space. This novel reveals how the kitchen can become a nurturing and creative domain, providing sustenance and pleasure for others; a site for repression, where one can be confined exclusively to domestic tasks and lose or be denied a sense of self; and a site for rebellion against traditional boundaries.
Source: Wendy Perkins, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999
Magical Realism in Latin American Literature
Up until the 1960’s, Latin American literature was not very well-known. It certainly was not highly publicized or taught in many schools. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution “sharpened” [the] social awareness of nearly all [Hispanic] writers” resulting in the so-called “Boom” of Latin American literature (Englekirk 135). There is still some debate on the exact definition of what the Boom is and when it occurred, but most scholars agree that it occurred around the time of the Mexican Revolution and was caused by it. In this time of political upheaval, the purpose of art became to serve as a medium for “serious thought” and analysis and narratives of “purposeful action” (EngleKirk 135). Literature became, among other things, used as a form of “artistic escape”, a violent and grotesque presentation of the misery of life, a means of targeting social problems and fascinated with the world of imagination (Englekirk 135). The use of myth, fantasy, humour and parody – heron referred to as magical realism – served as a shield between the writer and the dread-filled and hopeless reality. The literature written during this time, in this style, was broadly called modern or post modern literature (not to be confused with the art or literature of the same name from other countries). More specifically, literature expressing impossible and extraordinary events in an otherwise realistic narrative was termed “magical realism”. It is a term first used by German art critic Franz Roh, who compared the literary works to the magic realistic artwork of the time. There is controversy regarding the term magical realism because it is seen as a too-limiting term imposed on a post-colonial nation by its previous rulers. Some also feel that what is considered ‘magic’ by the outside Anglo-American or “western” critic is not viewed the same way by the native writers.
This way of writing is based on the “rational view of reality” versus the “acceptance of the supernatural” (Moore). Magical realism is usually associated with contemporary Latin American fiction but it is also seen in the writings of authors from different countries (Lodge 114). The unexplained fantasy in these works is used to depict “historical convulsions and … wrenching personal upheavals” that cannot be otherwise described adequately in a realistic fashion (Lodge 114). One of the best known magical realism novels is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The best known magical realism short story author however, is Jorge Luis Borges. Although Latin American literature was predominantly written by males in the past, it is becoming more diverse now with the voices of females, homosexuals, and Jews.
One such voice is that of Mexican writer Laura Esquivel who wrote Como Agua Para Chocolate. First published in 1990, this novel has since been translated into thirty languages, won the American Booksellers Association’s ABBY award in 1994, and been made into a movie. The film version, with a screenplay by Esquivel, won 11 awards at the Ariel Awards of the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures and is the largest grossing foreign film released in the United States (ethoschannel).
Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over a Low Fire
When Virginia Woolf argues in A Room of One's Own for an appropriate and pertinent place for a woman, she never mentions the kitchen as a possible space in which her intellectual liberation from the patriarchal system could be enacted. At first glance, this area had always been assigned to a wife, servant, daughter, slave, mother, grandmother, sister or an aunt. For feminists, the kitchen has come to symbolize the world that traditionally marginalized and limited a woman. It represents a space associated with repetitive work, lacking any "real" creativity, and having no possibility for the fulfillment of women's existential needs, individualization or self-expression.
A different, quite parodic and critical gender perspective has been presented in several recently published (cook) books by Latin American women writers. Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate: Novelet de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros (1989) (Like Water for Chocolate. A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies) and Silvia Plager's Como papas para varenikes: Novela contraentregas mensuales, en tarjeta o efectivo. Romances apasionados, recetas judias con poder afrodisiaco y chimentos (Like Potatoes for Varenike: A Novel in Monthly Installments, Cash or Charge. Passionate Romances, Jewish Recipes With Aphrodisiac Power and Gossips) (1994) have tried to revise stereotypical power relations and interpretations of male and female identity symbols. After all, alchemy and cooking probably did not always have rooms of their own, but may have shared the same transformative space.
In these novels the mythical, homogenized wholeness of Latin American identity posited by Garcia Marquez, along with the exploration of its origins vis-a-vis Europe, becomes fragmented. The power of medieval alchemy, introduced by a vagabond tribe of gypsies who paradoxically bring the spirit of Western modernity, is paradoxically replaced by different ethnic cuisines: Aztec in the case of the Mexican writer and Jewish in the Argentine example. Both gastrotexts can be labeled as postmodern in the sense that they mimic mass-mediated explorations of gender identities. Their surprisingly similar subtitles replicate the format of a monthly magazine whose readers are housewives, or to use a more expressive, literal translation from the Spanish term amas de casa, mistresses of the home. Like Water for Chocolate is composed of twelve parts clearly identified by months and their corresponding dishes, with the list of ingredients heading the "Preparation" section.... By amalgamating the novelistic genre with cookbook recipes, Esquivel and Plager actualize a postmodern blurring of distinctions between high and low cultural values. Both writers insist on the cover that their respective books are actually novels, but they also subvert this code of reference by adding a lengthy subtitle that recalls and imitates the particular realms of popular culture that are associated with women. Although both of the books under consideration here are authored by women, I am not making the claim that recipe-writing is an archetypically female activity. As a matter of fact, by making a connection with alchemy, I would like to suggest that both activities have a common androgynous origin in the past.
Esquivel's book was originally published in Mexico in 1989, became a national bestseller in 1990, continued its success with a movie version that garnered many international film awards, and in 1992 swept across the English speaking world— primarily the North American market—as a New York Times bestseller for several weeks. Plager's book came out in Argentina in April of 1994 and the public is still digesting it. Critics too. The editors' blurb on the jacket suggests that in Like potatoes for varenike the writer... 'shows us her culinary and humorous talents through an entertaining parody of the successful Like Water for Chocolate.' This statement is very significant for several reasons: first of all it represents the female writer primarily as a talented cook; second, it invokes the model, recognizes its success and appeals to the rights of cultural reproduction; and third, it claims that the book that the reader has in hand is actually a parody of that model.
Invoking the culinary expertise of the fiction writer, especially if the winter is a woman, fits all too well into the current, end of the century, wave of neo-conservativism. It also feeds into the postmodern confusion between reality and its simulation. Fiction is required to have the qualities of reality and reality is defined as what we see on television or read about in the newspaper; that "reality," however, is physically and psychologically fragmented and can only offer an illusion of wholeness. The avant garde insistence on the power of the imagination is giving way to research, "objectivity" and "expertise." Personal confession and "true stories" are valued higher than "imagined" ones and experience—in this case the culinary one—becomes the basis of identity and the source of discursive production. No wonder that the genre of the nineties is testimonial writing!
