Chocolate Lust

Love or Lust?

Throughout the book Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel, has a battle for the heart of Tita between John and Pedro. John is shown as the perfect man, he takes Tita in when everyone else shuts her out. Pedro is shown as an imperfect man, he marries Tita’s sister, Rosaura, because Mama Elena tells him to. Throughout most of the book Tita is in distress because her sister married the man she loves, but as the book moves on through the story a new relationship blossoms between John and Tita. John and Tita have a beautiful relationship that could be seen as an idealistic relationship. Pedro and Tita’s relationship is filled with lust and distress, yet Esquivel still portrays Pedro and Tita as if they are in true love. Through

This is a beautiful piece of magical realism by Esquivel. “When Tita was singing, the bean liquor was boiling madly.”(219) Through using the beans as Tita’s inner emotions she represents Tita’s true feelings towards Pedro and John. As her thoughts switched from the night with Pedro to thoughts about her relationship with John, the water went from doing nothing and not cooperating with the heat to boiling madly. “The beans allowed the liquid in which they were floating to penetrate them.”(219) Pedro is like the uncooked beans, she knows that it taste right, but she does not want him to stay a decorative stale bean that Rosaura turned him into. Rosaura placed Pedro on the windowsill, stuck in a sea of hundreds of other uncooked beans, him no different than the beans around him. Tita wants to take Pedro and turn him into a perfectly cooked bean that anyone would desire to have. Tita and Pedro’s affair is extremely unconventional and is almost like Tita snatched Pedro right off of the windowsill he is trapped on. When she allowed Pedro to access her, she is telling him that she wanted to cook him into this perfect bean. “When Tita opened her eyes and took a bean to test it, she saw that now the beans were done perfectly”(219).John is like the perfectly cooked bean, hand picked straight from the garden, that everyone wants, Tita already feels that she is undeserving of John’s love. John being the amazing man that he is makes him desirable to just about everyone. The boiling water represents the tension in her love life. “The beans swelled until they were about to burst”(219). This is a beautiful representation of Tita’s love life. There is so much tension between choosing between Pedro and John it is like a grenade is in Tita’s hands. With one decision the grenade will either fizzle out and not explode or it will blow up in front of everyone. One decision can determine the fate of many others. On one hand she