Societal Roles

Societal Roles

In the small, strictly Roman Catholic town of Columbia, Marquez writes Chronicle of Death Foretold which criticizes the way women are treated as property and cannot determine their future. To begin, the narrator never names his sister simply referring to her as “my sister the nun.” By doing this the narrator places a lack of identity over his siblings head, never gracing her with a name. Not even once does the narrator recognize his own sister kin with a name. Marquez makes a point of exaggeration, drawing focus to the loss of identity of the nun in society. He makes his sister become a “thing,” a property that is not recognized with something as simple as a proper noun. Something as human as a proper noun. Moreover, Marquez often uses words that have the connotation of something set in stone or something on a train with no reverse. Words such as fate and destiny are slipped into the mix when he talks about women. These words, often used in passive voice, suggest, once again, the lack of control that the women have over their lives. Women are prepared for marriage and forced to learn to portray a false love in that marriage. Marquez sheds a negative light on the fact that women are treated like property in wed-lock and raises the question: how are women supposed to find love in this society? Well, in fact, they are not. Women are “raised to suffer” (31). Moving along with the theme of property, Bayardo returns Angela after he found that she was previously deflowered . He whispers “’thank you for everything, Mother,’” as if he was returning a broken product (46). Marquez often uses this customer-product relationship to highlight how little freedom the female has in this society. They are mere products that can be bought and sold with shows of wealth that the author satirically provides. This attitude pronounces ever more the oppression and distaste of that oppression with sarcastic exaggeration of the large wealth displays to “purchase” the...