Gender Roles In Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

Women have their place and men have theirs, break this and chaos ensues. Everything has its own place in every culture. In the Latino culture the core values throughout the society are honor and most importantly gender roles. Many people follow these values but some do not and the mixture creates turmoil throughout the community. Throughout the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold Gabriel Marquez uses characterization and symbolism to convey the idea that no matter how pure in intent you are or how precisely you follow the core values, family honor overpowers those actions.

The influence of gender roles throughout each society heavily impacts the actions of the people. Within the novella Marquez uses the actions of the characters to portray

The men are held to a looser standard than women are. Men are the breadwinners of the family and really what they say goes. They do not get looked down upon when they have multiple sex partners unlike women. Divina Flor, a housemaid was subjected at a young age to the gender role that is machismo when Santiago “attacked” her “The girl, as yet a bit untamed, seemed overwhelmed by the drive of her glands. Santiago Nasar grabbed her by the wrist when she came to take the empty mug from him. "The time has come for you to be tamed," he told her” (Marquez 5). Santiago telling her “the time has come for you to be tamed is a representation of how he asserted his machismo role. Santiago was the head of his household and took advantage of the male responsibility he had. Almost all of Santiago’s actions are symbolisms of how most men in the Latino community were viewed and how they acted. He was not punished for abusing that power that he had nor was it a possibility. Another person that Marquez uses to symbolize machismo is Ibrahim Nasar, Santiago’s father. He was a man who was married while at the same time also having an affair with a woman named Victoria Guzman “She'd been seduced by Ibrahim Nasar in the fullness of her adolescence. She'd made love to him in

Ibrahim Nassar was the male example that Santiago had growing up. The extent of Santiago’s machismo came from his father’s example of machismo. Marquez includes the few references to Ibrahim Nassar to help the reader connect that the head of the community influences the actions of all of those to come. If Santiago strayed from the ideals that his father exposed him to he would be outcasted from the society. The female from of machismo is marianismo. Marianismo is the idea that a woman is there to compliment a man. Her main role is to bare children. Sex when in regards to the women is used to make babies not for pleasure, if you break this you are no longer pure. Victoria Guzman the woman that was involved with Ibrahim Nassar was not considered to be a marianismo following women, but there were women that were worse than her. Victoria was a middle man in the society, she slept with Ibrahim and had other relations that created her daughter Divina Flor. Victoria wanted the marianismo life for her daughter Divina, which is why she hated Santiago. Angela Vicario broke a few of these “laws” and as a result of that was returned after her wedding “ Angela Vicario, the beautiful girl who'd gotten married the day before, had been