Love In The Time Of Cholelera Analysis

Love in the Time of Cholera is a profound book by Gabriel García Marquez. In it, Marquez discusses many things from sickness to sexual autonomy. One of the most prevalent motifs is the portrayal of the class hierarchy in turn-of-the-century Columbia. Classism is used to reveal an innate truth in how a country evolves and revives itself as it moves toward the future, leaving the past, and those who cling to it, behind. Through his characters Dr. Juvenal Urbino, Fermina Daza, and Leona Cassini, Marquez shows the natural succession of the old with the new and improved. Love in the Time of Cholera uses class disparity to show the evolution of a country.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino is the archetype of an upper-class being left behind. He is the past that

The old ways are what Urbino is: conservative, rich, colonialist. Leona Cassini is almost a direct foil to Urbino because our first introduction to her is that she was a black woman who dressed like a slave girl and “a whore beyond the shadow of a doubt” (182). This image instantly tells the reader that she is of the lowest and the poorest. This does not hinder her however and she is bold, managing to snag a job at the company Florentino works for, the River Company of the Caribbean. Soon, she displays her intelligence and shrewdness and devises a plan that would increase company efficiency and gains the favor of the owner, Don Leo XII Loayza (185-186). In fact, Loayza was so impressed with her, he told Florentino to search for more workers like her and created a new job position specifically for Leona (186). After that initial promotion, “in three more years she had taken control of everything, and in the next four she stood on the threshold of the General Secretaryship” (186), which is an insane feat for a colored woman in the very early 1900s. She is further described as “dynamic” and to have “a character of solid iron”, the only reason that she did not go any further up the ladder because she felt indebted to Florentino, her strategy and wisdom so great that Florentino had “done nothing more on the Board of Directors than follow her suggestions, which helped him to move up despite traps set by his enemies” (186). This strong display of her intellect is such an uncommon trait to be written for someone of a lower class, much less a black woman. With Marquez being a known liberal, it can be inferred that this was intentional and designed in such a way to portray how the future is in those who are ignored. He writes a poor, at the time young, black woman to be the one to revitalize a company, doing what an old, upper-class man could not. This is such a self-evident