Characters Discussed
Tita de la Garza
Tita de la Garza (TEE-tah), the youngest daughter in a ranch-owning family. The rules of her tradition-bound family dictate that the youngest daughter remain single and care for her mother until the latter dies; therefore, Tita grows up in the kitchen, learning about life and cooking from the ranch’s Indian cook, Nacha. Her childhood sweetheart marries her older sister Rosaura so that he can be near Tita, but Tita’s vengeful mother regularly punishes the lovers for their clandestine meetings. Tita rebels against her fate through the marvelous recipes she prepares, which provoke magical reactions. After the deaths of her mother and her sister, Tita and her lover, Pedro, are united in a passion so intense that they perish in its blaze. Tita is immortalized in her diary and recipe book, in which she had written all of her recipes and the events surrounding their preparation.
Mamá Elena
Mamá Elena (mah-MAH eh-LEH-nah), Tita’s tyrannical mother, widowed with three daughters. Her attempts to prevent an adulterous relationship between Tita and Pedro occupy much of Mamá Elena’s destructive attention. Fearless in her cruelty, she even intimidates the captain of a marauding band of revolutionary soldiers, thus preserving the ranch’s inhabitants and livestock from attack. Later, she becomes paralyzed from a spinal injury she suffers when a group of bandits try unsuccessfully to rape her. She is then forced to rely on Tita to cook for her. Needlessly suspicious that Tita is poisoning her food, Mamá Elena soon dies from an overdose of the emetic she takes to counteract the food’s supposed noxious effects. She continues to plague Tita and Pedro from beyond the grave. After Mamá Elena’s death, Tita discovers her secret past: Her mother had enjoyed an affair with a mulatto man who fathered Tita’s sister Gertrudis. When her family discovered Mamá Elena’s relationship, they forced her into marriage with a white man and had the mulatto murdered when the affair continued.
Rosaura de la Garza
Rosaura de la Garza (rroh-SOW-rah), Tita’s older sister, who marries Pedro Muzquiz at Mamá Elena’s suggestion. Rosaura lives her life according to her mother’s dictates, attempting to maintain the respect and admiration of the cream of society. Jealous of his love for Tita, Rosaura tries unsuccessfully to impress Pedro with her cooking. Rosaura cannot even produce milk to nurse her son and daughter. Her attitude toward cooking and her knowledge of Pedro’s undying love for Tita are manifested in Rosaura’s obesity and flatulence.
Gertrudis de la Garza
Gertrudis de la Garza (hehr-TREW-dees), Tita’s rebellious older sister, fathered by Mamá Elena’s mulatto lover. Loyal and sympathetic to her sister Tita and a great fan of her sister’s culinary talents, Gertrudis is so overwhelmed by passion after eating one of Tita’s special dishes that she abandons her family and rides off on horseback with a revolutionary soldier. Unable to satisfy her lust with him, she tames her sexual appetite as a prostitute until the soldier returns and marries her. She lives happily, eventually becomes a general in the revolutionary army, and visits the ranch with her soldiers after Mamá Elena’s death.
Pedro Muzquiz
Pedro Muzquiz (mews-KEES), Tita’s childhood sweetheart, who marries her sister Rosaura to remain near Tita. After her death, Mamá Elena whirls into him in the form of a firecracker, nearly burning him to death, but he recovers under Tita’s care. When Rosaura dies, he is finally freely united with Tita, and his ecstasy is so overwhelming that it proves fatal.
John Brown
John Brown, the de la Garzas’ family doctor...
(This entire section contains 762 words.)
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from Texas. A widower with a young son, he visits the de la Garza ranch when Rosaura gives birth. He admires Tita. When she suffers a nervous breakdown, he rescues her and cares for her in his home and later proposes marriage. They become engaged, but when Tita breaks off the relationship, he bows out amicably. He later returns to the ranch happily to celebrate his son Alex’s marriage to Rosaura’s daughter Esperanza.
Nacha
Nacha (NAH-chah), the de la Garzas’ Indian cook. One of a long line of expert cooks, she rears Tita from childhood in the kitchen and teaches her secrets to Tita, even whispering recipes to her from beyond the grave. On the day of Rosaura’s wedding, after tasting the wedding cake icing in which Tita has shed tears, Nacha dies, overcome with grief and loneliness for the fiancé whom Mamá Elena had forbidden her to marry.
