La fem ir shell

Isolation

Patriarchy eliminates any risk of solidarity: the fascism of this frame ensures damning lonliness

Surviving Baenglish 12. . N.p., Web. 28 July 2013, review of The Chronicles of a Death Foretold: Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Marquez seems to provide an alternative to the nonsensical violence through the characters of his important women who become the only characters in the novel who make a conscious effort to stop this senseless violence. Clotilde Armenta urges the twins to halt the murder when Santiago passes by her tea-shop –“For the love of God, leave him for later, if only out of respect for his grace the bishop.” .When she sees Bedoya, she asks him to warn Santiago; she also informs the Bishop and the civic authorities. She even makes a physical intervention in holding Pedro Vicario by the collar to prevent the murder. Santiago’s mother closes the door thinking he is already inside so as to prevent the occurrence of the murder. Maria Cervantes is not present at the site of murder. Clotilde’s lamentation about the solitariness of women in the world is thus a critique of the socio-economic system wherein a women’s position denies her any agency and makes resistance to mindless violence and exploitation very difficult for them. Even in the responses of guilt to the collective complicity in the murder, women’s responses are most extreme. Hortensia Borte, ‘whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that were bloody as yet’ was so disturbed by the whole experience that she was in a state of nervous breakdown and one day,  “unable to take in any longer, she ran out naked into the street.” Santiago’s fiancée, ran away ‘out of spite’ with a lieutenant of the border patrol, who then ‘prostituted her amongst the rubber workers of Vicada’. Aura Villeras, the mid-wife suffers a severe bladder spasm. It is hence a comment on how women and women’s body are always the worst and very often amongst the most vulnerable victims in situations of conflict and violence.  Another significant aspect is the novel’s end with the heart warming image of Santiago Nasser calling out to the narrator’s aunt Wenefrida Marquez, (another woman character) “They’ve killed me, Wene child” – which, despite its danger of reinstating stereotypes of the feminine as empathetic and loving, does serve an enduring image of human warmth and love, which cannot be subdued by this violence.

Marquez’s representation of prostitution and his characterization of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes and her ‘House of Mercy’ is another instance of Marquez’s gender politics as being sympathetic and critical of the exploitation of women. Through her character, Marquez inverses the dominant stereotypes associated with women and prostitution which lead to their further marginalization. The name Maria Alexandria Cervantes in its connotation itself is subversive in nature. Maria stands for Virgin Mary, her middle name is a reference to Alexandria, the heart of knowledge and learning in Egypt and Cervantes is the famous Spanish writer.  Maria Cervantes is accorded an extraordinary status in the novel, and she is celebrated for her sexual experience and knowledge, she takes the role of a mentor figure in the narrative – to quote the narrator,“I was recovering…….in the apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina.” The Latin American assertion of patriarchy is a different experience in this respect where sexual pleasure and gratification is not seen as a degenerative experience. Under the indigenous native culture, sexuality is not seen as something to be repressed but as something to be fulfilled. In fact even Church authorities largely followed the crown (and St Augustine) and accepted prostitution as a necessary evil. Also Catholicism was more tolerant to prostitution; in fact this tolerance was one of Martin Luther’s criticism of Catholicism during the Reformation period. Prostitution was generally not criminalized in Latin America until the nineteenth century. However, as in Catholic Europe authorities attempted to encourage women to change their ways by opening up asylums for repentant prostitutes and ‘fallen’ women and there were attempts at regulation. Anne M Hayes in ‘Female Prostitution in Costa Rica: a historical perspective 1880-1930’, argues that such regulation systems creates the stigma associated with prostitution working along the Foucauldian logic that explains stigma as a political construct. The stigmatization of prostitution came in part also from the implicit sanction by Catholic tradition of a double standard. While prohibition theoretically rejects extra-marital sex for both sexes, regulation explicitly acknowledges a double standard. While Evangelical Protestantism preached abstention of males from extra-marital sex, Catholic societies essentially gave men a license to roam while dividing women into faithful wives and stigmatized public women.  Also prostitution was also rooted in an exploitation of women under vulnerable economic situations. To quote Hayes, “sexual commerce per say does not promote oppressive values of capitalist patriarchy, rather it is the cultural and legal production of a marginalized, degraded prostitution that ensures its oppressive characteristics, at the same time acting to limit the “subversive potential” that might attend a decriminalized culturally legitimized form of sexual commerce.”[5] In his novel, Marquez allows for this ‘subversive potential’ of prostitution. There is an enigma build Maria Cervantes’ character in her power over men, especially young men and she is representative of a fecundity and profusion of life in the native Latin American culture – “saddest thing in life is to have an empty bed”. Marquez thus creates an extra-ordinary women out of the most exploited and ‘stigmatized’ women. The narrator is also shown to have a special bonding with Maria Cervantes, reflective of Marquez’s close companionship with prostitutes, the immense time spend by him in brothels and thereby his empathy and understanding to their vulnerability and exploitation.

Solitude is a central concept to Marquez’s expression and experience of Latin America – a quality which is a consequence of not being understood by others. This loneliness in Marquez’s characters is integral to his politics and in this novel, his women characters embody this loneliness. Clotilde as the lone individual actively trying to stop the murder of Santiago fails to understand the indifference, the unwillingness of the community, especially men to act to prevent the murder. She has a very crucial presence in the novel. Maria Cervantes provided succor to many men, but is lonely in her position and contradictory role in society. Angela Vicario also suffers from a loneliness which comes from her being a victim of a very decadent and regressive social code. Their loneliness thus becomes a political statement by them on the society and its hypocrisy of social norms and its exploitative and unjust economic system.