In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez treats women in an anachronistic sort of way. When I first began reading the novel, my dormant feminist was stoked once more into indignation by the relegation of women to roles of motherhood, servility, back-breaking labor, and prostitution. I thought it was unjust that he placed them in these time-tried and powerless, immobile roles. After all, it wasn't as though he was overtly intending to document a specific city; he completely fabricated Macondo! I was disgusted, in my fiery pit of feminism, at his excessively normal depiction of the female characters in the novel. He had an entire range of emotions and situations at hand in which to imaginatively depict them, and he chose what seemed to be the most low and status-quo. Where was the fantasy and innovation that is supposed to characterize magical realism?
Nearing the end of the novel, it became clear just how misplaced and misinformed my anger was. The female characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude are not relegations by any means. Rather, they form the marrow of the novel, the sinews of its emotional and mystical depth, and the tendons which bind the plotline and the Buendia family together. I think that if I were nerdy and bored enough, I might even be able to empirically prove that Marquez spends many more pages developing his female characters and their internal monologues, than on all of his male characters combined. In allowing them this range of emotions, conflicting and complex motivations, and depth of concentrated character development, Marquez is not denigrating but idealizing women. In another empirical sense, it becomes clear that his women are strong of resolve, and his men, while eccentric and possessing often laudable extremes in genius and personality, almost unfailingly end their lives in depravity. He seems to be making a clear statement throughout the novel of the strength of will and character of women, and he sharpens this assertion by juxtaposing the relentless, wise Ursula Iguaran against the depraved, festering solitude of Jose Arcadio and the emotional depravity of Aureliano, who seems incapable of loving any other human, and perhaps even himself.
Providing distinct roles for the men and women in his novel, Marquez is illustrating the relative strengths and weaknesses he perceives in humanity as a whole, and our relative contributions as individuals. Indeed, even his most seemingly shiftless characters, who spend their time doing nothing but breaking what they create and re-creating it from its components, don't receive any less of his literary attention for their spiraling cycles of patheticism. Nor does Marquez seem to think their pursuits are actually pathetic. He portrays Aureliano's fish-forging with an attention to detail and appreciation for mastery and all-consuming fine work which Aureliano himself applies. Amaranta's repeatedly sewn and rent funereal shroud is described as the most beautiful creation made by the hands of men, and holds great spiritual and symbolic value for Amaranta as a character and for the plot as a whole. Marquez even at times seems to idealize their seemingly petty and useless indulgences; perhaps there is some implicit commentary on the fact that their destructiveness, when internally turned, has far more respectable effects than when channelled externally. Aureliano's self-imposed quarantine of solitude has far less destructive implications for society than his endless, pointless war, and Amaranta's way of toying with mens' hearts in a festering cycle of martyrdom is far more destructive than her cloistered, penitent spiral into self-predicted, if not self-inflicted, death. Marquez's commentary about the relative internal and external destructive capabilities of the human race may be intended as just that; a comment on the human race. After the spiraling cycle of solitary decay has gripped many individuals in Macondo, it grips the life and vigor of the city itself, and Macondo sees its downfall. One can only conjecture what Marquez may have been thinking about the cyclical nature of human civilization as a whole.
In making gender distinctions, Marquez also seems to be delineating the character qualities that he finds important and enriching. The women in his novel, while lusty and exuberant in bed, seem to possess a certain control and an interminable capacity for love, both of which he makes obvious that he respects. The prostitutes which he bothers to develop as characters, such as Pilar Ternera and Santa Sofia de la Piedad, are women of unwavering resolve and boundless tenderness; qualities which heal the broken Buendia men in his tale, and qualities which these men possess in pitiful amounts; or even if they are brimming with love and tenderness, it is misplaced and out of their control, released in fire-cracker spurts and often lacking in all the crucial moments. Even Aureliano Segundo, the least solitary and most openly loving and outgoing Buendia, has trouble controlling the way he dispenses of his love, and difficulty expressing his tenderness. Miscommunication drives a rift between Fernanda and he, and he turns toward Petra Cortes largely based on Fernanda's decisions and not his own. He kind of reminds me of my dad in some ways; hard to read, incapable of expressing the most wrenching and yet interpersonally binding emotions which connect us and allow us to control others, to both good and bad ends.
Pilar Ternera in particular has a vast amount of influence over the men and women she touches, literally and figuratively (wink wink). By granting this level of control to a historically low profession and 'class' of women, Marquez is making a controversial statement about the implicit but overarching power of women in the world; as well as, arguably, about prostitution itself. Assuming the most, perhaps too much, he often seems to depict his women characters as omniscient guides who reveal the illusions of reality that their men obediently act out; implying that they hold the real reigns of power in the world of Macondo. But no one, man or woman, ever seems to realize this.
