In the novel, Like Water for Chocolate, author Laura Esquivel tackles on a subject that is considered taboo in many cultures: Sexual passion, and the embrace of it. For many of us, as children especially, we are taught to turn off our “passion button.” We are trained to react to and treat such feelings as a base and instinctive nature that, by all means, must be kept in check; for it not only gets in the way of our good sense, but it creates the perception that we are lower people because it is only animals that give way to their instincts. Esquivel knows all too well this argument. She laughs it off and sets out to gives a better and reasonable assessment in her book. Through the variant metaphors of food Esquivel captures the quintessence of love and sexual desire.
From the way the book begins, we see that protagonist, Tita, will struggle to find her way: She is forced out of her mother’s stomach by the smell of onions, “making a premature entrance into this world,” she is denied love and marriage and is instead doomed to care for her abusive and repressive mother until she dies. And so her only way to express her passion is through the making of scrumptious food. “The joy of living is wrapped up in the delights of food for Tita.” It is how she “comprehends the outside world.” The amazing aromas and sounds bring her satisfaction but this is not enough, for the contact she makes with a man awakens her to a totally whole new set of feelings. Nevertheless, when she attempts to exploit them, she’s stopped in her tracts. She suffers emotionally and physically for the longest time as a consequence.
This leads her to question herself, whether this whole time she had based her life on the wrong premise — that she had assumed wrongly from the outset. What’s more, Tita struggles on her alone. It seems her sister Rosaura, and certainly her mother didn’t understand or know what she was feeling. So, she looks around for guidance, but Nacha is already dead and Gertrudis is nowhere to be found. She resists her mother to the best of her ability but she is questioning her efforts as she does it for she is unsure of herself; maybe the sexual cravings she bears for Pedro are abnormal. But disregarding them gives her a gnawing pain. The answer comes to Tita when she is in the care for doctor. He not only heals her physically but emotionally as well when he says 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 an experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help…the oxygen would come from the breath of a person [we] love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches…If one doesn’t find out in time what will set off these explosion, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted. (115-116)
This is Esquivel’s rebuttal to all who preach against, attempt to doubt, and deny their passions.
Don’t get me wrong. I agree that too much passion can make for a shallow and empty person, but I also hold the view that too little of it makes for a dull and rigid existence. Esquivel demonstrates this to us through each of the three sisters. We see Gertrudis become so charged with sexual passion at such a young and tender age that she catches the showering shed on fire. She runs away breaking all the rules and the expected norms. Yet, after she runs away for a few years to chase her sexual passion, upon her return, we discover that she lacks basic skills and can’t even make syrup for the fritters. This demonstrates that she wasn’t a measured and balanced person; she missed out on critical side of life. Then we see Rosaura—who for the sake of propriety constrains and ignores her passion, but suffers in the end for it, as she swells up in girth, swelling up in gas and eventually dying from chronic dyspepsia. Finally there is Tita—she is the sister who represents a balance between the two that I have aforementioned, for she shows discipline, and respect. She gives some credence to the ideas of society, as she obeys her mother carefully, staying in the kitchen cooking and working her butt off to please those around her. I mean, she even constricts her love for Pedro. Indeed, all these are good qualities to possess; they make for a cultured person, however they do not make for the complete person. This is what Esquivel points to in the end, when, finally, Tita makes love to Pedro, experiences the most intense climax in her life, and realizes “she doesn’t want to die.” She wants more, she “wants to experience these emotions more times.” This, to Esquivel, is what it means to live and be alive.
