Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel (1989)
“A Mexican woman's repressed love is so powerful it literally bleeds into her cooking, making everyone who eats her food feel exactly what she feels.”
Character Analysis
Born in the kitchen, raised in the kitchen, destined by tradition to die in the kitchen — but she remakes the kitchen's meaning from prison to artistic medium to finally the site of her liberation. Tita is not a rebel by temperament; she is made into one by a system that leaves her no other option. Her extraordinary magical gift — emotions transmitted through food — is not a compensation for her captivity but a consequence of it. All that suppressed feeling had to go somewhere. Her tragedy and her triumph are the same thing.
Kitchen-centered, precise about materials and quantities, lyrical when emotional. Her speech is conditional and hedged — a lifetime of suppression. Her most direct expressions are in action, not words.