The gastrotexts that I am discussing deal with gendered identities in a truly postmodern fashion: by situating the female protagonist in the kitchen and by literally allowing her to produce only a "kitchen table talk" spiced with melodrama instead of grandiose philosophical contraptions, their authors "install and destabilize convention in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and...to their critical or ironic rereading of the art of the past [according to Linda Hutcheon in her book A Poetics of Modernism]." In that sense the feminist discourse becomes paradoxical: instead of insisting on the liberational dimension of feminism which wants to get woman out of the kitchen, the postmodernist return to the discourses of power leads Esquivel and Plager to reclaim the kitchen as a not necessarily gender exclusive space of "one's own." Both writers rely heavily on traditional cultural practices and subvert the patriarchal values associated with masculinity and femininity.
Esquivel and Plager construct texts that do not fit into the traditional discourse of maternity. Like Water for Chocolate is constructed around the mother, who by invoking social rules, requires her youngest daughter Tita to reject any prospects of independent life, and take care of her until death. After Tita's premature birth on the kitchen table, ' amid the smells of simmering noodle soup, thyme, bayleaves, and cilantro, steamed milk, garlic, and, of course, onion,' Mama Elena does not satisfy the baby's need for food, and Tita has to turn to Nacha, the cook, with whom she establishes the successful object relation. The proto object— the breast—determines the relationship that the individual will have with other objects in the course of life, is the foundation upon which the construction of individual subjectivity takes place. In this carnavalesque farce, the mother becomes a fairytale-like stepmother, while Tita, who will never feed her own child, becomes the nurturer for all in need. She appropriates the space of the kitchen, transforming it into the center of her power which alters the dominant patriarchal family structure. Hence, her emotions and well-being determine the course of other's lives and she literally shares herself with the outside world: when she makes the cake for her sister's wedding to Pedro—with whom she was planning to get married—her tears of desperation mix with sugar, flour, eggs and lime peel. This later provokes melancholy, sadness and finally uncontrollable vomiting among the guests:
“The moment they took their first bite of the cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing. Even Pedro, usually so proper, was having trouble holding back his tears Mama Elena, who hadn't shed a single tear over her husband's death, was sobbing silently. But the weeping was just the first symptom of a strange intoxication—an acute attack of pain and frustration—that seized the guests and scattered them across the patio and the grounds and in the bathrooms, all of them wailing over lost love. Everyone there, every last person, fell under this spell, and not very many of them made it to the bathrooms in time—those who didn't join the collective vomiting that was going on all over the patio.”
The somatic reaction provoked by Tita's bodily fluids actually shows how the daughter undermines the mother's authority and prohibition. Something similar happens with "Quail in Rose Petal Sauce": Tita decides to use the rose that Pedro gave her as a sign of his eternal love, and prepares a meal that will awake Gertrudis' uncontrollable sexual appetite. By introducing the discourse of sexuality without necessarily relating it to marriage and by nurturing without procreating, Esquivel opens for discussion the ever present topics of feminine self-sacrifice and subordination that have traditionally been promoted by patriarchal literature.
By breaking the boundaries between body and soul and by showing that they are actually one, both Esquivel and Plager successfully undermine the duality so embedded in Western culture. They— latter day apprentices of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz—go against Plato and his all too well known argument that the soul can best reflect if there are no distractions from the body. They dismantle that same duality that puts masculinity on one side and femininity on the other. Like Water for Chocolate and Like Potatoes for Varenike unlock the kitchen door and present us its most common inhabitants— women. Then, they leave this door wide open and invite man to share. In Esquivel's version sergeant Trevino is the one who helps Gertrudis decipher the recipe for cream fritters and in Plager's book Saul and Kathy work together from the beginning in meal preparation. By going against the rigid patriarchal binary thinking they, in Derridean fashion, reveal that there is no "transcendental signified." There is no original recipe either, nor original cook. It is all about transcending ego boundaries through dialogic, polyphonic texts, emphasizing the importance of nurturing, both for man and women, going against sexual oppression and connecting those "honey-tongued" people who are not only making their cake, but are ready to eat it too.
Source: Ksenija Bilbija, "Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over a Low Fire," in Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol 20, No 1, Winter 1996, pg 147-61
Verbal and Visual Representation of Women: Como agua para chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate
Como agua para chocolate is the first novel by Laura Esquivel (b. 1950). Published in Spanish in 1989 and in English translation in 1992, followed by the release of the feature film that same year, the novel has thrust this Mexican woman writer into the world of international critical acclaim as well as best-seller popularity. Since Esquivel also wrote the screenplay for director Alfonso Arau, the novel and the film together offer us an excellent opportunity to examine the interplay between the verbal and visual representation of women. Esquivel's previous work had all been as a screenwriter. Her script for Chido Guan, el Tacos de Oro (1985) was nominated for the Ariel in Mexico, an award she won eight years later for Como agua para chocolate.
The study of verbal and visual imagery must begin with the understanding that both the novel and, to a lesser extent, the film work as a parody of a genre. The genre in question is the Mexican version of women's fiction published in monthly installments together with recipes, home remedies, dressmaking patterns, short poems, moral exhortations, ideas on home decoration, and the calendar of church observances. In brief, this genre is the nineteenth-century forerunner of what is known throughout Europe and America as a woman's magazine. Around 1850 these publications in Mexico were called "calendars for young ladies." Since home and church were the private and public sites of all educated young ladies, these publications represented the written counterpart to women's socialization, and as such, they are documents that conserve and transmit a Mexican female culture in which the social context and cultural space are particularly for women by women.
It was in the 1850s that fiction began to take a prominent role. At first the writings were descriptions of places for family excursions, moralizing tales, or detailed narratives on cooking. By 1860 the installment novel grew out of the monthly recipe or recommended excursion. More elaborate love stories by women began to appear regularly by the 1880s. The genre was never considered literature by the literary establishment because of its episodic plots, overt sentimentality, and highly stylized characterization. Nevertheless, by the turn of the century every literate woman in Mexico was or had been an avid reader of the genre. But what has been completely overlooked by the male-dominated literary culture of Mexico is that these novels were highly coded in an authentic women's language of inference and reference to the commonplaces of the kitchen and the home which were completely unknown by any man.
