Like Water For Chocolate By Laura Esquivel

779 Words2 Pages

Bruce Lee once said that “love is like a friendship caught on fire.” In any setting, the temperature people feel can dictate the mood. Oftentimes, heat is exciting, while coldness is somber. Authors commonly use heat in novels about cooking because heat plays a major role in the kitchen. That’s why in Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, the author uses temperature to show the passion and love in the story, and the theme that true love cannot be denied. In the novel, Laura Esquivel uses heat to convey the character’s passion. When the main character of the novel, Tita, makes rose quail, her sister Gertrudis and her lover Pedro are deeply affected. Tita puts her passion into the dish, Gertrudis responds to it, and Pedro picks it up. That was the way Tita, “entered Pedro’s body, hot, voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous” (Esquivel ch.3). The author’s choice to use words like hot and sensuously shows Tita’s sexual desire. It is also important that Gertrudis feels the heat and passion from Tita’s food because Gertrudis is symbolic …show more content…

Requited love makes them feel warm, and unreciprocated love gives their whole body chills. When Tita learns that her love, Pedro, is going to marry her sister, she “felt her body fill with a wintry chill: in one sharp, quick blast she was so cold and dry her cheeks burned and turned red, red as the apples beside her” (Esquivel ch.1). Once again, the use of temperature effectively expresses the characters’ emotions. Tita’s icy feeling shows her feelings of rejection and sadness. Later on, she worries that, “Gertrudis was cold, as cold as she was, but then she decided, no, she wasn't. Most likely she was near a fire, in the arms of her man, and that would surely warm her” (Esquivel ch.3). She knows that Gertrudis cannot be cold because her love for for her man is returned. This shows the reader the importance of returned love, and shows that Tita is still madly in love with

More about Like Water For Chocolate By Laura Esquivel

Open Document