Fermina Daza, in the novel Love in the Time of Cholera, can often be seen as the stereotypical woman. Her quick temper, undying love, changing mood, and using of her lover for personal amusement are all qualities that the stereotypical, confusing woman possesses and that are all shown through the character of Fermina Daza. While the reader comes to love this character as an interesting person, her stereotypical female attributes lead the reader to a further understanding of what love is to many females and the power that such a woman has over the males in her life.
Many of the frustrations in the marriage of Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino stem from Fermina Daza’s uncontrollably quick temper which stand to explain how women can be immensely infuriating to men in times of argument. The scene where Fermina Daza took her anger out on her husband for reminding her of her forgetful ness and exaggerating the time in the process, caused a simple issue over whether there was or was not soap to be a great rift in their marriage. Because Fermina Daza was determined to be proven correct and would not back down, knowing she was fully wrong, she shows the unchangeable stubbornness that women possess. She uses this power to make her husband miserable and therefore his love for her overpowers his frustration. During this argument, the reader sees how frustrating women can truly be and how two sided their thoughts commonly are. Though it is obvious she loves her husband, her will power and anger get in the way of her love and she would rather control her husband than control her emotions, as many women seem to do. While it is infuriating to men to be put through the metaphorical washing machine in order to make up with the one they love, women consistently force men to compromise because women know the power love has over their husbands and lovers.
When a reader can see the truth behind a woman’s mind as she seems to fall in love but her mood and mind consistently changes, the reader can understand a man’s frustration and obsession with love and irritation with his lover. While Fermina plays with the heart of her lover, Florentino, thinking that she loves him more than anything in the world and knowing that all she needs is to marry things man, she pulls his heart and his emotions closer to her own. Even when a year and a great distance separated the two, their adolescent love kept them from being far apart. But at the moment when the two can legitimately be together and married, Fermina realizes, as it seems many women do, that she was in love with the idea of love and the idea of having an admirer, not necessarily in love with the man himself. Her obsession with adolescent love and her toying with a man in order to fulfill her own naive emotional needs sends Florentino into a state of irrevocable love for the woman he fell so madly for from the beginning. Her hops and leading aspirations for their future together never left his mind and he never recovered that part of his heart that he had lost. The mood change and feeling change of selfish women can terrorize a man’s life forever, though Fermina never intended this to be the case, she destroyed his love life forever.
Women are so highly influential in the lives of men that they can overpower men’s emotions and toy with heir hearts. Women have mood changes, mind changes and fluctuated feelings that lead men into falling for them and lead them into an irreversible trap known as love that even the conniving woman did not understand she was making. While these traps cause many men pain, they also cause turmoil and confusion in the mind of women who commonly do not even know the disasters they are causing, as in the case of Fermina (662).
Monday, November 19, 2007
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Brotherly Pain
In the novel, The Sound and the Fury, the pride of the family in conjunction with the brothers’ love for their sister tears the family apart. Each of the characters in the story have many internal, mental issues with their positions in their family which are only heightened as a result of Caddy’s promiscuity. Both Benjy and Quentin suffer after Caddy lost her virginity because their love for their sister tears them each apart mentally, knowing that Caddy has changed and that they no longer can control the occurrences in her life.
Caddy’s promiscuity effects Benjy greatly and his reaction to her loss of virginity shows that Caddy’s actions changed the lives of those around her. When Caddy first comes into the house after she had been deflowered, Benjy senses that she has been with a boy and attempts to make her cleanse herself of her sins by washing them off as she had done before. Though, in his mind, this seems the sensible way to redeem herself, for Caddy the cleansing is not a possibility and she is aware that she is too far-gone from personal reconciliation. Benjy throws a fit that Caddy will not give herself completely to him anymore, and though he does not fully understand Caddy’s actions, he seems to understand that he can no longer control Caddy’s actions and that he cannot be the only boy in her life any longer. We, as readers, can see that this is the beginning of Caddy abandoning her brother, whom she loved so dearly, and that she will only further isolate him from her life. The next time, chronologically, that the reader can tell that Benjy needs his sister but she is no longer there to support him is when he waits by the golf course, moaning when the golfers say “caddie”. This shows that Benjy still wants to wait by the gate for his beloved Caddy as he did when he was little, because to his adolescent mind, she comes home through the gate. He still hopes that if he is loyal to the sister who treated him so kindly that she will come back to take care of him as she used to. When Caddy lost her virginity, she bean to throw her brother, Benjy, who so idolized her, to secondary importance. This change effected Benjy, and his emotions took over so that Benjy kept trying to bring his sister back, unaware that she would not return to his side.
