In Laura Esquivel’s trenchant and fascinating novel Like Water for Chocolate, young girl Tita learns how to find her own voice in a patriarchal, restrictive Latin society through the art of cooking. According to Canadian author Pat Tryer, "Ultimately, Tita negotiates a voice through the elaborate, fantastical recipes she creates, thereby subverting gender suppression by speaking through the stereotypical women's sphere of cooking. These recipes and their fantastic results mirror and reinforce the central theme of the novel, that of the suppression of the female voice and its inevitable explosion of expression everywhere”. A wonderful work of fantastical magical realism, Esquivel’s novel explores the transformative power of cooking, and the ways in which women can find ways to assert themselves even in the boxes that they are placed in. The use of recipes and cooking as a motif in Like Water for Chocolate is indicative of the means women use to forge their own destinies independent of tradition and patriarchal gender roles.
At the outset of the novel, Tita’s prospects are grim. Having fallen in love with Pedro, her mother, Mama Elena, informs her that she cannot ever marry or lose her virginity, as family tradition among the De La Garza’s dictates that the youngest daughter must take care of her mother until she dies; in this case, it is Tita. In this respect, this lack of agency creates an even more restrictive situation for her; Elena wishes to keep her daughter even more closely tied to her, and is a punishing, withholding force in Tita’s life. Elena herself represents the resentment and conservatism older Latina women feel at the hands of tradition; Latin tradition favors the old over the young, providing them with a young caretaker who must give up their freedom for the sake of their elders. Mama Elena becomes a symbol for the constrictive nature of Latin society, and the enforcement of gender roles upon those who might not want them.
This novel is full of magical realism, where the supernatural is taken in stride as part of everyday life by the characters of the novel. In this case, Tita has the ability to communicate the thoughts and feelings that she experiences while cooking and transmit them to those who eat her dishes. For example, her lust for Pedro is transmitted to her older sister Gertrudis through a quail dish, leaving Gertrudis to sleep with a revolutionary soldier in her erotic need. Here, the dishes are Tita’s way of expressing herself, because she is literally allowed no other avenue to convey her thoughts and feelings. This is how Tita is able to communicate her suppressed self; she loves Pedro, but society prevents her from showing it except through her food.
The power of food as a conduit for emotional expression plays into Tryer’s position that Tita’s cooking becomes her voice in a world that leaves her voiceless. At one point, Tita says of one of her dishes, “It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present” (Esquivel 7). Here, Tita notes the importance of sensory experience of things we have created to be a part of ourselves; the experience of consuming this food helps to conjure up the time in which it was made, and by extension the emotions of the person making it. Even Gertrudis links food to her memories and her past: “Gertrudis got on her horse and rode away. She wasn't riding alone--she carried her childhood beside her, in the cream fritters she had enclosed in a jar in her saddlebag” (Esquivel 145). The author makes clear the importance of food as a way for otherwise voiceless women to enact their own desires, whether through the expression of lust or passion or more.
In conclusion, Tryer is accurate in her assessment that Tita uses food as a way to give herself a voice in a patriarchal world that restricts it. In order to find some semblance of peace in her life, Tita learns to cook; while cooking itself is sometimes considered another way patriarchal society keeps women from having agency, forcing them to do hard labor with little reward, Tita finds her cooking to be a way to express herself. For Tita, food is closely tied to her identity – she was born in the kitchen, and much of her life knowledge is “based on the kitchen” (Esquivel 5). To that end, her own means of agency is through these dishes. The subtitle of Like Water for Chocolate is “A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies,” illustrating the importance of food to the narrative of the novel, and to Tita’s character. Each chapter is prefaced with a recipe for a Mexican dish, linking that dish to the event in Tita’s life that is being documented in the book. To that end, food is inextricably linked to Tita’s quest for freedom to fulfill her aspirations.
Works Cited
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. Perfection Learning, 1995. Print.
