Like Water For Chocolate Literary Analysis

Throughout lifetime, human’s definiton of love has always been obscure. In Like Water for Chocolate, Esquivel portrays love in many forms; her ideas often being ambiguous. Based in Mexico, the novel explores the life of a young girl named Tita, who faces the challenges of family traditions. Throughout the book Tita seems to experience love in the untraditional sense and also in the form of cooking; often using that as a way to communicate her love. Esquivel uses magical realism and inanimate objects to portray how love can both come and be ignited from different sources.

The symbol of breastfeeding is used to show how unconventinal love doesn’t have to be bloodborne; it’s all in the passion you carry with you. This is shown in the book when

Tita is able to breastfeed Roberto, when it apparently “wasn’t possible for an unmarried woman to have milk, short of a supernatural act, [being] unheard of in [those] times” (Esquivel 76). Although Tita in a way is related to Roberto, she’s not his actual mother which would explain their powerful connection. The fact that she alone can breastfeed him and not his actual mother, shows that perhaps the feelings inside of Tita were powerful enough to simulate that type of connection. It’s as if the universe made it right for Tita, considering all the wrong it had done for her before. Almost as if motherhood was supposed to make up for her lost love. Later in the book Tita also forms a connection with Rosaura’s daughter, Esperanza. Tita cared for her well being; she saw her as both a human and a daughter, ways in both which Rosaura seemed to be doing the opposite. When it was shown that Esperanza had similar traits to Tita growing up, “Tita prayed that the idea of perpetuating [the] cruel tradition would not cross Rosaura’s mind” (Esquivel 147). Tita cares about the struggles Esperanza may have to go through; she genuinely wants to protect her. It shows that Tita has love for her in a motherly way when some would argue that perhaps she shouldn’t be so invested in Esperanza’s life.

Additionally, matches in Like Water for Chocolate portray the natural spark you feel when meeting somebody destined to be with you. This is a case in which Esquivel uses an inanimate object to portray love. In the book this is explained when Tita is speaking with John and he’s telling her about his grandmother’s theory. The theory explains that “each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves” (Esquivel). The fact that you can’t strike them all by yourself proves to show that you have to meet your significant other in order to feel the intense emotion of love. In contrast, there are plenty of other platonic ways that love works in this book, but this one specifically is reffering to soulmates and romantic love. It is possible that matches can have platonic significance, but towards the end of the book you can see in the way it ties in with lust and romance. Tita makes love with Pedro at the end and proceeds to light herself on fire; this could be homage to the match theory. It is explained that “for a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it,” which ultimately is what happened at the end with Tita (Esquivel).

Lastly, one of the many foods shown in Like Water for Chocolate as symbols of love was the rose petal sauce, which was used to symbolize how the burning passion within you is meant to be taken care of.

It’s as if you should listen to it; let it guide you. Consequently, this is what Gertrudis did. She listened to it, and she followed through with her emotions. When Gertrudis tasted the sauce, “it was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce” (Esquivel 52). You could say that the emotions Tita had within her were cooked into the sauce, which I mentioned earlier when I said she used cooking as a way to communicate her love. Except she communicated it wrong, because the receiver on the other side wasn’t ultimately Pedro, but Gertrudis. The sauce changed everything Gertrudis seemed to be: “The delicacy of her face, the perfection of her pure virginal body contrasted with the passion, the lust, that leapt from her eyes, from her every pore” (Esquivel 55). In this case the source of love (or lust) came from the food Tita cooked with clear passion. And it seemed to work out great for Gertrudis in the end, who ultimately got to experience life for what it was and experience what true love meant; all of this because of the rose petal

sauce.

Like Water for Chocolate has a particular magical nature to it, which was used to portray the different types of love many of these characters felt. Love that ranged from lust, maternal, friendship, and more. The magical realism in this book served to portray how these types of love work, when it would’ve been too hard to explain with ordinary words. They purely served as messengers. That being said, love is still a tricky and spooky subject and in reality we all see it differently. Not just universally, but in the book this is shown too. Characters had their own ideas about what love meant and what it didn’t which just proves that love can be anything you want it to be.