The Characters
Tita de la Garza, the youngest daughter in her family, wins the reader’s sympathy immediately as the victim of the repressive family tradition that prevents her from marrying. Like most of the characters in the novel, in certain respects she resembles someone from a fairy tale. Beautiful, desirous of pleasing her mother, enormously talented, but cursed by an unfortunate destiny and a wicked mother and sister, Tita can be likened to Cinderella. She propels the novel’s action forward through the effects produced by the dishes she prepares. Tita represents a model of female liberation because, rather than rejecting the domestic space that confines her, she employs the resources of the kitchen to obtain self-fulfillment.
Mamá Elena, Tita’s cruel mother, like most female characters in the novel, is characterized largely by her relationship to the activities of the kitchen. In contrast to Tita, who uses ingredients creatively and generously, Mamá Elena displays and demands rigid obedience to rules in cooking. She is the principal villain, notorious for loving any destructive culinary activity, such as dividing, dismembering, detaching, or carving. She inspires a modicum of sympathy after her death, when Tita discovers Mamá Elena’s secret: Before and during marriage, she had enjoyed an affair with a mulatto until her scandalized family had the lover murdered. Readers interpret her authoritarian ways as the tragic result of being so severely punished herself for defying repressive societal rules.
Rosaura, the unattractive and inept sister obsessed with keeping up appearances, resembles a fairy-tale wicked stepsister and thus gains virtually no sympathy from the reader. Diametrically opposed to Tita, she shows her lack of creativity in her fear of the kitchen. Her death is an act of poetic justice, punishment for unquestioning allegiance to societal norms.
Gertrudis, the rebellious, unfettered daughter of Mamá Elena and her mulatto lover, is depicted in stark contrast to Rosaura. She fully appreciates Tita’s talents and observes that an entire family history is contained in Tita’s recipes. She is the receptacle for the erotic response that one of Tita’s recipes provokes and is the embodiment of unbridled female freedom.
Nacha, the ranch’s Indian cook, serves as a kind of surrogate mother to Tita. She is the representative of a centuries-long tradition of culinary art that is transmitted only orally until Tita begins writing down her recipes. Through this character, Esquivel pays tribute to the contributions of Mexico’s indigenous female population.
Pedro Muzquiz, Tita’s lover and Rosaura’s husband, like all the male characters in the novel, remains relatively undeveloped. He exists principally as the object of Tita’s quest for romantic happiness and as the lens through which to admire Tita’s beauty and talent.
John Brown, the family doctor and Pedro’s rival for Tita’s affections, is a relatively bland stock character, as his name might suggest. His kindly presence serves to highlight Tita’s virtues and to introduce tension into Pedro and Tita’s love story.
Characters
Women take center stage in Esquivel's narrative. The three sisters—Rosaura, Gertrudis, and Tita—illustrate three distinct responses to societal norms and expectations. Rosaura adheres strictly to the rules, Gertrudis defies them completely, and Tita outwardly conforms while secretly rebelling. Their mother, Mama Elena, who once attempted to defy these norms in her youth, transforms into a cold-hearted tyrant, devoid of love. In contrast, the male characters are of little consequence.
Mama Elena emerges as the tragic figure in Esquivel's story. She serves as the villain in Tita's life, relegating her to the kitchen from birth, forbidding her to marry, and seemingly intent on crushing her every dream of love and happiness. Yet, Mama Elena is also a victim. Her punishments are both imaginative and harsh. For instance, when she detects a glimmer of joy in Tita's eyes during Roberto's baptism celebration (sparked by an innocent kitchen encounter with Pedro while nursing Roberto), Mama Elena devises the most severe punishment—sending Rosaura and her family to San Antonio. This not only deprives Tita of Pedro's company but also of the child she loves as her own. When this separation leads to the child's death, Mama Elena's reaction is to ban mourning: "We can't give in to sorrow, there's work to do. First work, then do as you please, except crying, do you hear?" Tita grows to despise her mother's arbitrary cruelty and relentless criticism, but she remains a dutiful daughter, even returning to the ranch to care for Mama Elena in her final days after being disowned. After Mama Elena's death, Tita uncovers her mother's hidden past. A secret bundle of letters reveals the love of her mother's life—a mulatto named Jose, father of Gertrudis—who was killed the night they planned to escape together. Forced into a loveless marriage with a man who later died upon learning the truth about Gertrudis, Mama Elena becomes a masculinized figure, feared by both family and servants. As Tita observes after watching her expertly slice a watermelon, "Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying, or dominating, Mama Elena was a pro." However, once Tita learns her mother's secret, she finds it within herself to mourn her passing: "Not for the castrating mother who had repressed Tita her entire life, but for the person who had lived a frustrated love. And she swore in front of Mama Elena's tomb that come what may, she would never renounce love."