Behind the purportedly simple episodic plots there was an infrahistory of life as it was lived, with all its multiple restrictions for women of this social class. The characterization followed the forms of life of these women rather than their unique individuality; thus the heroines were the survivors, those who were able to live out a full life in spite of the institution of marriage, which in theory, if not in practice, was a form of indentured slavery for life in which a woman served father and brothers then moved on to serve husband and sons together with her daughters and, of course, the women from the servant class. The women's fiction of this woman's world concentrated on one overwhelming fact of life: how to transcend the conditions of existence and express oneself in love and in creativity.
Cooking, sewing, embroidery, and decoration were the usual creative outlets for these women, and of course conversation, storytelling, gossip, and advice, which engulfed every waking day of the Mexican lady of the home. Writing for other women was quite naturally an extension of this infrahistorical conversation and gossip. Therefore, if one has the social codes of these women, one can read these novels as a way of life in nineteenth-century Mexico. Laura Esquivel's recognition of this world and its language comes from her Mexican heritage of fiercely independent women, who created a woman's culture within the social prison of marriage.
Como agua para chocolate is a parody of nineteenth-century women's periodical fiction in the same way that Don Quixote is a parody of the novel of chivalry. Both genres were expressions of popular culture that created a unique space for a segment of the population.
Obviously, for the parody to work at its highest level of dual representation, both the parody and the parodic model must be present in the reading experience. Esquivel creates the duality in several ways. First, she begins with the title of the novel, Like Water for Chocolate, a locution which translates as "water at the boiling point" and is used as a simile in Mexico to describe any event or relationship that is so tense, hot, and extraordinary that it can only be compared to scalding water on the verge of boiling, as called for in the preparation of that most Mexican of all beverages, dating from at least the thirteenth century: hot chocolate. Second, the subtitle is taken directly from the model: "A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies." Together the title and subtitle therefore cover both the parody and the model. Third, the reader finds upon opening the book, in place of an epigraph, a traditional Mexican proverb. "A la mesa y a la cama / Una sola vez se llama" (To the table or to bed / You must come when you are bid). The woodcut that decorates the page is the typical nineteenth-century cooking stove. The fourth and most explicit dualistic technique is Esquivel's reproduction of the format of her model.
Each chapter is prefaced by the title, the subtitle, the month, and the recipe for that month. The narration that follows is a combination of direct address on how to prepare the recipe of the month and interspersed stories about the loves and times of the narrator's great-aunt Tita. The narration moves effortlessly from the first-person to the third-person omniscient narrative voice of all storytellers. Each chapter ends with the information that the story will be continued and an announcement of what the next month's—that is, the next chapter's—recipe will be. These elements, taken from the model, are never mere embellishments. The recipes and their preparation, as well as the home remedies and their application, are an intrinsic part of the story. There is therefore an intricate symbiotic relationship between the novel and its model in the reading experience. Each is feeding on the other.
In this study I am concerned with the model of the human subject, specifically the female subject, as it is developed in and through language and visual signification in a situated context of time and place. The verbal imaging of the novel makes use of the elaborate signifying system of language as a dwelling place. The visual imagery that at first expands the narrative in the film soon exacts its own place as a nonlinguistic signifying system drawing upon its own repertoire of referentiality and establishing a different model of the human subject than that elucidated by the verbal imagery alone. I intend to examine the novelistic signifying system and the model thus established and then follow with the cinematic signifying system and its model.
The speaking subject or narrative voice in the novel is characterized, as Emile Benveniste has shown, as a living presence by speaking. That voice begins in the first person, speaking the conversational Mexican Spanish of a woman from Mexico's north, near the U.S. border. Like all Mexican speech, it is clearly marked with register and socio-cultural indicators, in this case of the landowning middle class, mixing colloquial local usage with standard Spanish. The entry point is always the same: the direct address of one woman telling another how to prepare the recipe she is recommending. As one does the cooking, it is quite natural for the cook to liven the session with some storytelling, prompted by the previous preparation of the food. As she effortlessly moves from first-person culinary instructor to storyteller, she shifts to the third-person and gradually appropriates a time and place and refigures a social world.
A verbal image emerges of the model Mexican rural, middle-class woman. She must be strong and far more clever than the men who supposedly protect her. She must be pious, observing all the religious requirements of a virtuous daughter, wife, and mother. She must exercise great care to keep her sentimental relations as private as possible, and, most important of all, she must be in control of life in her house, which means essentially the kitchen and bedroom or food and sex. In Esquivel's novel there are four women who must respond to the model: the mother Elena and the three daughters Rosaura, Gertrudis, and Josefita, known as Tita.
The ways of living within the limits of the model are demonstrated first by the mother, who thinks of herself as its very incarnation. She interprets the model in terms of control and domination of her entire household. She is represented through a filter of awe and fear, for the ostensible source is Tita's diary-cookbook, written beginning in 1910, when she was fifteen years old, and now transmitted by her grandniece. Therefore the verbal images that characterize Mama Elena must be understood as those of her youngest daughter, who has been made into a personal servant from the time the little girl was able to work.
Mama Elena is depicted as strong, self-reliant, absolutely tyrannical with her daughters and servants, but especially so with Tita, who from birth has been designated as the one who will not marry because she must care for her mother until she dies. Mama Elena believes in order, her order. Although she observes the strictures of church and society, she has secretly had an adulterous love affair with an African American, and her second daughter, Gertrudis, is the offspring of that relationship. This transgression of the norms of proper behavior remains hidden from public view, although there is gossip, but only after her mother's death does Tita discover that Gertrudis is her half-sister. The tyranny imposed on the three sisters is therefore the rigid, self-designed model of a woman's life pitilessly enforced by Mama Elena, and each of the three responds in her own way to the model.
Rosaura never questions her mother's authority and follows her dictates submissively; after she is married she becomes an insignificant imitation of her mother. She lacks the strength, skill, and determination of Mama Elena and tries to compensate by appealing to the mother's model as absolute. She therefore tries to live the model, invoking her mother's authority because she has none of her own. Gertrudis does not challenge her mother but instead responds to her emotions and passions in a direct manner unbecoming a lady. This physical directness leads her to adopt an androgynous life-style: she leaves home and her mother's authority, escapes from the brothel where she subsequently landed, and becomes a general of the revolutionary army, taking a subordinate as her lover and, later, husband. When she returns to the family hacienda, she dresses like a man, gives orders like a man, and is the dominant sexual partner.
