DOMESTICITY: SEED FOR REBELLION IN ESQUIVEL’S ‘LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE’- A CASE IN POINT

Author Name: Smriti Ladsaria

Volume/Issue: 02/10

Country: India

DOI NO.: 08.2020-25662434 DOI Link: https://www.doi-ds.org/doilink/04.2022-57921958/UIJIR

Affiliation:

PhD Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

ABSTRACT

The paper will argue that Esquivel’s characters demonstrate that domesticity does not always signify domestication. Esquivel perceptively filters the combative domesticity of the ‘soldaderas,’ who played an important role in the Revolution into her narrative. During the revolution, the soldaderas received a salary from the male soldiers in exchange for providing domestic services, which included preparing food, washing clothes, and sexual intercourse. The soldadera’s role was considered so critical to military success that some of them were designated coronels in the army. The soldaderas’ ‘female’ domesticity enabled them to carve out a visible space for themselves within the ‘male’ structure of the military. Similarly, in Esquivel’s novel, domesticity, instead of being an obstacle for resistance, becomes a fertile ground for seeding rebellion against the prescribed performance of femininity. The dictates of normative expectations confined women to the domestic space. Inside the home, Esquivel’s women protagonists cook, clean, bear children, take on familial care, but instead of being passive receptors of male sexuality they become desiring women without moving outside the domestic space. The chosen weapons for the rebellious women in the novel are food recipes. Every dish they prepare is a tactical element of their mutinous strategy. The expression ‘Como Agua Para Chocolate’ translated as Like Water for Chocolate is a colloquial Mexican expression used when the water is boiling during the preparation of a traditional Mexican drink, hot chocolate. Likewise, a metaphor for a person who has reached its boiling point, is infuriated and angry, a point of no return and, or experiencing carnal agitation and uncontrollable excitement. Laura Esquivel’s bestseller ‘Como Agua Para Chocolate’ portrays through the women protagonists’ emotions and feelings of fury, rage, displeasure, contempt, resentment, tantrum, animosity, outrage, displeasure, resistance, defiance, disobedience, love, longing, craving, lust, yearning, hunger, passion, excitement, furore, rebellion among others as if like water for chocolate. The vehement displayed on the part of the women are result of discrimination and marginalization which Mexico as a society experienced.

Key words: domesticity, rebellion, kitchen, soldadas, women