Like Water For Choclate Vs House Of Spirits
Word Count: 1386
Influence of Surroundings on Allende’s and Esquivel’s
“The House of Spirits” and “Like Water for Chocolate”
Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, as two aspiring female intellectuals raised in an environment characteristic of the Latin American XX century, share much of the ideology that is seen projected in their works, due to the similar action of the social surroundings in the shaping and defining of their identities. As a consequence of their similar upbringings, the similarities in their place they adopted in respect to society, their works show an impressive amount of similarity; from the set of social values present in each of the novel’s social setting, to the perception of women in society, to the integration of the political-military events into their works, to the basic theme of struggle between forces that is constant through their stories, and to even the writing style and the devices they use to achieve their purpose.
The social setting in both “The House of Spirits” and “Like Water for Chocolate” is characterized by the heavy presence of a rousseauistic ideology that confines women to the dull sphere of the domestic and spousal life:
Education, for (most of) the women in both novels, sets as a goal to provide only the knowledge they will need to become good wives and housekeepers. Indeed, it is only this argument that convinces Rosaura to send her daughter to school, for in her view, the only acceptable reason to allow education to her daughter is to make her more entertaining to the guests, and let her fill her own old age with the...
View Full Essay