Role of Women in One Hundred Years of Solitude: Analytical Essay

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In Latin America and other parts of the world, a person in the family (usually the father) was the head of the family, somebody who no one dared to face while the woman (the mother) is the servant or slave of the family and the house. Marquez, he tried to make sure to make that stereotype was alive. The women in One Hundred Years of Solitude are very domestic, everything exciting that happen in the novel usually around the men. The women are shown as sex tools and the men continue with curse of being obsessive. This novel is filled with sexism and how men are the only one ruling, which is something that was very common in Latin America back in the day. But the only exception is the character Ursula who is introduced as the head of the household and her husband someone whom always puts his family in danger. In the Buendia, the women run the house and men went to war and thought of sex and dreams except for again Ursula. Ursula represented the feminists in Latin America that wanted equal rights. Marquez said that he viewed women as down-to-earth and strong, &in most cases, most women are the practical sex. Its men who are the romantics and who go off and do all kinds of crazy things; women know that life is hard. Ursula is a prototype of that kind of practical, life-sustaining woman.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, again the main role of a women is sex because the continuation of the lineage is portrayed as the focus for women in the novel. Further in the novel, the reader can see that sex in female is more of prostitution and their virginity and what is accepted in society. Virginity is seen as an important part of the womens honor at a very young age, also Ursula was unwilling to let her daughter with Pietro but later she encouraged Amarantas marriage with Colonel Marquez, which meant that virginity was not a big thing anymore. Even though Amaranta is dying she never let Colonel Marquez touch her and that action suggests that her virginity was taking power over passion and dies with a clear conscience its clear that she showed her virginity with pride. Now those who are not virgin are shown as useless, Garcia Marquez he said, the custom of sending virgins to the bedrooms of soldiers in that same way that hens are turned loose with fine rooster (page 154), he compares the situation of when a woman loses her virginity to the way animals have sex. Prostitution is viewed as something that is always there, Pilar Ternerra as a person who had intimacy with a lot of men and not being paid for that which implies that women sometimes dont always want people to give them money because of their body, for some women in the novel they didnt have another chance but to turn into prostitution like a girl who burned her grandmas house and to pay her back she started to a sell her body. Throughout the novel, again it is clear that they oversee the house and that their sexuality is something seen as bad and that only men can think about that.

In conclusion, Garcia Marquez shows the everyday life of women and their role. He showed how men never left their duties and that theyre guided by their wrong morality and that the women in the family should be admired because of how they can show how much control and power they with limited freedom.

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