Feminist Power in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Introduction and Thesis

Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) spins a tale of postcolonial Colombia that will likely forever be regarded as a classic work of fiction, produced during what many consider a high point in Latin American literature. The work has been translated into many languages and continues to sell widely today (King). The novel follows the founding of a city by a single couple and traces all the ways in which that couple and their various offspring relate to the world within the scope of their town. This multigenerational tale encompasses a century and begins with the development of a core relationship — that between José Arcadio Buendía and his wife and cousin Ursula.

This paper will first establish the context and methodology of the novel and then examine the work through a feminist critical perspective. The central argument is that the interwoven female characters, with Ursula as their moral compass, demonstrate García Márquez's vision of the power of Latin American women. These women serve as constant arbiters defining what is and is not acceptable and moral — for each other as well as for the community as a whole — teaching one another through their lived experience how easily one can become the "other," the mistress instead of the wife. This dynamic is most visible in the manner in which the women of Macondo walk a fine line between wife and mistress within an isolated social system, one ultimately governed by what Ursula will accept or reject. Macondo can in fact be understood as an enlarged version of the family home — a village of mirrors, as José Arcadio Buendía prophesied and Ursula made a reality.

The World of Macondo and Its Context

José Arcadio Buendía builds his village from a vision he receives while sleeping after many days of wandering with his new bride and cousin Ursula. Macondo is a kind of Eden, set apart from the wider world and emblematic of a singular union — the one between this fated pair:

"At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." (García Márquez 1)

The little village does not remain small for long. The outside world encroaches upon it and exerts tremendous power over the seven generations of Buendías, pulling the men away through the political upheavals associated with the turn of the twentieth century and Colombia's colonial legacy. At its founding, Macondo is conceived as a refuge — isolated from external wars and conflicts, and separated from a wider culture that would have rejected the couple's union out of collective fear of incestuous offspring (Lanzen Harris).

One character outside the Buendía family who moves between Macondo and the outside world is the gypsy Melquíades, who returns indefatigably from death to live out a second life among the Buendías. As Lanzen Harris notes, Melquíades "introduces José Arcadio to the wonders of science, which absorbs the indefatigable patriarch to the exclusion of all else. He ends his life in madness, tied to a tree and babbling in Latin. Ursula, conversely, is strong and pragmatic. She is the only character who lives to see the beginning and end of the Buendía dynasty. Throughout her long life, she reinforces one of García Márquez's central themes: that time is circular, and that it is characterized by endless repetitions and recurrences."

José Arcadio Buendía and the Limits of Masculine Authority

In many ways the novel reads as a bildungsroman tracing the evolution of each generation. Yet the final curtain reveals that no generation truly evolved: the story begins with a fear that the incestuous couple will produce an offspring with a pig's tail, and ends with that very event occurring six generations later, as if the mythical Adam and Eve figures of the novel's opening have merely replayed themselves. By comparison with Ursula, José Arcadio Buendía is distracted and disengaged from his role as father and grandfather. He falls prey to political and intellectual obsessions that draw his focus away from family life, seating him firmly in science and abstraction (Sangari 157). He is effectively dismissed early in the narrative, leaving behind a legacy of repetitive familial misdeeds and a near-constant presence without being genuinely present — much as he was in life.

"José Arcadio Buendía finally got what he was looking for… That discovery excited him much more than any of his other harebrained undertakings. He stopped eating. He stopped sleeping… He would spend the nights walking around the room thinking aloud, searching for a way to apply the principles of the pendulum to oxcarts, to harrows, to everything that was useful when put into motion." (76–77)

José Arcadio Buendía was ever-present but without the authority of genuine presence. Beyond his first few decisive actions and his care for Rebeca and others, his entire existence in the novel is shadowy and disenchanted. He obsesses over the unchanging nature of time — delivering lengthy monologues insisting that although he has been told it is Tuesday, it is actually Monday all over again (77–78) — and eventually evolves into a ghost wandering the house, unable to make sense of the world around him:

"It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight." (221)

Ursula, on the other hand, is described throughout as pragmatic, stoic, and logical. At one point the two characters are placed in direct contrast:

"While Ursula and the girls unpacked furniture, polished silverware, and hung pictures of maidens in boats full of roses, which gave a new life to the bare areas the masons had built, José Arcadio Buendía abandoned his pursuit of the image of God, convinced of His nonexistence, and took the pianola apart in order to decipher its magical secret." (61)

José Arcadio Buendía was never his wife's equal in practical matters, even when the family desperately needed his rationality. Ursula held the family together in almost every respect.

