Love Relationship

Introduction

Like Water for Chocolate is a 3rd person, Mexican novel driven mostly by two topics, the disruption of tradition and how love conquerors all. The book also uses incredible imagery and figurative language to blend typical Mexican life in this time period with recipes and a little bit of magic. It is great for anyone reading at a high school level or higher. Love is a powerful feeling within the heart that holds it. People can show and express their love in many different ways. Love can take over the mind and control your every thought for a short instance.

In the novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison tells a story of Bone and the Boatwrights, a family besieged by poverty and violence. Throughout the novel, the reader uncovers the lives of all the different characters, and discovering the identity of these characters plays a large role in understanding the novel as a whole. Within the Boatwright family are women who are constantly faced with the struggle of finding themselves in a patriarchal society. Anney, Alma and Raylene each have their own characteristics and ideals and as the novel progresses, Bone successively displays identity characteristics of each of these women. To Bone, these women exemplify the different levels of independence that a woman can achieve in such a society. In the end, while Alma and Anney are unable to break free from a male-driven society, Raylene remains independent, and Bone finds her own identity through her experiences.

Analysis

In Like Water for Chocolate there is 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.

Tita's love, Pedro Múzquiz, 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 ...