Like Water For Chocolate Literary Analysis

Throughout lifetime, human’s definiton of love has always been obscure. In Like Water for Chocolate, Esquivel portrays love in many forms; her ideas often being ambiguous. Based in Mexico, the novel explores the life of a young girl named Tita, who faces the challenges of family traditions. Throughout the book Tita seems to experience love in the untraditional sense and also in the form of cooking; often using that as a way to communicate her love. Esquivel uses magical realism and inanimate objects to portray how love can both come and be ignited from different sources.

The symbol of breastfeeding is used to show how unconventinal love doesn’t have to be bloodborne; it’s all in the passion you carry with you. This is shown in the book when

It’s as if you should listen to it; let it guide you. Consequently, this is what Gertrudis did. She listened to it, and she followed through with her emotions. When Gertrudis tasted the sauce, “it was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce” (Esquivel 52). You could say that the emotions Tita had within her were cooked into the sauce, which I mentioned earlier when I said she used cooking as a way to communicate her love. Except she communicated it wrong, because the receiver on the other side wasn’t ultimately Pedro, but Gertrudis. The sauce changed everything Gertrudis seemed to be: “The delicacy of her face, the perfection of her pure virginal body contrasted with the passion, the lust, that leapt from her eyes, from her every pore” (Esquivel 55). In this case the source of love (or lust) came from the food Tita cooked with clear passion. And it seemed to work out great for Gertrudis in the end, who ultimately got to experience life for what it was and experience what true love meant; all of this because of the rose petal