Gender Roles In Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

From the beginning of human history until today, whether you are male or female, the stereotypical gender roles has shaped you as a person in one way or another. It is in the fictional novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, that in a small Colombian town in the 1900s that the bewildering murder of Santiago Nasar took place. Surprisingly, this murder case indirectly ties back to the gender roles of the society; men are expected to live up to the dominant male masculinity and women, the obedient housewives. By reading Márquez’s novel, we can see how the machismo culture, embedded in this Latin American community, plays a significant role in the death of Santiago Nasar. With this fundamental premise in mind, the Vicario twins went to extremes to protect their manly image.They, being the direct murderers of Santiago, portray this machismo image through their somewhat involuntary actions. The aggressiveness of Pedro Vicario expressed in the quotation

This relates back to an equally significant aspect of a machismo man as being a womanizer which is a suitable title for Santiago. Divina Flor, the servant girl, in an interview recounts a notable experience with Santiago Nasar, on the day of his death, stating,”’He grabbed my whole pussy,’...’it was what he always did when he caught me alone in some corner of the house…’” (Márquez 13). It is actions like this that reveal his provocative nature to us, the readers. Not surprisingly, “...his favorite sport was to confuse the identities of the mulatto girls,”(Márquez 65) who were whores. Seemingly he spends much of his time in brothels as expected of men in this society.With this in mind, when Angela reveals Santiago as the person who deflowered her, the twins without a doubt believed her. Being with all these women and bearing in mind that he has a fiance, may have had an influence on the twins’ judgment of him which eventually prompted his