Tita, the youngest of the three daughters, speaks out against her mother's arbitrary rule but cannot escape until she temporarily loses her mind. She is able to survive her mother's harsh rule by transferring her love, joy, sadness, and anger into her cooking. Tita's emotions and passions are the impetus for expression and action, not through the normal means of communication but through the food she prepares. She is therefore able to consummate her love with Pedro through the food she serves.
“It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal's aromas. That was the way she entered Pedro's body, hot, voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous.”
This clearly is much more than communication through food or a mere aphrodisiac; this is a form of sexual transubstantiation whereby the rose petal sauce and the quail have been turned into the body of Tita.
Thus it is that the reader gets to know these women as persons but, above all, becomes involved with the embodied speaking subject from the past, Tita, represented by her grandniece (who transmits her story) and her cooking. The reader receives verbal food for the imaginative refiguration of one woman's response to the model that was imposed on her by accident of birth. The body of these women is the place of living. It is the dwelling place of the human subject. The essential questions of health, illness, pregnancy, childbirth, and sexuality are tied very directly in this novel to the physical and emotional needs of the body. The preparation and eating of food is thus a symbolic representation of living, and Tita's cookbook bequeaths to Esperanza and to Esperanza's daughter, her grand-niece, a woman's creation of space that is hers in a hostile world.
Source: Maria Elena de Valde's, "Verbal and Visual Representation of Women: Como agua para chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate" in World Literature Today, Vol 69, No 1, Winter 1995, pp. 78-82.
The Encrypted Recipes in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel’s novel, Like Water for Chocolate, is a contemporary novel based on romance, recipes and home remedies. Very little criticism has been done on the novel. Of the few essays that are written on this work, the majority of them consist of feminist critique. This novel would be most easily approached from a feminist view because of the intricate relationships between women. However, relationships between women are only one of the many elements touched upon in the novel. Like Water for Chocolate is a novel that uses recipes as a crypt for many important themes in the novel. Jaques Derrida defines crypt as something that, "disguise[s] the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds".The recipes are more than just formulas, they hold, concealed within them, memories. These crypts are revealed through food and the process of food production. Esquivel has personal ties with food and feels that the production of food creates a centre of the household. Tita, being the person most closely associated with food preparation in the novel, becomes the primary focus in the structure of her family. The crypts that Esquivel uses are opened throughout the novel in a variety of ways. Tita is constantly struggling against her mother, tradition and inevitably her own destiny. Along the way many aspects of her trials are revealed in her cooking. Eventually, Tita is able to free herself from the emotional chains that her mother has bound her. In the end her destiny is revealed, which in return sets her free from her struggles.
Esquivel begins each chapter of the novel with a different recipe. The various recipes evoke memories of different events in Tita’s life. Certain dishes are prepared at certain times of the year or for special occasions. In the words and ingredients of the recipes themselves lie the formula to produce a particular dish. Whether it be dinner rolls, wedding cake or sausages, the dish’s sole being relies on the recipes. In a sense, the recipe is the first step in a chain reaction to triggering a memory. After the food is produced, it has a texture, smell, shape, taste and colour unlike the others. These elements arouse the senses, which can trigger emotions. As mentioned above, with the creation of food a centre is created. The centre is the substructure which other elements are built. Esquivel associates certain dishes to love, lust, sickness, pregnancy, motherhood, and the supernatural. Whoever controls the food, appears also to control all those elements mentioned above, and in the novel this person is Tita. She is seen as the strong woman in the family. It is not a coincidence that Esquivel places the novel during the time of the Mexican Revolution. Historically, many women participated in this war and women had been participating since 1519, during the Spanish Conquest. This is interesting because Tita is very much a soldadera—a female soldier—herself, similar to Toci. Toci is the oldest of the Earth Mother Goddesses from the Valley of Mexico.
If a recipe is available, open for anyone to read and follow, why would it be described as a crypt? This is precisely where the secret lies. Because one follows the recipe doesn’t guarantee that the dish is created in the way it is intended to be. A dish prepared by two different people doesn’t necessarily taste the same. Esquivel seems to believe that recipes also consist of what could be described as "hidden ingredients." These ingredients could consist of love, patience, sorrow or, perhaps, a respect for tradition.Encrypted into the recipes, these ingredients only come out after the food is prepared and eaten. Marisa Januzzi describes how complex the recipes used in the novel can be: "Interestingly, some of the foods and techniques called for, as well as metric amounts, are among the untranslated elements in the text, leaving me to conclude that maybe recipes are even less translatable, in their way, than poetry" Nancha and Tita respect this complexity and have a deep understanding of food. The two women have a relationship with food that the other characters in the novel are unfamiliar with. A good example of a character who is unfamiliar with food preparation is Rosaura, which is expressed in the episode where she attempts to cook for the family. She follows the same recipes that Tita does, however everything tastes awful:
“There was one day when Rosaura did attempt to cook. When Tita tried nicely to give her some advice, Rosaura became irritated and asked her to leave the kitchen. The rice was obviously scorched, the meat dried out, the dessert burnt. But no one at the table dared display the tiniest hint of displeasure, not after Mama Elena had pointedly remarked: "As for the first meal Rosaura has cooked it isn’t bad. Don’t you agree, Pedro?" . . . Of course, that afternoon the whole family felt sick to their stomachs.”
These hidden ingredients are not only encrypted in the recipes but also in Tita’s subconscious. She is only subconsciously aware of what she is doing while preparing the food. Esquivel uses magical realism to express some of the emotions that Tita puts into her cooking—allowing them to assume a visible form which is more easily expressed-- which will be discussed more in depth. The hidden ingredients are encrypted into Tita’s subconscious partially through Nancha. Although Nancha is the family cook and nanny, she is the mother figure in Tita’s life. She raises Tita in the kitchen. After all, Tita was born in the kitchen on a flood of tears caused by her mother chopping onions while preparing dinner. Through all of the years she spent in the kitchen, she was unconsciously building a complex relationship with food. Preparing dishes became more of an experience than a necessity to survive. This idea is expressed more in depth in the article, "Romancing the Cook," by Susan Lucas Dobrian. Dobrian describes meal preparation as the following:
“The kitchen becomes a veritable reservoir of creative and magical events, in which the cook who possesses this talent becomes artist, healer, and lover. Culinary activity involves not just the combination of prescribed ingredients, but something personal and creative emanating from the cook, a magical quality which transforms the food and grants its powerful properties that go beyond physical satisfaction to provide spiritual nourishment as well.”
