Like Water for Chocolate: Symbols: Onions and Tears

Chapter 3: March  In Chapter 3 of Like Water for Chocolate , Onions and Tears were not featured at all.  To summarize this chapter:  The chapter started with Tita preparing a dish of quail in rose sauce, with the roses coming from Pedro (she was forced to get rid of these roses by Mama Elena, and so Tita decided to use them in a meal). When she served this dish, each family member had a different reaction. Mama Elena hated, Rosaura was made sick it, Tita longed for it, Pedro hailed it as a gift from the gods, and poor Gertrudis got stuck in the middle of the transfer of emotions and feelings between Tita and Pedro. This was caused by Tita's blood being absorbed into and infused with the roses used in the rose sauce for the quail. This overloaded Gertrudis' senses, and she tried to deal with this by taking a cool shower. She worked hard to get the shower running, carrying water back and forth in order to make the shower work correctly. The work put stress on h...

Chapter Two In this chapter, the family is getting ready for the big wedding between Rosaura and Pedro. Nancha and Tita have landed the task of preparing the wedding cake, but since Tita is so sad about the whole event, she can't stop crying. Her tears get in the cake batter, but luckily they don't effect texture or taste of the cake. Tita seems to be going crazy because she thinks she hears a live chick in one of the eggs and she can't even tell that Nancha added food coloring to the icing. Nancha sends her off to bed. While all this is going on with Tita, Nancha has flashbacks  to her past when she also wasn't allowed to marry her fiancé. Tita had planned to avoid Pedro the entire day in order to keep herself together, except her plan fails when she bumps into him in the kitchen. They have an awkward conversation before Tita quickly escapes. Once the wedding guests start arriving, everyone is just loving the drama of the situation and gossip floats around. Tita st...

In chapter one, we met many, many characters including Tita, Great Grandma (Tita's mother), and Nacha (the cook). We saw the symbol of "Onions & Tears" in the very beginning during Tita's childhood. Tita always cried very, very loudly when anyone would cut onions, even while she was in her mother's womb. She cried so hard one day that it induced an early labor and she came out crying. We're not sure, but as of right now, we think that perhaps onions are a indicator for sadness. "She was already crying as she emerged; maybe that was because she knew that it would be her lot in life to be denied marriage." This gives evidence as to why onions represent sadness/hopelessness. Tita was literally born into the role of her mothers future caretaker, preventing her from leading a desirable life.

Hi, everyone! Our names are Caroline, Cordi, Maeve, and Sebastian. We got assigned "Onions and tears" for our symbol in the book Like Water for Chocolate.