Ursula as Moral Compass and Feminine Power

In many ways Ursula's unwavering pragmatism can be understood as the expression of feminist power within the work. Despite so much being beyond the family's control, Ursula always managed to feed, clothe, and care for anyone she deemed worthy. Bellow Watson addresses the realization of feminine power and the shift away from the stereotypical notion that a woman's power resides solely in her sexuality. Bellow Watson argues that feminine power is expressed in literature through subtler means:

"Women, like other groups with minority status, adopt various forms of accommodation to protect themselves. The most essential form of accommodation for the weak is to conceal what power they do have and to avoid anything that looks like threat or competition. Therefore we must not expect either the literature or the authors that draw on their observations of women to tell us much about so sensitive a topic in the form of declarations, manifestos, plot summaries, or even the broad outlines of characterization. We begin instead to look at such techniques as ambiguity, equivocation, and expressive symbolic structure." (113)

Ursula is fully aware of everything that is happening and has happened regarding the practical management of her home. It is not until the very end of the story — when she is approximately 130 years old — that she begins to show signs of senility. Yet even then, she can tell someone exactly where a missing item is after more than a century and recall to the penny how much was spent on the household the previous year: "She began to make mistakes, trying to see with her eyes the things that intuition allowed her to see with greater clarity. One morning she poured the contents of an inkwell over the boy's head thinking it was rose water. She stumbled so much in her insistence on taking part in everything…" (250). Significantly, García Márquez frames her errors as a failure of physical vision rather than of the mind itself, informing the reader that if she relied on her intuition she would have far greater clarity than her failing eyesight allows.

Though many readers regard the patriarch as the thread running through each generation, it is actually Ursula who lives to witness the dynasty's beginning and its end. It is through Ursula that all the defining standards of womanhood are established and transmitted. Many critics have challenged the novel for pigeonholing women into stereotyped roles — the matriarch or the whore. As Bloom observes:

"As derived from the contemporary Latin American novel, our knowledge of the reality of womanhood is fragmented and distorted. At first glance it seems that all levels of such literature have typecast women in either matrifocal or matrilocal roles, i.e., the mother or family support role, or in supernatural or degrading roles, i.e., the witch or prostitute/mistress role… While the artistic appeal is widespread and much discussed, in actuality few critics focus on the fact that their female archetypes are presented much too glibly and, perhaps, too frequently as perceived realities based on their cultures' patriarchal practices." (151)

Conclusion

There is a clear sense throughout this work that women have serious meaning, and the parts they play are integral to the message of the story. Ursula is the backbone of the family and, by extension, of the town. As she becomes more reliant on her failing physical vision rather than her intuition, she begins to decline — and Macondo declines with her. The same trajectory applies to each of the women around her.

The interwoven female characters, with Ursula as their moral compass, ultimately demonstrate García Márquez's vision of the power of Latin American women. They serve as constant arbiters defining what is and is not acceptable — for each other as well as for the community as a whole — and teach one another through their lived experience how easily one can become the "other," the mistress instead of the wife. In this reading, the women of Macondo are not peripheral figures constrained by stereotyped roles; they are the novel's true moral and narrative center.

Works Cited

Bellow Watson, Barbara. "On Power and the Literary Text." Signs, vol. 1, no. 1, Autumn 1975, pp. 111–118.

Bloom, Harold. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' Chelsea House, 2003.

García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper and Row, 1970.

Hamilton, Carole. "Overview of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.'" Literature of Developing Nations for Students, edited by Elizabeth Bellalouna, Michael L. LaBlanc, and Ira Mark Milne, vol. 2, Gale Group, 2000. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Dec. 2011.

Lanzen Harris, Laurie. "Overview: One Hundred Years of Solitude." Characters in 20th-Century Literature. Gale Research, 1990. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Dec. 2011.

King, John. "The Latin American Novel in Translation: Mapping the Field." Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 4, no. 2, 1985, pp. 123–131.

Monet-Viera, Molly. "Brujas, Putas y Madres: El Poder de los Márgenes en La Celestina y Cien Años de Soledad." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 77, no. 3, 2000, pp. 127–146. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 4 Dec. 2011.

Sangari, Kumkum. "The Politics of the Possible." Cultural Critique, no. 7, Autumn 1987, pp. 157–186.