The recipes are crypts in another aspect as well. They are passed down from generation to generation. They are held within the family. Tita passes the recipes to Esperanza (Rosaura’s daughter), and Esperanza passes them to her own daughter (the woman that narrates at the beginning of the novel). The recipes that are received tell stories while keeping old memories alive. Memories are kept through the words, ingredients and foods that are created. The women keep them protected within their own spheres. With the passing of the recipes, the one who passes it also teaches the younger how to prepare the dish, not just to follow the directions. They are taught patience and knowledge of the different qualities of all the ingredients that go into making a dish. Maria Elena de Valdes says that by passing recipes, it allows a woman her space:
“The essential questions of health, illness, pregnancy, childbirth, and sexuality are tied very directly in this novel to the physical and emotional needs of the body. The preparation and eating of food is thus a symbolic representation of living, and Tita’s cookbook bequeaths to Esperanza and Esperanza’s daughter, her grandniece, a woman’s creation of space that is hers in a hostile world.”
The younger generations learn the beginnings of how to develop a special relationship with food. If an outsider were to follow the same recipe, the memories remain safe because they are unaware of the stories and memories hidden in each dish.
Because of Tita’s understanding of food, she acquires a certain position in her household and that is the centre. She prepares the food they eat that sustains their survival. In some aspects she provides life. With this position she is linked to everyone else’s lives. Although she never has children of her own, she becomes more of a mother to Rosaura’s children than Rosaura is. She is Pedro’s lover. She is like a daughter to Nancha. These relationships are a little bit different than what we might think of as normal relationships. The most abnormal being the relationship Tita shares with her mother. They are related by blood, but that is where the family ties end. Theirs is a complex relationship. Her mother is jealous of Tita and Pedro’s love, not because it is wrong, but because it was something that she once had. She won’t allow Tita to be happy, prohibiting her from having the life that she wants and in order to do so, she forces a ridiculous tradition upon her. Tita is not allowed ever to marry because as the youngest, she has to take care of her mother until her mother dies. In an interview with Claudia Loewenstein, Esquivel gives her view on Mama Elena: "Mama Elena is a castrating woman because she is a product of a castrating society. She is also a victim of repression but with all of her strength she was unable to rebel against tradition" The ties between Tita and her mother are so stretched and tangled that they cannot be fixed.
Even after Mama Elena’s death, her ghost haunts Tita. The memory of her mother is so embedded within her subconscious she is unable to get rid of her contempt for her. Derrida explains this phenomena by stating, "The inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entity we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead, one we are willing to keep, as long as we keep it, within us, intact in any way save as living" Although Mama Elena is dead, Tita is keeping her alive through memory. In other words, Tita must kill her mother, who is already dead, in order to stop being haunted. The word "killing’ is used here as a means to an end. She needs to somehow stop the memory of her mother from continuously haunting her. Eventually, she is able to chase off Mama Elena’s ghost, and how she is able to do so will be discussed later.
In the novel, Tita’s cooking has a profound outcome on the other characters. Her meals have more effect than what we usually experience while eating. When we eat a meal, we eat to suffice our hunger or to fill our stomachs. However, sometimes food can be the cause of illness and the origin of disease. Tita’s cooking causes two specific "illnesses" in the novel. Illness is in quotations because it is meant in a metaphorical and symbolic sense. The first of these illnesses is suffered by Rosaura and eventually leads to her death. The medical reason for Rosaura’s death is indigestion and gas. Rosaura blames her flatulence and obesity on Tita’s cooking. She even begged Tita to cook her special meals in order to accommodate her health problems. Tita follows Rosaura’s request, but her body continues to produce gas and she dies. Gas is not only a noun, but is also a verb that means to harass, torment or torture. This better explains the cause of Rosaura’s death. She is tortured by love. She watches the way that Tita and Pedro are together, she knows that what they have is real. Rosaura desperately tries to have love, by going through the "rituals" of love. The rituals could be marriage, children, and intimacy. Things that people that are in love, do together. Unfortunately, she is missing the one vital ingredient which is love. Going through these rituals moves her further and further from what she wants. She is harassed by the relationship that Tita and Pedro share. This hate and discontent fills slowly over time inside of her. Literally, she balloons out and is at the bursting point. It is at this pinnacle that she suffocates on the gas that she produces.
The other important illness mentioned relates to Mama Elena. There comes a point in the novel in which Tita and Mama Elena’s relationship is almost completely abolished. Mama Elena can no longer eat Tita’s food. It is by no coincidence that it is the two women overwhelmed with jealousy of Tita become ill from her cooking. Mama Elena believes that the food tastes as though it has been poisoned. She refuses to eat and begins to lose weight. The phenomena of food tasting like poison can be approached from the viewpoints of each of the women. From Tita’s point of view it can be seen as if Tita placed poison in the food, not physically, but emotionally. Out of her sheer hatred for her mother, she is unable to cook for her out of the goodness of her heart, which results in the production of a poison-like flavour. On the other hand, it can also be seen that Mama Elena tastes the bitterness in the food due to her own emotions. Mama Elena is unable to expel her feelings of jealousy and loathing for Tita. Kristine Ibsen feels that this is the reason for the bitterness in the food: "Elena’s bitterness towards Tita leads her to taste poison in everything she eats; although she finally consents to let Tita prepare her meals, she secretly expels the food from her body with syrup of ipecac, and eventually dies from vomiting."
The bitterness that Mama Elena tastes and the gas and halitosis that Rosaura suffers are examples that food is encrypted into the text. The emotional and psychological elements that are occurring in the book are produced in just this manner. The food being the prime object that triggers the "illnesses" are too much associated with the psyche and not a physical ailment. Tita, being the centre of the household, the provider of food, is the one that allows these emotions to be released, but they are released physically.
Illness is only one of the many symptoms released through Tita’s cooking. Another emotion that is expressed physically through her cooking is love. After all, this novel does fit the criteria of a love story. Tita and Pedro share a passion for one another that the others have not experienced (except Mama Elena for a brief period). Tita even uses food as a metaphor for the passion she feels. The title of the novel also happens to be a metaphor for one of her emotions as well. A good example of how prevalent food is in Tita’s psyche is exemplified in the following quote:
“when she first felt his hot gaze burning her skin. She turned her head, and her eyes met Pedro’s. It was then she understood how dough feels when it is plunged into boiling oil. The heat that invaded her body was so real she was afraid she would start to bubble—her face, her stomach, her heart, her breasts—like batter, and unable to endure his gaze she lowered her eyes and hastily crossed the room.”
