In Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel designs the text into twelve chapters named after twelve months of the year, each describing twelve delicious Mexican recipes (Esquivel, 1993). The novel is about two main characters – Tita the subjugated and Elena the subjugator. Tita as the victim struggles to create an independent identity, free from the dominance of her tyrannical mother.
Tita is forced to subdue all her amorous feelings to uphold an unfair and old family tradition. Elena controls and represses Tita, her youngest daughter, by foiling her chances to marry Pedro, the man she loved. Instead, Elena gets Pedro married to Rosaura, her eldest daughter, and Tita’s sister (Esquivel, 1993). Elena’s vicious ascendancy finally results in Tita’s psychological and physical breakdown. The novel reverberates of three central themes – feminism, magical realism, and Hispanic culture. this essay discusses these three elements of the novel.
The presence of mythical, fantastic, and epic themes in the narration typifies magical realism. Esquivel uses the religious mythical themes of magical realism to present the suppression and the everyday life of the characters in the novel. Further, these fantastic mythical events are transposed to the domestic realm of the matriarchal household (Spanos, 1995). The symbolism used through magical realism in the novel creates a powerful narration. At the very beginning, the episode of Tita’s birth shows the strong presence of magical realism in the text.
The imagery of the ocean wave ushering in the infant on the wooden floor shows the narrative’s fantastic element: “Tita was literally washed into the world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor” (Esquivel, 1993, p. 10). In another instance, Tita cooks the rose petal sauce, while burning in desire for Pedro. When Gertrudis eats it, her whole body starts burning, and unable to resist the heat she takes a shower. The heat/fire metaphor symbolizes the sexual desire of Tita for Pedro, which is transferred to Gertrudis through the sauce: “her body was giving off so much heat that the wooden walls began to split and burst into flame” (Esquivel, 1993, p. 51).
The dramatic imagery of Gertrudis in the shower with pink sweat and powerful smell accentuates the magical element of the description (Zubiaurre, 2006). The most remarkable expression of magical realism was when Rosaura’s son was born and the infant had to be breastfed. However, due to Rosaura’s ill health, Tita was given the responsibility to look after the infant. When the crying infant started sucking on Tita’s breast, “a thin stream of milk spayed out” (Esquivel, 1993, p. 70). This imagery exposes the presence of the fantastic element strewn into the domesticity of the novel.
The narrator admits: “It wasn’t possible for an unmarried woman to have milk, short of a supernatural act, unheard of in these times” (Esquivel, 1993, p. 70). Symbolically, this drawing of milk from Tita’s breast implied that the infant was actually hers, a fruit of her love affair. The imagery returns when the boy dies and the “milk in her breast … dried up overnight” (Esquivel, 1993, p. 84).
The pain Tita felt for the loss of the child is reflected through the symbolic drying up of her breast milk. Finally, the emergence of Elena’s ghost and its continued domination over Tita symbolically showed the internalization of her mother’s tyrannical domination. Tita was no longer a subject of her mother’s commands. However, her continued subversion has molded her mind into submission, which rejected the idea of freedom. Therefore, even after her mother’s death, Tita continued feeling her domineering presence.
Like Water for Chocolate is a feminist novel. This is because it is a story narrated by a woman and is about women. Esquivel uses the matriarchal familial structure to show Tita’s subjugation. A feminist reading of the novel shows the tyranny of the patriarchal societal norms that controlled and dominated Tita through the figure of her controlling mother (Spanos, 1995). From the very beginning of the novel, the readers sympathize with Tita as the oppressed victim of an autocratic matriarch.
The very title of the novel represents a popular Mexican saying meaning the boiling point indicative of Tita’s resentment and anger at being confined within the domestic walls, especially the kitchen. Therefore, she transfers all her pent up anger and protests through her cooking. Cooking and the kitchen becomes the medium of expression for Tita’s crushed self. Her recipe book becomes an expression of her self and a way to preserve her identity. Therefore, the kitchen, which has often been conceived by feminist critics as a space of female domination and confinement, gains therapeutic and functional value (Zubiaurre, 2006).
Though feminist critics assume the kitchen as a representation of passive submission of women, in the case of Tita, this space assumes the symbolic expression of freedom (Valdés, 1995). Thus, when Pedro was to marry Rasaura, Tita silently channels her wrath into the wedding cake, which makes the guests feel “a great wave of longing” and “an acute attack of pain and frustration” that transformed into violent vomiting similar to volcanic eruption (Esquivel, 1993, pp. 39-40). Thus, Tita’s frustration to her mother’s atrocities finds voice in the kitchen and in her cooking, a space, and role traditionally conceived as one of female subjugation. Tita’s struggle for freedom and search for a separate identity through a self-discovered space within the tyrannical domestication of her mother makes this novel feminist in nature.
The story is set in a village in Mexico during the revolution. Mexican identity is the main theme of the characters (Finnegan, 1999). This background of the Mexican revolution is used by Esquivel to explore issues of gender and masculinity in the novel (Finnegan, 1999). Pedro, the handsome hero of the novel meekly avoids going out to fight for a cause. On the other hand, Gertrudis’s ferociousness is demonstrated when she becomes the leader of the rebel army. The stereotypes of gender are broken in the novel that represents the patriarchal Mexican society (Finnegan, 1999).
Further, the use of recipes, which are mostly of Hispanic origin, reverberates the cultural backdrop of the novel (Zubiaurre, 2006). The recipes are gastronomic representation of the rich Hispanic culture. In addition, the theme of matriarchal family and the societal norm of the youngest daughter to remain unmarried to care for the parents show a minute facet of the Hispanic societal construct (Fernández-Levin, 1996). The plot demonstrates the multiplicity of restrictions on the life of women belonging to the Mexican society and provides an insight into the societal norm of the region (Valdés, 1995). Intuitively, these tropes show the masculine domination of women in the Hispanic culture that is broken by Tita, silently, using a gender-defined stereotypical role of cooking and writing.
References
Esquivel, L. (1993). Like Water for Chocolate. London: Random House.
Fernández-Levin, R. (1996). Ritual And “Sacred Space” In Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water For Chocolate”. Confluencia, 12(1), 106-120.
Finnegan, N. (1999). At Boiling Point: “Like Water for Chocolate” and the Boundaries of Mexican Identity. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 18(3), 311-326.
Spanos, T. (1995). The Paradoxical Metaphors of the Kitchen in Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate”. Letras Femeninas, 21(1/2), 29-36.
Valdés, M. E. (1995). Verbal and Visual Representation of Women: Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate. World Literature Today, 69(1), 78-82.
Zubiaurre, M. (2006). Culinary Eros in Contemporary Hispanic Female Fiction: FromKitchen Tales toTable Narratives. College Literature, 33(3), 29-51.