Magical Realism and Tradition in Like Water for Chocolate

Abstract

Like Water for Chocolate is a Mexican novel of magical realism, as it mixes real-life situations with the completely fictitious. The work focuses on early twentieth-century Mexico. The author tells the story of a passionate love repressed because of a family tradition handed down in the family into which Tita is born. Because she is the youngest daughter of the house, she is destined to remain single and care for her mother until death, in addition to being subject to her orders and punishments.

The protagonist never feels satisfied, as she is unable to do what she wants with her life. Tita is a clever and sassy girl with a maternal instinct, wanting to procreate and to love; she is especially sensitive and tender. She is a fighter and a rebel, but her fate is dark, and she knows she cannot escape it, despite trying tirelessly without success.

At fifteen, she realizes this is merely the start; she is in love, and though her love is requited, her mother forces her to remember her destination. She has no remedy because she has no right to protest of any kind. The kitchen was her only consolation; her dishes have different effects depending on the nature and behavior of the person who ate them. Cooking was her only inducement to the problems that caused her to fall: the pain of not being with the love of her life, the fatal blow of knowing the man she loved was to marry her sister, the humiliation and beatings from her mother, and the loss of the person who raised her and loved her more than her own mother.

She stepped through so many difficulties that she felt she had found love again, only to realize that she still loved this man despite everything; he was her greatest and only love. When she finally got rid of everything that prevented her from being happy and was in the highlights of her sad life, she suffered the loss of the man she loved. At the end of the novel, she achieves her goal, and the two die in a fire born from the combination of love and passion that was always suppressed. The story is told by the granddaughter of Rosaura’s daughter, Esperanza, and Alex, who feels very identified with her great-aunt and finds the story among the recipes in an old book that escaped the fire.

Theme

The theme is the frustration of a young girl who discovers her life is marked by a cruel tradition.