Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water For Chocolate tells the story of Tita De La Garza, the youngest daughter of Mama Elena. She is protagonist of the story who strives for love, freedom, and individuality while Mama Elena is the chief-antagonist, who stands as the prime opposition to the fulfillment of these goals. This mother-daughter relationship is filled with difficulty from the start, when Tita is brought into the world too soon after her father's sudden death. Mama Elena is the opposite of a nurturer, never producing any bond with Tita. Tita develops a relationship with food that gives her the power to nurture and give outlet to her emotions.
As with most literary pairings, Tita and Mama Elena share a central characteristic that defines both their individual struggles and their conflict with each other. It showed that Mama Elena herself suffered the pains of lost love is an important part to Tita's deprivation. The reaction of each woman to her difficulty helps describe their differing characters. Whereas Mama Elena lets the loss of love turn her into a sinister and domineering mother, Tita, while obeying her mother's command, engages in a lifelong struggle for love, which she eventually wins through the strength of spirit.
Each installment features a recipe to start each chapter. The major affairs of these recipes are linked throughout the retelling of the story by Esperanza, who is the niece of Tita. She opens the novel by informing the reader about the birth of Tita, who has born in the kitchen while crying in the flood of tears which would foreshadows the grief and desire that will pass through her later life. Tita also has spent most of her childhood in kitchen, because her mother, Mama Elena gave her to Nacha, who is a house cook. Outside the kitchen, Tita follows the difficult routine that her mother, Mama Elena sets for her daughters, which is full of food preparation, cleaning, and prayer.
One day the routine got interrupted by Pedro Marquiz arrived at their house to ask for Tita's hands, but Mama Elena refuses this marriage proposal. Instead, she offered the hand of her second daughter, Rosaura because of their family tradition, which required for the youngest daughter to stay unmarried. So that, she can take care of her parents in their old age. Tita at the other hand is disappointed by this. Since, she is a young woman, she rebels against the family tradition that limits her to a living without love.
In addition to serving as a central organizing principle, food is often a direct cause of physical and emotional unrest, and serves as a medium through which emotions can be transmitted. Tita prepares most of the food in the novel, and she uses food to express her emotions because her lowly cultural status affords her no other opportunity to do so. In the wedding of Pedro and Rosaura takes place, which would also marks the first example when Tita misguidedly pours her emotions into the food she prepares. This results into the nonstop sickness and a terrible sense of loss among the wedding guests, which has been ultimately transformed from an act of emotional aggression that Tita has endured into an act of social aggression. But the alteration of Tita's emotions into the food does not end after the fateful wedding of her sister. As a matter of fact, the next victim has happened to be her own sister, Gertrudis. The food arouses her in an insatiable sexual desire. This feel of sensation later invokes her to escape De La Garza family and its tradition; something that Tita has not been able to done. Despite the fact that Tita can only express her sexuality within the household sphere, Gertrudis is able to surpass these limitations without a second thought. Her disappearance can be seen as a success, in which she discards the ideas of social modesty in order follow her uncontrolled wishes. Fortunately after this incident, a surprising happiness comes to Tita's life with the birth of her nephew Roberto, the son of Rosaura and Pedro. Tita eventually takes the liability of nursing his nephew, but once she offers her breast milk, she find out that she is miraculously full with milk and is able to nourish Roberto. Pedro then later discovers this secret, but he helps her to hide this secret from the rest of the family, by which means he tries to increase the illicit relationship between the two yet further. This connection also let into the communication between Tita and Pedro, where she let him observe her breast, which is an attraction in their erotic relationship and is expressed like having "Tita being transformed from chaste to experience” without the advantage of any physical contact; Tita has been able to produces milk as though she had been pregnant, can be infer as one of the magical realism of this novel. These incidents suggest a simultaneous commodification and uncontrollability of emotion; food is a potent force in the world of the novel, and it lets Tita assert her identity.
Images of heat and fire permeate the novel as expressions of intense emotion. Heat is the catalyst that causes food to undergo chemical change. In the cooking, heat is a force to be used precisely; the novel's title phrase "like water for chocolate," refers to the fact that water must be brought to the point of boiling several times before it is ready to be used in the making of hot chocolate. However, the heat of emotions cannot be so controlled. Heat is a symbol for desire and physical love throughout the text: in Gertrudis' flight from the ranch; Pedro's lustful gazing at Tita in the shower; and the post-coital death of Pedro, among many other instances. The inner fire of the individual constitutes an important theme in the novel, and much of Tita's struggle centers on cultivating this fire. These uses of fire point toward a duality in its symbolism, as a source of strength and a force of destruction. The coupling of death and desire that occurs when the love between Tita and Pedro is freed epitomizes this duality.
In Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel, the writer, extends the religious-mythical themes of magic realism to the everyday world of the domestic realm of a female-dominated household. She elevates this story of women and one woman in particular, to such proportions. This strategy leads the reader to explore the feminist properties of Like Water For Chocolate, which are evident in the depictions of Tita's struggle to gain independence and develop her identity, and also in the fact that this struggle is depicted at all. In creating this female-centered cast of characters, Laura imagines a world in which men are physically present only occasionally, though the legacy of sexism and the confinement of women to the domestic sphere persist. She does not offer her readers the vision of a utopian sisterhood, but rather insight into the way women are restricted by standards of societal propriety perpetuated by other women.