Women and Gender in Like Water for Chocolate

Laura Esquivel's novel, Like Water for Chocolate, is the love story of a woman who is forbidden from love because of a tradition that forces the main character, Tita, to dedicate her life to her mother until she dies. Forbidden to marry his lover Tita, Pedro marries Tita's older sister to stay close to Tita. Throughout the novel, patriarchy is imposed upon Tita by her mother, who may represent a modern form of patriarchy through mimesis. Although Tita is repressed, she is empowered by her role in the kitchen, as every time she cooks a meal, her emotions are literally transported into those who eat the food. This is may be perceived as an example of essentialist feminist perspective, as Tita is empowered through her feminine role.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s essay, “Madwoman in the Attic,” analyzes the way women are depicted in literature of the twentieth century, analyzing the way that women were either angels or monsters, but always something other-worldly. In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita and her childhood nanny, Nacha, are the angels in the household—they exhibit “submissiveness, modesty, selflessness” (Gilbert 816). Tita’s mother, on the other hand, is depicted as a selfish masculine monster that is demonized for her tyranny.

However, not all the women in the story are depicted as angels or monsters. Gertrudis, one of Tita’s sisters, after eating one of Tita’s meals that Tita made when feeling an intense passion for Pedro, runs off the ranch to make love to a Mexican soldier. After disappearing for several months, Gertrudis returns as a soldier who leads Mexican revolutionary troops in the war, and despite her masculine position, remains an object of attraction for the troops. She is a duplicitous woman: understanding, independent, sexualized, and, somehow, still feminine. She is neither an angel nor a monster; she is innately human and heroic.

Although at first glance this novel may seem to reinforce traditional gender roles, it is instead revolutionizing them. Tita ends up making love to her Pedro both while he is married to her sister and after they die. Although her behavior might be deemed unpious and unchaste by traditional standards, she is nevertheless a sympathetic and admirable character in Like Water for Chocolate. Her mother, on the other hand, may be a symbol for patriarchy through a matriarchal figure. Her death, and Tita's final rejection of her ghost spirit may symbolize the end of patriarchy's tyranny. According to Gilbert and Gubar, "women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art. And similarly, all women writers must kill the angel's necessary opposite and double, the 'monster' in the house, whose medusa-face also kills creativity" (812). Perhaps this is exactly what Like Water for Chocolate is doing.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 812-825.