Gender Role Effects In Like Water For Chocolate And The Bride Price

Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate(LWFC) and Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price while contextually different - set in 1920’s Mexico and 1950’s tribal Nigeria respectively, are written by authors personally affected by sexist traditions within the culture they compose about. Both texts challenge cultural paradigms of gender expectations and emphasise their effects on individuals and those surrounding them, thereby criticizing the universal cultural oppression of young women.

The texts utilize representation through character to portray the dichotomy between modern and traditional values and challenge one’s obligation to adhere to tradition through the characters’ juxtaposition. Furthermore, by using various narrative devices, LWFC and Bride Price reveal the effects of stipulation of young women by conservative customs, additionally demonstrating the society’s pressure to adhere to sexist traditions. Emecheta and Esquivel represent traditional values through parental figures and challenge the obligation to adhere to them through the representative conflict between parents and young women in conservative households.

Within Bride Price, traditional expectations of physical and sexual dominance over young women in a 1950’s Nigerian Ibo tribe are represented through the contrasting characters of Ma Blackie and Aku-nna. These values are represented through Ma Blackie, evident in her direct diction: “Girls like you tend to end up having babies in their father’s houses, because they cannot endure open play, so they go to secret places and have themselves disvirgined!” which connotes society’s disapprobation of impure women. Emecheta then uses simile inl'a helpless fish caught in a net” to emphasise the absolutism of tradition and to juxtapose Aku-nna with Ma Blackie.

Furthermore, Aku-nna’s developed hatred towards her mother is revealed by Aku-nna’s inner dialogue: “how simple our lives would have been but for the interference of our parents”, which parallels the subdued resentment women feel towards cultural norms that imprison them with both the traditional and modern world. The contrast between Ma Blackie, whose values embody the culture’s merciless dominance over a young woman’s sexuality, and Aku-nna who represents a new generation of woman that value independence and reliance on self, consolidates the global struggle between modern and traditional values. Thus, Emecheta vilifies and challenges traditional rituals, offering hope that, in the future, these debilitating gender-based customs will be abolished.

LWFC similarly explores the dichotomy between modern and traditional values by challenging Mexican marital and familial traditions as Mama Elena subjugates her youngest daughter Tita into subservience to her. Similar to Bride Price, this is seen in her direct diction: 'You know perfectly well that being the youngest daughter means you have to take care of me until the day I die”. In contrast to Bride Price however, LWFC uses personal pronouns “me” and “I” to manifest a sense of authority and the repetition of “you” subconsciously pressurises Tita to be in agreement with her, reinforcing the idea that traditions must be upheld.

However, Tita’s juxtaposition to Mama Elena is clear in: “when they had chosen something to be neutered… they should have chosen her, then there would be some justification for not allowing her to marry the man she loved.”lHere, Esquivel uses stream of consciousness narration to suppress Tita’s emotions and compares her to a confined animal with the repetition of “choice”. In both LWFC and Bride Price, the young women’s expression of opinion through indirect voices amplifies the position of young women in society as submissive and peripheral. Furthermore, the comparable juxtaposition of representative characters, despite being set in differing contexts, enhances a common theme of modern and traditional conflict within both texts and consolidates the cultural oppression of young women as a universal issue.

The texts utilise varying narrative techniques to portray the widespread effect of oppressive gender paradigms and the obligation to adhere to tradition.

LWFC utilizes magical realism to create symbolism through Mexican food which subverts Tita’s character and emphasises her powerlessness in her personal life, paralleling the cultural suppression of young women’s freedom. An example of this is when Tita’s tears, magically infused with grief, fall into the cake she is obligated to make her love’s wedding, and “seized the guests, scattered all of them, wailing over lost or failed love”. Here, Tita fear leads her personal will to be trivialized to that of being revealed indirectly through food, which becomes a sustained symbol of the subjugation of women by tradition. Contrary to the subversion of Tita’s will as a young woman in society, the magical realism emphasises the widespread effect, consolidating this universal issue.

Furthermore, following the motif of food, ‘Like Water for Chocolate’, a symbolic title, is used by Emecheta to foreshadow a young woman’s life of perpetual submission and subservience and, thus her emotions unhealthily suppressed to being ‘to the verge of boiling over’. Finally, the use of magical realism allows Mama Elena’s outraged ghost to return from the dead which hyperbolizes the immense pressure societies put on young women to adhere to tradition. Hence, Esquivel successfully criticizes the universal expectations placed on young women by highlighting their detrimental effects.

In contrast to Bride Price, Emecheta uses symbolism to explore oppressive marital traditions of and their effects, additionally manipulating metaphor to show the pressure to adhere to them. ‘The Bride Price’, being emphasised to even hold the name of the novel, is a symbol woven throughout Aku-nna’s entire journey to create a sense of inevitability and obligation. Similar to LWFC, Emecheta also uses this to literally and symbolically represent women’s submission to men because of the traditional marriage paradigm. Furthermore, Aku-nna’s death functions as a metaphor - one which synthesizes the conflict between liberal and traditional ideologies, the latter being the ultimate cause of her death. However, Aku-nna’s death is manipulated to become a metaphor for death, rather than the freedom of women: 'Every girl born in Ibuza after Aku-nna's death was told her story, to reinforce the old taboos of the land. If a girl wished to live to see her children's children, she must accept the husband chosen for her and the bride price must be paid.'

Similar to Bride Price, this metamorphosed metaphor, highlights the detrimental effects of sexist paradigms and the society’s coercion of women into patriarchal submission. However, LWFC’s use of magical realism compared to Bride Price’s metaphor is objectively more expressive of society’s demand for compliance, as it depicts characters returning from the dead only to enforce their customs.

Nonetheless, both texts compellingly reveal the detrimental effects of cultural gender paradigms and highlight their universality of the oppression of young women.