One Hundred Years of Solitude focuses more on the men of the story. They are the ones that go out, get married, make bad decisions, join wars etc etc. However I found women to be the most interesting characters of whole story. Especially seeing what qualities were considered to be the most “virtuous”. Marquez uses a lot of Christian metaphors/references to portray his characters but what makes that interesting is that he doesn’t equate Godly with Good.
One of the most consistent characters is Ursula. She represents a perfect matriarchy, she protects and cares for her entire family without hesitation up until the day she dies at over 100 years old. Now, I think she should be one of the most revered and rewarded characters of the novel, and in a way she is. She only seems to make one mistake and that’s marrying and procreating with her first cousin. She is punished by being forced to live through her decedents doing crazy and disgusting things, being completely inbred, killing people, and getting involved with crazy drama. But in a way her extreme old age is a reward, she gets to watch generation after generation of her children grow up. I also related Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendía to Adam and Eve characters who arrive in the promise land and begin to populate. So just like Adam and Eve, we can really try to forgive the incest thing.
When I was reading this book I expected the most religious and typically virtuous women to be perceived as the “good” characters. However this wasn’t the case, as proven by Fernanda Del Carpio. She strictly adheres to the catholic faith and tries to teach her children to share her beliefs. She is cold and distant and comes across as a prude. Her husband leaves her despite their shared children and she is disliked for having Meme’s lover killed. So clearly Marques doesn’t link spirituality with virtue. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t use some Christian imagery with virtue. Remedios the beauty is written as literally a heavenly character, eventually she just floats up into the sky. Although beautiful enough that men risk their lives just to see her, she remains completely ignorant of all sin. Like Adam and Eve before eating from the tree of knowledge, she is unaware of sin and particularly her own nakedness. Even though she is never described as any sort of Godly, Marquez uses Godly imagery to represent qualities he admires.
I may be reaching a little too far, but I related the conclusion of the novel to the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah and eventually tried to relate it to the bible’s predicted apocalypse. In the story of Sodom, the town had become so sinful and run down that God finally destroyed it in a terrible storm, killing all the sinners inside of it. Marquez even describes that final wind and destruction as “that Biblical hurricane”. As I was reading the ending, I was looking for seals of the apocalypse, or anything biblical that might predict the end of times. Well, I didn’t find any horsemen or swallowing up of seas and falling of mountains, but I did find several curses reminiscent of those God placed on Egypt. The first of which is rivers turning into blood, which I found in Amaranta Ursula’s Death
… Because Amaranta Ursula was bleeding in an uncontainable torrent. They tried to help her with applications of spiderwebs and balls of ash, but it was like trying to hold back a spring with ones hands.
Many of the other plagues include bugs/animals. There is a plague of locusts, frogs, flies and lice. I rolled all of these into the presence of ants in their home and eventually, as the book is ending, the yellow butterflies. Another plague is “Murrain” or livestock pestilence/death. Which happens when Jose Arcadio Segundo and his lover Petra find all their animals dead. I didn’t find any connections between the plagues boils, hail and darkness that wouldn’t be extreme reaches. Maybe darkness could be the 5 years of rain? and Hail could be the reoccurring theme of ice? I’ve got nothing for boils though. However, the final and most devestating plague God sent to Egypt was passover, the killing of firstborn sons. Which is clearly represented with the death of Aureliano and Amaranta’s child.
“She only seems to make one mistake and that’s marrying and procreating with her first cousin. She is punished by being forced to live through her decedents doing crazy and disgusting things, being completely inbred, killing people, and getting involved with crazy drama.”
I wonder how much of her family’s choices and mistakes were because of inbreeding or if it was just because they were human?
I hadn’t even considered that the family’s choices might have been because of inbreeding. I assumed from the beginning that it was because they were human. Now I wonder, though, if the inbreeding was meant to play a role in their behavior, though I’d still say it’s mostly due to their humanity even if it is.
Kaia,
You’re right in pointing out that 100 Years of Solitude shares similar stories of relating to those of the Bible.
One of the varieties of the fantastic is the death of Remedios the Beauty, which I paralleled with the Assumption of Mary. While Scripture doesn’t explicitly state the passing of Virgin Mary, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church it’s written that:
“Finally the Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, so that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords and conqueror of sin and death.”
We can assume the same fate happened to Remedios the Beauty, as Márquez writes:
“Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’ clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.”