The emotions described in this passage are very powerful. She allows these emotions to overwhelm her and take control of her in the kitchen. Nothing else could compare to the scene when she prepares her recipe for Quail in Rose Petal Sauce. In the dish she uses rose pedals, given to her by Pedro, as a main ingredient because Mama Elena forbids her to them. Tita holds the roses so tightly to her chest that her blood and sweat and the rose petals all intermix. She extends so much of herself in preparing the meal that her emotions are extended to the other characters, especially her sister Gertrudis. Gertrudis is so overwhelmed with passion and desire that she runs off naked and jumps on the horse of a federal troop and rides off with him. Gertrudis then works as a prostitute for many years because she is unable to quench her desires. Dobrian describes this act as, "Esquivel inverts the prominent virility of the romance hero and transfers the hyperbolic nature of sexuality to Tita through the magical effect of her cooking to her sister. . ." The others at the table feel the effect of Tita’s sensuous dish, however not to the extent that Gertrudis does. Even Mama Elena finds herself longing for the touch of her old lover. However, the purpose behind the creation of the exotic dish was for Tita to relay her feelings to Pedro, but she had to keep them hidden, disguised in the food. Valdes demonstrates how the sexuality between the two lovers is shared:
“Tita’s emotions and passions are the impetus for expression and action not through the normal means of communication but through the food she prepares. She is therefore able to consummate her love with Pedro through the food she serves. This clearly is much more than communication through food or a mere aphrodisiac; this is a form of sexual transubstantiation whereby the rose petal sauce and the quail have been turned into the body of Tita.”
Once again, Tita is able to overpower the other characters with an emotion (lust) so potently in her cooking that it is revealed in the physical realm as well.
Tita has almost developed certain "powers" because of her control with food. However, this is the only way that she is allowed to express herself. Her mother keeps her under lock and key with the excuse of tradition. Because of tradition, Tita has no life of her own. Her future was already planned from birth. The description of her birth couldn’t be a better omen for how her life was going to be led, symbolized through her tears. The following passage describes Tita’s entrance into the world:
“Tita was sensitive to onions, any time they were being chopped, they say she would just cry and cry. . . Once her wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labour. And before my great-grandmother could let out a word or even a whimper, Tita made her entrance into this world, prematurely, right there on the kitchen table amid the smells of simmering noodle soup, thyme, bay leaves, and cilantro, steamed milk, garlic, and of course, onion. Tita had no need for the usual slap on the bottom, because she was already crying as she emerged; maybe that was because she knew then that it would be her lot in life to be denied marriage.”
Her birth represents the theme of destiny in the novel. As Esquivel states in an interview in Salon Magazine, "Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family—Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican—and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become". Tita is raised her whole life knowing exactly the way the rest is going to be spent, alone with a mother that she despises. She is set free from her arranged destiny when Mama Elena dies, not physically, but when she dies in Tita’s memory. With this turning point, Tita’s destiny becomes something entirely different; her life is turned around.
Esquivel uses the phrase "a turning point" because there is in fact a precise moment that Tita is allowed a new destiny. Her mother dies half way through the novel, however she continuously haunts Tita. The ghost of Mama Elena doesn’t approve of Tita’s relationship with Pedro. The ghost bestows a number of warnings, curses actually, whenever she is upset. The only way that Tita is able to break the hold that Mama Elena has on her is when she acknowledges that it is her life to live and she will not let anyone else plan it for her. In the following words that Tita screams at her mother’s ghost, Mama Elena disappears:
“‘I know who I am! I am a person who has a perfect right to live her life as she pleases. Once and for all, leave me alone; I won’t put up with you! I hate you! I hate you, I’ve always hated you!’ Tita had inspired the magic words that would make Mama Elena disappear forever. The imposing figure of her mother began to shrink until it became no more than a tiny light. As the ghost faded away, a sense of relief grew inside Tita’s body.”
With these words, the life that Tita had been born to live had been dramatically altered forever. Now she could experience freedom.
Tita’s new destiny entitled her to the man that she loved, Pedro. Her final destiny however is rather sicklying ironic. Tita and Pedro, although much aged, are able to express their love for one another. Unfortunately Pedro dies while they are making love. Tita is horrified until she remembers the story told to her, by the doctor, which had been passed to him from his grandmother:
“[grandmother] said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. . .You must of course take care to light the matches one at a time. If a powerful emotion should ignite them all at once they would produce a splendour so dazzling that it would illuminate far beyond what we can normally see; and then a brilliant tunnel would appear before our eyes, revealing the path we forgot the moment we were born, and summoning us to regain the divine origin we had lost. The soul ever longs to return to the place from which it came, leaving the body lifeless.”
Tita takes the advice literally and begins swallowing matches one by one, until a fire begins to blaze in her belly. She is quickly enveloped by flames. The doctor’s grandmother was right, in the end she sees Pedro at the end of a dark tunnel consumed by light. Tita finally is able to have the future that she had wanted her entire life. Destiny had been altered ever since the death of Mama Elena’s ghost. In the death of the ghost, Tita is able to live.
Although Tita does eventually gain a personal freedom in the end, she suffers from the ties of tradition during her life. Tita and Pedro were never able to marry. She also never became a mother, probably the one thing that she was born to do. From another perspective we can say that she provides life for the others in the novel. She never literally gives life by giving birth, but she does become a mother figure. With the theme of motherhood predominating in the story, pregnancies also play a role. In fact, they are an extremely important element in the novel. Throughout the novel there are a total of four different pregnancies, each playing a significant role. Despite the numerous mediums represented in the novel, the act of being pregnant is symbolic in itself. Pregnancy is a crypt, the mother is keeping a child concealed within her womb. The womb, like a crypt, holds as it hides. It keeps the unborn baby safe and kept out of the dangers of the outside world. The only person that is truly able to relate with the child is the mother because there is a special bond. However, this rule doesn’t seem to apply to Tita and her relationship with Rosaura’s children. To start from the beginning and continue chronologically, the pregnancies go as follows: Tita is born, then Roberto, followed by Esperanza, and finally Tita’s false pregnancy.