In her 1993 interview with Loewenstein, Esquivel reveals that "Mama Elena transforms herself into a repressor because she herself was repressed; they did not let her follow her heart." Part of her severity with Tita undoubtedly stems from her awareness of the consequences of thwarted love. However, the irony lies in Mama Elena perpetuating the very tragedy she suffered by enforcing a rule that forces Tita to watch her sister marry the man she loves.
Mama Elena's daughters each mirror aspects of their mother in significant ways. According to Esquivel, Rosaura resembles her mother by adhering to societal norms and upholding traditions. Critic Maria Elena DeValdes notes that Rosaura tries to emulate her mother, invoking her mother's authority because she lacks her own. Rosaura seems to learn nothing from her loveless marriage, as she condemns her daughter Esperanza to the same fate imposed on Tita by Mama Elena. Having never experienced love herself, Rosaura may be unaware of the cruelty of such a fate. Her inability to manage food—evidenced by her death from flatulence and her son's death due to her ignorance in feeding him—symbolizes her lack of understanding about love, which food represents in this narrative.
Gertrudis, on the other hand, fares better by inheriting the passion of her mother's youth, a passion so long suppressed it is now dormant. Critics have noted that Gertrudis' fervent response and escape from the ranch's confines symbolize the unrestrained love between Pedro and Tita. After all, it was Tita's dish of love—quail in rose petal sauce, made from the roses Pedro gave her—that facilitated Gertrudis' escape. Society might attribute her passion and unconventionality to heredity, if only they knew. Nonetheless, neighbors are fascinated by her extraordinary tales of battle, her cigarette smoking, and her audacious polka dancing. Her androgynous lifestyle allows her to control her surroundings, including men like her husband Juan and the comically devoted Sergeant Trevino.
Tita, left behind, is trapped by a tradition she lacks the strength to defy. Zamudio-Taylor and Guiu, in their analysis, differentiate between voluntary and involuntary memory and note that conscious behavior in this book is characterized by duty and conservatism. Meanwhile, the potential for change and breaking from tradition emerges from the memory of love and a blind willingness to take risks. In the first half of the story, Tita occasionally acts on instinct, showing an inner strength that allows her to make decisive actions in small matters (such as swiftly killing quails to prevent their suffering). However, it is only through John's guidance away from the ranch that she learns that everyone has choices.
John teaches her to express her needs, and she credits him with showing her the path to freedom. As she places the porcelain doll in the Three Kings' Day Bread before baking, she is, for the first time, able to be honest about her desires. She reflects on how easy it is to make wishes as a child and how, "growing up, one realizes how many things one cannot wish for, the things that are forbidden, sinful. Indecent. But what is decent? To deny everything that you really want?" She then articulates her true wishes, the forbidden ones, many of which eventually come true. Gradually, she gains the courage to speak her mind to her sister Rosaura, to Pedro, and even to her mother's ghost, ultimately overcoming her. When Pedro proposes marriage, she sheds "her first tears of joy." And when Pedro dies at their moment of greatest ecstasy, she makes conscious decisions about life and death, initially resisting the tunnel by controlling her passion, and later approaching the tunnel again to let herself go, joining him in a lost Eden. By the end, Tita takes charge, becoming a complete person, though she dies in the process.
Pedro and John, the two men who helped her reach this climax, are more symbolic than real. Pedro, with his selfish declarations of love, his intense passion for Tita, and his strong jealousy, perfectly embodies machismo. Yet, he falls short of being a true man. On his and Rosaura's wedding day, he whispers in Tita's ear, "through this marriage I have gained what I really wanted: the chance to be near you, the woman I really love," and steals occasional intimate moments with Tita. However, he lacks the courage to do what is truly necessary—standing up to Mama Elena.
Pedro agrees to a marriage that even his own father questions and behaves childishly when Tita seems on the brink of a new life with John. Tita herself labels him accurately: a coward. Conveniently, he dies just as their love is about to be made public, leaving his resolve untested.
John Brown, in contrast, is everything Pedro is not. He is calm, reasonable, intelligent, gentle, and open-minded. He is a nurturer, willing to sacrifice his own needs for the happiness of someone he loves. He embodies both male and female qualities, perhaps representing the New Man that Esquivel idealizes. He makes Tita feel happy, grateful, and at peace. However, he is not the man for her. True love comes from the heart, not the head, and Pedro, not John, is Tita's soul mate. Knowing that without Pedro she will be forever dark, cold, and alone, she makes the conscious choice to "light all her matches at once," ensuring that "never again would they be apart."