Essays on Like Water For Chocolate

“Like Water for Chocolate” is a drama and a romance about the lives of women in Mexico The following quote is from chapter six titled “A Recipe for Making Match and it describes the way Mexican women thought about love, about passion and about life in general and everything was connecting with cooking. “My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this ...

The best recipe for a dish to be delicious is preparing it with love – Tita, the heroine of “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel, is sure. That is certainly the formula Esquivel resorts to creating her novel, where love is a key ingredient, and the food for thought produced by the book is savory, hot and rich. “Tita remembered that Nacha had always said that when people argue while preparing tamales, the tamales won’t get cooked. They can be heated day after day and still stay raw, because the tamales are angry. In a case like that, ...

Published in 1889, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate is set in revolutionary Mexico of the early twentieth century. At that time, society and the family institution exercised an authoritative and oppressive control on women’s activities and expression; in fact, such control had existed since colonial times, Up until recent times, women had been playing a subservient role from which even in the twenty-first century they are still struggling to break themselves free. Not only were women denied participation in society and politics as individuals with their own voice and identity, but they were mostly confined to ...

Introduction

This novel revolves around kitchen, and its contextual interpretation is in the Mexican society. The recipe was a major element to the Mexican kitchen, and it signified the life endeavors in this society. The thesis of this essay is a discussion on various attributes of the Mexican kitchen through the ailing Mama Elena, her three daughters and the surrounding love inferno between Tita and Pedro in the contextual ranch setup. 1. What was the general interpretation of this novel, and what impacts did it have? ( what conversations did it start or what understanding did the book generally bring to ...

The debut book by Laura Esquivel under the name "Like Water for Chocolate" was published first in 1989 and met an unexpected success among the readers and the critics. The success was so big that in 1992 Alfonso Arau, a talented Mexican director, has shot a movie under the same name based on this book. The movie was also a success and brought much fame to a director and the actors making it one of the most recognized non-American films in Hollywood. Moreover, the book itself and the popularity of it made the world publishers reconsider their cooperation with female writers and started ...

Introduction

The fact that literary works are aimed at mirroring the reality of the human society whether local or global means that there will be a point of convergence among them. The mirroring of the reality of the human society is informed by the need to facilitate and sustain debates that will lead to the finding of solutions to better human society and life. The converse is also true that literary artistes have their works colored by personal, ideological and sociocultural settings and because of this, literary works will diverge on structure, ideas and themes. The case is exemplified by the ...

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, ...