Women Mistreated in the Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the way women have been represented and characterized gives us an idea of how the female gender are treated differently from the male gender as well as children in Latin America during the 1950s. The husbands were given all the authority, also known as machismo, whereas women weren’t allowed to take charge of anything, and were portrayed as weak and impotent.

The Vicario sisters were raised and trained by their mother, Purisima Del Carmen, to become good wives. They did not have very social lives and did not marry until late in life. However, the lines, “the girls had been reared to get married” and “any man will be happy with them because they have been raised to suffer,” from the novel suggests that women usually have certain responsibilities that need to be fulfilled, one of which is to keep their man happy by serving them for the rest of their lives. The Vicario sisters were expected to be engaged in daily chores such as sewing, weaving, ironing and washing. To make their mother believe that they were perfect, they were also taught to keep the old traditions alive, by helping the sick, comforting the dying, and covering the dead.

However, one of her daughters, Angela, broke the village’s rules and traditions by having premarital sex. This had caused her to lose any honor and self-respect she had, due to her own choice. She had lost her virginity to Santiago Nasar but had still not shown any signs of embarrassment considering the fact that she had openly informed her husband, Bayardo San Roman of this big and shocking news and had courageously put on the veil as she waited for the groom. At first, she showed no interest in Bayardo, but was met with rejection from her mother who said that “love ...

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...w lowly they think of women and consider them as nothing but sexual objects, who do not have a stand on their own. In this novel, men are illustrated as the dominant ones, who have complete control over men. They were allowed to do anything they desired (for example, go to the brothel), but if a woman cheated, or lost her virginity before marriage, it is seen as the ultimate sin.

Throughout the novel, double standards were portrayed, with men being the superior ones. Women on the other hand, were expected to be perfect and any glitch in their behavior would lead to a ruinous reputation. Marquez represented woman in an extremely distressing and upsetting manner with the intent to generate pity for the inferior gender amongst the readers. However, the roles of each woman in the Chronicle of a Death Foretold is different, yet entitled as being controlled by the males.