In Love and the Time of Cholera love is viewed a plague on the main characters. One of the main characters, Florentino Ariza, feels the pangs of lovesickness similar to how one may experience the physical and emotional ills of cholera. This can be seen time and time again. For example, Florentino so wants to know the scent of his love Fermina that he eats flowers and drinks cologne, causing himself to become very physically ill and vomit. He is also obsessed and even mentally disturbed by his fixation on Fermina. He even goes so far to have the captain of the ship he is on in the final chapter to announce that there has been an outbreak of cholera on the boat, even though this is false, because he is so convinced that his physical and mental pains from love is causing a plague.
However, it’s interesting because love is also a way to help cure the problems that he feels from his love of Fermina. He says that he will remain a virgin until he can consecrate his love of Fermina, but is taken by a moment of passion when he sleeps with Rosalba. This serves as a momentary alleviation of his emotional and physical problems caused by his overwhelming love for Fermina. He uses sex like an antidote to his disease but it does not ultimately bring him any satisfaction, only momentary cessations of his pain. This is how love is presented in Love in the Time of Cholera. The experience of love without being able to actually be with the one you love is seen as a plague. In small dosages, love in the form of physical passion can serve as a treatment for the plague, but ultimately it consumes until the person can actually fulfill the love they’re fantasizing about.
One example of a similar depiction of love is found in the recent song “Love is my disease” by Alicia Keys. In this song, she talks about her love of another person as an addiction or disease. She talks about how when the object of her love is gone her “entire world is gone.” She also says that she “thought love would be my cure.” (“Love is my disease,” 2012) This shows that she also thinks of love as a double edged sword. On one hand she feels so much pain from it because she cannot have the object of her affection, even though she thought the experience of love would be what ultimately made her feel better.
She talks about the all the physical symptoms that she feels because of this and that she basically mimics the feeling of withdrawal. She wakes up “drenched in cold sweat,” and turns in her bed all night. The main similarity between the two understandings of love is that it is powerful enough to make someone feel full blown physically and mentally sick by wanting to love someone and having this object of love deprived. For Keys it resembles being addicted to a drug and not being able to have that drug. For Love and the Time of Cholera it resembles a plague.
In both instances love is shown to be an enduring feature of human emotion. It is not constrained by time but can cause people to feel a sickness regardless of what time period they live in. It is also shown to be something that can cause physical sickness in both instances, whether it resembles cholera or drugs. The main difference shown is that each time period has a different sickness to compare the feeling of love to. Cholera is not so much a concern when Keys is writing however, the novel did not yet have the epidemic of drugs that Keys’ time period would experience. This shows that while love may have a universal appeal to it, especially in how it can cause suffering, it is not expressed the same way in every instance. This depends on the time and circumstance that the person is writing within.
Works Cited
"Love Is My Disease" lyrics. (n.d.). Retrieved August 09, 2016, from http://www.azlyric
s.com/lyrics/aliciakeys/loveismydisease.html
References