Caddy’s actions began to deteriorate the mental state of Quentin from the beginning of her changes and slowly, he began to lose all hope for the future. Quentin loved Caddy to the point that he would admit to the world that he had committed incest so that the world would reject them together. He is torn apart because he believes in the morals of the south and that women should be cautious with their bodies. He is proud of his heritage and wants to retain the stature that his family possessed in better times. When Quentin discovers the promiscuity of Caddy, it forces him to convince her that she never loved Dalton Ames and that she can overcome her promiscuity. Even after Quentin has gone back to Harvard, he cannot get his sister out of his mind, as shown when he fights a fellow Harvard student and loses, all to protect the names of sisters everywhere. Quentin tries, and fails to protect his sister from the real world, but realizes that he cannot keep her from something he, himself, does not understand. This realization drives him all the way to suicide because he cannot bear the disgrace of his family and the loss of his truly beloved sister because of her life choices. Caddy’s actions tears him to pieces to the point that death is a better outlet than fretting about every instance that had occurred when Caddy lost her virginity, became pregnant, and married a man she didn’t love in order to cover her pregnancy.
The Compson family is distraught over the choices that Caddy has made, and though they were not wholly normal before her actions, the knowledge of her losing her virginity and becoming pregnant out of wedlock is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Caddy was the finishing moment that tore the family to pieces and put her brothers out of their minds (733).
Caddy’s promiscuity effects Benjy greatly and his reaction to her loss of virginity shows that Caddy’s actions changed the lives of those around her. When Caddy first comes into the house after she had been deflowered, Benjy senses that she has been with a boy and attempts to make her cleanse herself of her sins by washing them off as she had done before. Though, in his mind, this seems the sensible way to redeem herself, for Caddy the cleansing is not a possibility and she is aware that she is too far-gone from personal reconciliation. Benjy throws a fit that Caddy will not give herself completely to him anymore, and though he does not fully understand Caddy’s actions, he seems to understand that he can no longer control Caddy’s actions and that he cannot be the only boy in her life any longer. We, as readers, can see that this is the beginning of Caddy abandoning her brother, whom she loved so dearly, and that she will only further isolate him from her life. The next time, chronologically, that the reader can tell that Benjy needs his sister but she is no longer there to support him is when he waits by the golf course, moaning when the golfers say “caddie”. This shows that Benjy still wants to wait by the gate for his beloved Caddy as he did when he was little, because to his adolescent mind, she comes home through the gate. He still hopes that if he is loyal to the sister who treated him so kindly that she will come back to take care of him as she used to. When Caddy lost her virginity, she bean to throw her brother, Benjy, who so idolized her, to secondary importance. This change effected Benjy, and his emotions took over so that Benjy kept trying to bring his sister back, unaware that she would not return to his side.
Caddy’s actions began to deteriorate the mental state of Quentin from the beginning of her changes and slowly, he began to lose all hope for the future. Quentin loved Caddy to the point that he would admit to the world that he had committed incest so that the world would reject them together. He is torn apart because he believes in the morals of the south and that women should be cautious with their bodies. He is proud of his heritage and wants to retain the stature that his family possessed in better times. When Quentin discovers the promiscuity of Caddy, it forces him to convince her that she never loved Dalton Ames and that she can overcome her promiscuity. Even after Quentin has gone back to Harvard, he cannot get his sister out of his mind, as shown when he fights a fellow Harvard student and loses, all to protect the names of sisters everywhere. Quentin tries, and fails to protect his sister from the real world, but realizes that he cannot keep her from something he, himself, does not understand. This realization drives him all the way to suicide because he cannot bear the disgrace of his family and the loss of his truly beloved sister because of her life choices. Caddy’s actions tears him to pieces to the point that death is a better outlet than fretting about every instance that had occurred when Caddy lost her virginity, became pregnant, and married a man she didn’t love in order to cover her pregnancy.
The Compson family is distraught over the choices that Caddy has made, and though they were not wholly normal before her actions, the knowledge of her losing her virginity and becoming pregnant out of wedlock is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Caddy was the finishing moment that tore the family to pieces and put her brothers out of their minds (733).
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