Ultimate Love In Like Water Fo Chocolate

Essay, Research Paper

Ultimate Love in Like Water for Chocolate

Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate is a love story set in Mexico, interspersed with recipes, related in unadorned, uncomplicated language. Yet when the ingredients are combined and simmer, subtle and unusual flavors emerge. On one level, this is the story of Tita, youngest daughter of the formidable matriarch Mama Elena who forbids Tita to marry her true love Pedro because tradition says that the youngest daughter must care for her mother until her death. When Pedro marries Tita’s oldest sister in order to be near Tita, it begins a life-long conflict filled with passion, deception, anger, and pure love. Interwoven throughout the narrative are the recipes, which, like an ancient Greek chorus, provide an ongoing metaphorical commentary on the characters and their culture. Finally, there is the food itself that Tita creates as head cook on the family ranch, food so vibrant and sensual, so imbued with her feelings of longing, frustration, rebellion, or love, that it affects everyone who eats it. The story is told by Tita’s grand-niece who follows in her footsteps, using her cookbook and continuing a tradition quite different from the one her great-grandmother tried to impose. The combination of all these elements, food, tradition, romance, and a good measure of the super natural thrown in, enlace to form a passionate narrative where ultimate love is the string that holds it all.

Tita was born and raised in the kitchen. It is in this realm where she burst in a tidal wave of tears from her mother’s womb; where she was destined to serve a long life of solitude and emptiness. However, it is here where she also learns the most important lessons about life from the Indian cook Nacha. Tita was always attracted to the scents, the flavors, and the mysteries of the kitchen. As a toddler she spent her days witnessing the magic that Nacha manifested every time she set herself to make a platter. Tita was her apprentice and without knowing it, little by little, she completely embodied the power to cook, and what’s more, to reveal herself through her food. When she had no other way to express herself, food became her mode of communication. Mama Elena’s cruel appointing of Tita as head of all the preparations for the wedding of her sister Rosaura and the man that Tita loved, resulted very tragically. While baking the cake with Nacha, Tita’s tears sank into the batter of the cake, and acted as poisonous toxins that nauseated all those who ate it, ruining the wedding, and killing Nacha herself, who also tasted Tita’s melancholy teardrops:

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 their lost loves

(39).

Her feelings towards the other nuptial that occurs in the novel are completely different since it occurs much later in her life and Mama Elena and all the forces that were against her, had vanished. At her niece’s wedding, Tita felt so much happiness in preparing all the edibles that everyone complimented her food and those who dared to ask her for the secret recipe only received the reply: “The secret is to make it with love” (239). As in the book’s title, descriptions of how characters feel in various situations are presented in imagery from food and cooking. In addition, the unique ways in which food is prepared and the ingredients employed are shown as determining or redefining people’s fates. The novel equates understanding these secrets of the power of food with understanding life. By doing this, Esquivel marks a new phase in feminist thought where, instead of rejecting the kitchen as a space that impedes women’s freedom, she adapts the kitchen’s secrets to literary production.

In this novel, tradition manifests itself as the greatest obstacle that can stand between the love of two people. Tradition is set as the factor in this Mexican culture that predetermines the destinies of people even before they are born. However, when this framework of rules and social standards bottle up and leave a person trapped with no air to breathe, a defense mechanism arises and builds enough strength to rebel and bring about the change that is necessary. Esquivel presents the plot during the turbulent civil war years of Mexico, exactly written to emphasize the great war that is about to take place between a desperate soul and her own strictly bound world. Also, to foreshadow the revolution and change that is about to take place within this character, Tita.

It had been an unbroken tradition that Mama Elena was certainly not about to change: “Being the youngest daughter means you have to take care of me until the day I die”(10). After being told that she could never marry Pedro, Tita realized that she would never experience or truly know what love is. This became a catalyst for Tita’s powers to surge and for her lunacy to later on take place. After losing Nacha and her sister Gertrudis to the sorcery of her food, and Pedro to her sister Rosaura, Tita’s loneliness and desperation only seemed to swell. Soon enough she became mentally unattached because she could no longer take the torture of dealing with her mother, and was taken away by a doctor to be treated and spiritually