The story begins with the most odd birth of them all, Tita is delivered into the world cascading down her own flood of tears. She is born and then raised among the smells, sounds and tastes of the kitchen. As discussed earlier, her flood of tears is a symbol for the life that she is destined to live. Nonetheless, when the tears dry, only the residue of salt remains, in which Nancha sweeps up and uses in her cooking for a many years. In this sense, Tita literally is in the food she prepares. Although Mama Elena is Tita’s birthmother, Nancha is her main source of love and nurturing. In fact, Nancha is the one who "nurses" Tita because Mama Elena is unable to do so, as described in the following passage:
“When she was only two days old, Tita’s father, my great-grandfather, died of a heart attack and Mama Elena’s milk dried up from the shock. Since there was no such thing as powdered milk in those days, and they couldn’t find a wet nurse anywhere, they were in a panic to satisfy the infant’s hunger. Nancha, who knew everything about cooking—and much more that doesn’t enter the picture until later—offered to take charge of feeding Tita. She felt she had the best chance of ‘educating the innocent child’s stomach,’ even though she had never married nor had children.”
Nancha and Tita share more of a mother-daughter bond than Tita does with her real mother. Throughout this novel, there is a theme that expresses the belief that the best care provider doesn’t necessarily have to be the child’s birthmother. The special bond that is supposed to develop between mother and child is not bestowed upon all characters. Nancha and Tita both are natural care providers and are very good at what they do. However, this is not true of Mama Elena, she could not be defined as a care provider. She and Tita are more enemies than they are family. One would think that a mother would want what is best for her child. Also that she would like to see her grow up, get married, have children, and, most importantly, be happy. However, in Mama Elena’s case, the only person’s happiness that she cares about is her own. Tita is there for her benefit and hers alone. Tradition is a far more important issue than her daughter’s happiness or freedom, which is unusual from most mother-daughter relationships. Mama Elena’s strong hold on the tradition results in hatred between the two women. There has never been a foundation of love between the two, so they really have no reason to even try and save their relationship. Despite Tita’s rough relationship with her mother, she still has the ability to nurture and protect. She even has a better knack for motherhood than her sister Rosaura.
Rosaura gives birth to two children in the novel. The first pregnancy produces a boy named Roberto. Tita develops a special bond with Roberto right from the beginning. When Rosaura goes into labour, Tita happens to be the only one around and she delivers him. She is forever touched by this moment, as she describes her emotions, "The baby’s cries filled all the empty space in Tita’s heart. She realized that she was feeling a new love: for life, for this child, for Pedro, even for he sister she had despised for so long". Her attachment even becomes stronger when Rosaura is unable to produce milk and the wet nurse dies. Miraculously, Tita is able to feed Roberto by herself. Valdez gives a reason for the phenomenon: " . . .Tita is able to take the infant and nurse him in spite of the fact that she has not given birth. Her breasts are filled with milk not because she wishes she were the other of the child, but because the child needs to eat and she is the provider of food". Valdez reinforces the idea that one doesn’t have to be a mother in order to be a chief provider. She continues by comparing the care that Tita provides to communion in the Catholic Church:
“Tita’s cooking controls the pattern of living of those in her household because the food she prepares becomes an extension of herself. The culmination of this process of food and art and communication is food as communion. The transubstantiation of Tita’s quail in rose petal sauce into Tita’s body recalls the Roman Catholic doctrine of the communion wafer’s becoming the body and blood of Christ, but on a deeper level it is the psychological reality of all women who have nursed an infant.”
The food that baby Roberto receives (Tita’s breast milk) is encrypted in the sense that it is coming from an unlikely source, in fact, more of an impossibility. A woman who has never been pregnant is unable to produce breast milk, but in Tita’s case this is not true. The production of milk is one of the many ways that Esquivel encrypts food in the novel. Tita begins to rely on Roberto for unconditional love, and in turn, Roberto becomes strongly attached to Tita. Both Rosaura and Mama Elena can see what is going on, and neither of the women approve. In order to severe the ties between Tita and the infant, Mama Elena convinces Pedro and Rosaura to move to San Antonio. The distance that is put between Tita and Roberto propels Tita into a deep depression. She is no longer able to provide for the infant. The effect is even worse on Roberto and he dies as a result of the separation. The infant won’t eat and dies of physical and emotional starvation. Roberto has no ties to Rosaura, and cannot live. Tita blames his death on her mother and on Rosaura, which even further inflames her hatred for the women. It appears strange that a child would die because it was estranged from its aunt and not its mother. This odd relationship is how Esquivel expresses the importance of the care provider in the family. Tita understands food and has an amazing ability to express herself both literally and metaphorically in her cooking.
Tita’s motherly instincts also take control when Rosaura gives birth to her second child, Esperanza. Tita and Esperanza have even a stronger bond than Roberto and Tita shared. This is due to the fact that they have much in common from the beginning. Esperanza is born three months premature, like Tita. Mama Elena’s death effected Rosaura so much that it brought on an early labour. Esperanza, also being the only daughter, was also considered the youngest, thus she is forced to follow in the footsteps of Tita, which greatly upsets Tita. She is furious at her sister for following the absurd tradition and will do anything to stop her from following it. For example, Pedro wants to name the baby girl after Tita’s full name, Josefita, but she adamantly refuses. Tita’s feelings are expressed as, "But Tita refused to hear of it. She didn’t want her name to influence the child’s destiny". Due to the bad shape that Rosaura was in after giving birth, Tita once again was left to take care of the baby. She refused to breast feed her like Roberto for fear of becoming too attached. Instead she fed Esperanza in the same way Nancha had fed her, with teas and gruels. Esperanza spent most of her time with Tita in the kitchen. She grew up surrounded by the same smells and the warmth of the kitchen. The birth of Esperanza plays a large role in the novel. Her character parallels Tita’s almost perfectly. However, Esperanza’s life takes all of the good turns that Tita’s was unable to take. She does not have to experience the type of mother that Mama Elena was—because of Rosaura’s early death—she also is not denied from her true love. Esperanza’s destiny is the one that Tita should have had, but due to unfortunate situations, one that she was unable to experience. Tita didn’t miss out completely though, through her strong love for Esperanza she lived through Esperanza’s experiences. Even more importantly, the recipes, secrets and the powers of the kitchen were passed down to Esperanza: "Esperanza went to the best school, with the objective of improving her mind. Tita, for her part, taught her something just as valuable: the secrets of love and life as revealed by the kitchen".. This fact more than anything allowed Tita to live on through Esperanza, along with past relatives.
