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True Love In Laura Esquirel's Like Water For Chocolate

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Like Water for Chocolate
How far does one go when expressing their exquisite love for somebody else? Laura Esquirel tests love’s limits in her magical realistic novel Like Water for Chocolate. Set in Mexico during the Revolution, the book focuses on a teenage girl named Tita. She falls in love with a man named Pedro, even though he marries her sister, Rosaura. Esquirel uses magical realistic symbolism to display the hardships people have to go through when they are truly in love. In Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquirel uses the edible symbols of roses and a wedding cake to express Tita’s emotions, and to show how real true love is.
The symbol of the wedding cake shows the depression that Tita feels when her true love marries her sister. …show more content…

When Tita receives the roses from Pedro, she experiences a lot of emotions. Looking back at it while she is making the sauce, she remembers being “shaken as she was to get a bouquet of roses, and from Pedro besides” (Esquirel 47). The feelings she has represent her being deeply in love with Pedro. She is taken by surprise when he gives her the roses. When her family feasts on the sauce, more than anyone, her oldest sister Gertrudis is affected by the magical realism of the quail in rose petal sauce. Gertrudis “[begins] to feel an intense heat pulsing through her limbs” (Esquirel 51). It seems Gertrudis is the “medium” between Pedro and Tita. The sexual message is passed through Gertrudis’s conducting body. The love Tita feels for Pedro is stored in the rose petal sauce.
In the end, Tita eventually achieves her dream of making love to Pedro, and she is overfilled with joy. Her domain has always been the kitchen, because she was born in a kitchen, and she was raised by Nacha, a woman whose favorite activity was cooking. Tita began cooking when she was a little girl, and it is her passion. She stores all her emotions into her food. The roses and the wedding cake show that when someone is truly in love, they will express it no matter one. Esquirel shows that anyone can push love to its

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