Living оnly оne Love Story even after the Death

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Living оnly оne Love Story even after the Death

The love story of Pedro and Tita actually begins one year before the time of the discourse, on Christmas as well (this big Christian holiday is functioning here with all its symbolism, at the beginning, at the birth) with the dialogue between Tita and Pedro where he is asking for an answer to his love. When she is asking for some time to think, he finishes with categorical words: I can’t, I want immediate answer: love is not to be thought about, it is felt or it is not felt. I am a man who talks little, but my words are strong. I swear to you that I will love you all my life. And you? Do you feel the same for me? Tita answers affirmatively and thus the font for future obstructed, unhappy love is prepared.
5. Laura Eskivel in opposition to the dominant, cruel, egoistic mother defines the attributes of the cook Nacha as a substitute for mother (Nacha, for whom there were no secrets in the kitchen, and knew many other things, that is of no importance now, immediately offered herself to care for Tita’s eating. She regarded herself as most fitting to look after child eating, although she has never been married or had children. She was illiterate, but there was no one equal to her kitchen skills. So, Nacha became her friend in the playtime). In the characterization of Nacha we read the attributes of the so called a man from the people who has pretty idyllic origin in the novel, generally. Such are the portraits of the servants in Walter Scot, Saveljic in Puschkin, in Dickens, in the French novel (from the life of Maupassant to Fransois in Proust) and all the portraits of Overanians and Bretonians who carry with them the folk wisdom and the idyll of the local. The man from the people figures in the novel as a carrier of the wise relation to the life and death, that is lost among the ruling class. With his character is often linked the specific interpretation of food, drink, love, and birth. He is a carrier of the permanently productive labor. (Bakhtin, 1989:363) Nacha, the queen of the kitchen, in her motherly love towards Tita is situated in opposition to the portrait of mother. She will saving for months to buy Tita’s favorite toy. Nacha who dies in the 2 chapter with the worn photography of her ex fiancé in her hands, with her feminine attributes of the misfortune is Tita’s double. But the main attribute of Nacha is that although she is dead after the second chapter, she will keep communicating with Tita participating in the amalgam of the fantastic by which the discourse is adorned non-imposingly and calmly, magically compensating the absence of Tita’s mother in all the deciding moments. Through this line of the fantastic, the dead Nacha, along the text, will get her double, also dead, the grandmother of John, the unusual Indian woman who as in a mirror reflects the attributes of Nacha. Above all, the maternal care for her in one of the crucial moments. It is interesting to be noted that in the novel is used one of the features of the Latin-American prose (which does not have an exclusive right to it) – the characters of the passed people to participate in the events. But L. Eskivel in this position has put only the women characters: Nacha, John’s grandmother and mother Elena.
6. An important element in the novel is that called malady of the pain (Julia Kristeva, writing on Margaret Duras, employs this syntagma as a general feature of Duras prose) related above all to the portrait of Tita, and to the general features of the discourse that thinks feminine by selecting, as well. (In the world of the novel’s characters, the female portraits are dominant. In the Donna Elena’s house live: herself, the three daughters, the female servants whose position in the household is emphasized and they overpass the male servants in the established matriarchal hierarchy.) The husband of Donna Elena is being mentioned in past tense, in the presence of the discourse he is dead, but not in the same way as Nacha. The son of Rosaura and Pedro died as a baby. (These two form the man frame in the center of which Pedro supremely exists. The absent fatherly figure and the short-lived existence of the adopted son will fix Tita’s love much more intensively.) Pedro and John make the pair that has to suggest the double-genders of the world. We have respect for the rebels, as male element, who are close to Gertrude, but their presence overloads the story and contributes in the historic-political allusion which is the most-melodramatic and weakest point in the novel. Through Tita’s fixation, Laura Eskivel suggests the female inferiority and the female exclusive right for suffering because of unhappy love. Or more precisely said the pair Tita/Pedro illustrates the distinction pointed by Ortega y Gasset: “ The exclusivity of the man is in his doing, and of the woman in her being; or otherwise said: the value of the man is that he does, the value of the woman is that she is.” (Ortega y Gaset, 1989:23) Pedro is really acting. He agrees to get married with Tita’s sister. Leaded by rational motifs he will resolve his problem in manly manner – at all costs to be close to the woman he loves, deceiving the mother in law who will follow the lovers attentively. Scared that Tita might get married, he will almost rape her and aggressively will take everything from the woman who, although in love with him, has a right to marriage and family, as he himself has already accomplished with Rosaura.
Tita, (for whom the laughing was a way of crying), is the passive, suffering principal. She will diagnose her disease intuitively as a pain similar to the hunger, but as more severe, irreplaceable void and thus she substitutes the realms of the abdomen/food with the realms of the uterus/erotic.
Tita will materialize her pain in the blanket knitted by her on the night her unhappiness reaches the highest point, when she hears the news about the engagement of Pedro and her sister. (In her conscious pecks the thought that it is wrong for her to love her sister husband to be, in contrast to her sister, Rosaura, who does not have any moral scruples, as their third sister Gertrude will correctly notice, and no guilt on her conscience that she is stealing what belongs to Tita. By that, Laura Eskivel emphasizes the outstanding attributes Tita possesses in this twist of the destiny.)

AuthorJadranka Vladova
2018-08-21T17:24:05+00:00 April 1st, 1998|Categories: Reviews, Blesok no. 02, Literature|0 Comments