Rosaura’s pregnancy with Esperanza was an important as well as a symbolic event. However, Tita experiences a "pregnancy" that is slightly more of a symbolic representation. Pregnancy is put into quotation marks because Tita’s pregnancy is not genuine. It is actually a curse thrust upon her as a punishment from the ghost of her dead mother. It is punishment for consummating her love for Pedro. The pregnancy is not entirely a figment of Tita’s imagination; she experiences real symptoms. Tita stops getting her period, she experiences morning sickness, her breasts swell, and the most odd thing of all, her stomach actually grows. The symbol of an essentially "empty" womb represents the unborn child in Tita. It is a symbol of her destiny or the fact that her destiny does not hold children in her future. Her womb is a crypt that hides nothing—which in hiding nothing in fact reveals that the hidden crypt is nothing. It is a crypt that is hiding empty space, or in other words an empty destiny.
Because Tita’s womb holds no infant, she obviously never gives birth. Although, she does end the pregnancy without giving birth, she does so by ending the curse. As discussed earlier, Tita chases off her mother’s ghost forever when she expresses her real feelings of hatred for her mother and her desire for freedom. When Mama Elena’s ghost is banished, the curse ends:
Tita had said the magic words that would make Mama Elena disappear forever. The imposing figure of her mother began to shrink until it became no more than a tiny light. As the ghost faded away, a sense of relief grew inside Tita’s body. The inflammation in her belly and the pain in her breasts began to subside. The muscles at the centre of her body relaxed, losing a violent menstrual flow. This discharge, so many days late, relieved all her pains. She gave a deep peaceful sigh. She wasn’t pregnant.
Esquivel uses the word "discharge," a synonym for the following: ejection, emanation, radiation, spurious output and exhalation. With the non-existent foetus being repelled from her body, she is freed from the empty womb, which also releases her from the destiny she was tied to. Her life would not be led under her mother’s boot. Although Tita doesn’t have children in the future, she does experience a future with Pedro—something that formerly was not possible. Throughout everything that we have discussed thus far, Laura Esquivel has used a specific approach in order to express main points in the novel. All of the symbols and significant events have been derived from an important literary utensil: magical realism. This important element in the novel is what gives it its life and a twist all of its own. Anything is possible, however not too far-fetched. A baby could be born on its own river of tears couldn’t it? Isn’t it also possible that a bunch of fighting chickens could spin so fast they dug themselves a hole into the ground? Well maybe not exactly, but it isn’t too far out there. It is this stretch of the imagination that makes it so fun. If you consider the word: magical realism, it consists of both reality and magic intertwined. David K. Danow describes magical realism in his book, The Spirit of Carnival, as containing specific elements: "While negotiating the tortuous terrain of credibility, magical realism manages to present a view of life that exudes a sense of energy and vitality in a world that promises not only joy but a fair share of misery as well. In effect, the reader is rewarded with a perspective on the world that still includes much that has elsewhere been lost. . ."
Esquivel uses magical realism to express happiness as well as sorrow. Magical realism is constantly used in order to express Tita’s emotions, which are then revealed through food. For example when Tita’s tears fall into the batter of Rosaura’s wedding cake causing everyone to get ill, or the whole episode when the characters are overwhelmed with feelings of lustfulness after eating Tita’s infamous Quail in Rose Petal Sauce. Esquivel takes a point she is trying to make and then proceeds to push it a little further, to emphasize it a little more, thusly giving the text a magical element. We as Americans feel this effect even more so, due to our culture. Magical Realism is not something commonly used in English literature and is something rather different to us. Danow addresses this issue, "That ‘magical dimension’ is hypostatized in literature by the superimposition of one perceived reality upon another, as seemingly fantastic events that may nevertheless appear to the indigenous, heterogeneous peoples of the region as an indubitable norm are embedded within what outsiders perceive as distinct, exclusive, and the only ‘true’ reality". In other words, because we are not as familiar with the culture described in Esquivel’s writing, we view the text slightly differently than a reader raised in a similar culture would.
The main focus of magical realism in this novel is not only to exaggerate a specific point, but also as a function of humour. Ibsen describes Esquivel’s humour as "women’s humour" which consists of intimacy through support and healing, whereas "men’s humour" consists of domination of power and sexual joking. However in the case of Like Water for Chocolate there is a role reversal and the women are the ones that initiate the sexual jokes—even if represented in the magical effect. This reversal, even just in humour, also shifts power. Women are portrayed with the respect and honour that is normally attributed to men. The humour provided by the magical events produces a comedic relief that shifts the readers’ focus away from the more depressing aspects of the novel. The mass nausea that occurs on Rosaura’s wedding day as a result of Tita crying into the batter relieves us of the sad fact that Tita’s true love is marrying her sister.
Like Water for Chocolate is a novel that is intertwined with love, hate, relationships, humour, tradition, destiny and magic that are all revealed through food created in the kitchen. The various recipes that introduce each chapter hide within themselves a story. Behind the story are people, events and traditions. The recipes are passed through the generations, which is in fact a crypt within a crypt. Each generation adds a new layer through the events experienced in their lives. Each time a relative cooks one of the family recipes, a story is being told, a memory is being recalled. Quail in Rose Petal Sauce means more than a favourable dish, it is a trigger that sends the message of two lovers’ lustfulness that could not be reached. The memory would not be relived if not for the creation of the dish, whose ingredients lie within the recipe. In this novel, the person placed in the centre of the home is a woman, which is very rare in Latin American literature. The novel is centred on the lives of women and rarely focuses on men. Esquivel uses the reversal of gender roles to the story’s advantage because it is fresh and different. Magical realism is the final touch that gives the novel an aspect of comfort, which makes it all the more enjoyable.
Mackenzie E. Dennard
Internal Assessment – Part 4 Works: Options
Individual Oral Presentation (15% of grade awarded)
(10 – 15 Minutes)
Possible Topics for the Presentation:
• The significance of the many physical illnesses that plague characters
• The importance of the narrator
• The role of the ghost / Mama Elena
• The role of tradition
• The presentation of The three De La Garza sisters
• Compare and contrast the two prime male figures in the novel, Pedro and John
• Symbolism
• Magical Realism
• How is fire used as a symbol in the text?
• The character of Tita
• Adopt a critical / theoretical perspective of the novel
• The theme of love
• The importance of recipes / cooking
• The structure / style / language of the novel
• Discussion of a key theme (e.g. tradition, gender roles)
• The domestic life of women
• Comparison of key passages
• The significance of the title of the novel
Appendix
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