Regarding prostitution, he certainly acknowledges that many of his minor prostitute characters were driven to the work out of necessity, and that they are in the depths of misery and depravity in doing so; but he conversely crafts Pilar Ternera as a sort of goddess and master of the arts of love, which she often bestows for free; and in this simple fact, she seems to be removing all of the depravity from the act. Sex in the novel has no Christian connotations of filth and disrespect. In Marquez's eyes it is the ultimate complicity of love and a simple human pleasure which allows his characters to connect and relieve. There isn't rape in his novel, and there is in The House of the Spirits, another Latin American magical realism novel, written by Isabelle Allende. In many ways, Isabelle Allende's overt attempts at feminism are less successful than Marquez's implicit assertions of womens' control over sex, love, and their own journeys and destinies. For every powerless prostitute driven to sell herself to eke a mere living or, in one instance in the novel, pay off her debt to her mother for accidentally burning down their house, there is a complementary woman who has complete control over her patrons, her desires, and her meaningful relationships.
Remedios the Beauty is perhaps one of the most enchanting and humbling creatures in the novel, because she represents absolute purity and innocence. It is interesting that Marquez crafts her as a mentally and developmentally retarded character, because despite her practical stupidity she seems to possess a self-contained knowledge that leaves her supernaturally content, and thus superior over her peers who suffer from the pains of everyday inconveniences. What such modern inconveniences Remedios finds untasteful, such as clothing and indoor toilets, she simply does not bother herself with. In the character of Remedios, Marquez seems to be commenting on the state of human nature as an entity intermediate between Rousseau's golden innocence and pure morality, and Hobbes' idea of us as vulgar and uncivilized. Marquez depicts none of Hobbes' presumed violence, but a great deal of Hobbesian cynical and disgusted commentary on her sometimes savage habits. It is interesting, and perhaps more overtly religious than any of his other dealings with women or miracles in the novel, that he chooses as the most spiritual and pure being in his novel a young woman, instead of a young man. In one sense, she is the Virgin Mary; but in another, she is pure in a much more basic, animalistic sense, with an innocence so instinctive and inherent that she cannot be worshipped but only envied and wondered after. Marquez's treatment of this young woman character as the most supernatural creature in his novel, perhaps even more so than the traditional Gods of Catholicism, provides only more indications of those traditionally feminine character qualities which he finds so commendable. On the other hand, by making her stay on earth an awkward and uncomfortable one, and making her departure rather premature, Marquez seems to indicate that these qualities are not realistic or practical in our world; but perhaps that we ought to respect in a new light those people whom we perceive as annoyingly simple, as he seems to understand that they possess a perspective unique in the human race.
As such, I think that Marquez crafts women with courage, stolidity, and a steadiness of will that is literally never consistently visible in any of his complementary male characters. Two of the scenes of irony that I find worth mentioning are as follows: one, when the house is devoid of men for a period, and it is coincidentally but not causally falling into disrepair and, oh how I love this word, depravity, Ursula laments that they need a man in the house, to fix it and also mend the shambles and scandal in the Buendia family. It's a scene of blatant irony for many reasons, but I shall focus on one: Ursula essentially created the house itself, in its beauty and order, and every time it has fallen into disrepair it is she who has renovated the house in intermittent gusts of revival, with little or no initiative from any Buendia men. These gusts symbollically coincide with renovation and revival in the Buendia family: new life, new chances, and times more happy than sad that blossom in Macondo. Later in the novel, her namesake Amaranta Ursula makes a similar remark when she happens upon the house in its solitude and disrepair, infested by ants and other unwelcome creatures, saying that 'it is clear that a man has not been in the house for a long time', or something to that effect. Yet again, the irony lies in the fact that indeed a man has been living in the house all the years she has been gone, and it is she, and not any man, who undertakes to revive the house and their lives, during what little time remains in Macondo itself. Thus Marquez again manifests the hidden power of women in Macondo, a subtle undercurrent to the projected, largely illusory, power of men in the novel. It is interesting, and I hope not reading too much into the idea of this illusory power when, near the end of the novel, the youngest Aureliano and his friends visit a whorehouse where they are literally powerless because the whole setup is an elaborate illusion. And, not to kill the point, but the whores and the madam who owns the operation clearly have the control in the situation, despite, and cleanly juxtaposed against, their traditionally powerless roles as prostitutes.
Self-control is a hugely recurring motif, if not a theme, in the novel. Marquez seems to think that his women have more of it, but that his men are complementary characters of unbridled love and passion which keeps the world turning and bursting with life and vigor, and characters of extremes with fits of genius which accelerate the civilization forward; if not at a sometimes dangerous speed. He is not critical of progress itself, but of the progression of this progress. The complementary roles of men and women in the novel serve to regulate innovation and progress, and provide complementary aspects of traditional and modern life, which enrich and propagate Macondo's civilization. At some fine point, the Buendia family brings Macondo to a peak of glory; after which it may be commended that they were able to maintain it for so long in such a fiercely mystical and natural land, in the first place.
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