Sign in with Facebook
Madeline's Reviews > Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera
by
by
LET ME EXPLAIN, GUYS.
Okay. I like Marquez. I think his writing is beautiful, his settings are evocative and masterfully portrayed, and yes, his books are pretty romantic, and I always enjoy magical realism (this one could have used more of that last bit, though). The last twenty pages of the book even manged to suck me into the romance of the story, and I found myself finally really invested in this love story instead of being vaguely creeped out (we'll get there). Look, I even found a really nice passage to quote:
"It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."
See? That's fucking beautiful, and even if I didn't like the story itself, I still liked the writing. So call off the dogs, Marquez apologists, and let's get to the ranting portion of the review.
Fair warning to all who proceed past this point: I am preparing to don my Feminist Rage hat and shout about rape culture. Those who plan to leave mean comments calling me an idiot or telling me that I misunderstood the book, remember that you were warned. BEWARE, FOR HERE BE DRAGONS AND ANGRY FEMINISTS.
Here's something I learned about myself while reading this: I have absolutely no patience for books about obsession disguised as love. I hated it in Twilight, I hated it in Wuthering Heights, I hated it in The Phantom of the Opera, and I hated it here. It would be one thing, I decided, if Fermina Daza felt as passionately about Florentino Ariza as he felt about her. But she didn't love him. For her, their romance was a brief fling in her teens, and she stopped loving him when she returned from her trip. She continued not loving him, until he wears her down (after writing her letters constantly despite her explicitly telling him to fuck off out of her life) and she basically shrugs her shoulders and says, fine, might as well.
The lesson men can take from this book is that if a woman says "no" (as Fermina frequently and clearly says to Florentino), she really means, "make me change my mind." NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE. THIS PHILOSOPHY IS NOT OKAY AND IT IS WHY RAPE CULTURE EXISTS. NO MEANS FUCKING NO, EVERYBODY. IF A WOMAN TELLS YOU TO LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE. IT IS NOT ROMANTIC TO OBSESS ABOUT HER FOR FIFTY YEARS, IT IS CREEPY.
And OF COURSE Florentino still fucks anything that moves while claiming to be in love with Fermina, because he is a man and that's just how it works. Which leads me to my next ranting point: this book romanticizes rape.
(you can still get out, guys - it's only going to get worse from here)
First there was the intensely unsettling way Florentino loses his virginity: while traveling on a ship, a woman drags him into her cabin and forces him to have sex with her. Then Florentino falls in love with her. Because of course he does. I was willing to chalk this scene up to the common misconception that men cannot be sexually assaulted because men are horny dogs who are always up for sex no matter what - fine, whatever, I'll let it go. But then later, a minor female character describes the time she got raped, and I'm going to let you guys read this while I do yoga breaths in the corner and count to ten slowly:
"When she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so she could die of love in his arms."
...
Once more with feeling: NOPE.
AND THEN, as the creepy pedophilic cherry on top of this rape sundae, Florentino's last affair is with a child. When he is in his sixties. The best part is that he doesn't even use the classic pedophile's defense of "yes, she's young, but she ACTS like a grown woman!" No, Florentino sees that this child is going to be smoking hot when she grows up, and decides that he can't wait that long. Then this passage happens:
"She was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees, but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse."
The hero of Love in the Time of Cholera, ladies and gentlemen. Let's give him a round of applause.
If anyone wants to join me in the corner, I will be staying here for the rest of the week.
Okay. I like Marquez. I think his writing is beautiful, his settings are evocative and masterfully portrayed, and yes, his books are pretty romantic, and I always enjoy magical realism (this one could have used more of that last bit, though). The last twenty pages of the book even manged to suck me into the romance of the story, and I found myself finally really invested in this love story instead of being vaguely creeped out (we'll get there). Look, I even found a really nice passage to quote:
"It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."
See? That's fucking beautiful, and even if I didn't like the story itself, I still liked the writing. So call off the dogs, Marquez apologists, and let's get to the ranting portion of the review.
Fair warning to all who proceed past this point: I am preparing to don my Feminist Rage hat and shout about rape culture. Those who plan to leave mean comments calling me an idiot or telling me that I misunderstood the book, remember that you were warned. BEWARE, FOR HERE BE DRAGONS AND ANGRY FEMINISTS.
Here's something I learned about myself while reading this: I have absolutely no patience for books about obsession disguised as love. I hated it in Twilight, I hated it in Wuthering Heights, I hated it in The Phantom of the Opera, and I hated it here. It would be one thing, I decided, if Fermina Daza felt as passionately about Florentino Ariza as he felt about her. But she didn't love him. For her, their romance was a brief fling in her teens, and she stopped loving him when she returned from her trip. She continued not loving him, until he wears her down (after writing her letters constantly despite her explicitly telling him to fuck off out of her life) and she basically shrugs her shoulders and says, fine, might as well.
The lesson men can take from this book is that if a woman says "no" (as Fermina frequently and clearly says to Florentino), she really means, "make me change my mind." NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE. THIS PHILOSOPHY IS NOT OKAY AND IT IS WHY RAPE CULTURE EXISTS. NO MEANS FUCKING NO, EVERYBODY. IF A WOMAN TELLS YOU TO LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE. IT IS NOT ROMANTIC TO OBSESS ABOUT HER FOR FIFTY YEARS, IT IS CREEPY.
And OF COURSE Florentino still fucks anything that moves while claiming to be in love with Fermina, because he is a man and that's just how it works. Which leads me to my next ranting point: this book romanticizes rape.
(you can still get out, guys - it's only going to get worse from here)
First there was the intensely unsettling way Florentino loses his virginity: while traveling on a ship, a woman drags him into her cabin and forces him to have sex with her. Then Florentino falls in love with her. Because of course he does. I was willing to chalk this scene up to the common misconception that men cannot be sexually assaulted because men are horny dogs who are always up for sex no matter what - fine, whatever, I'll let it go. But then later, a minor female character describes the time she got raped, and I'm going to let you guys read this while I do yoga breaths in the corner and count to ten slowly:
"When she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so she could die of love in his arms."
...
Once more with feeling: NOPE.
AND THEN, as the creepy pedophilic cherry on top of this rape sundae, Florentino's last affair is with a child. When he is in his sixties. The best part is that he doesn't even use the classic pedophile's defense of "yes, she's young, but she ACTS like a grown woman!" No, Florentino sees that this child is going to be smoking hot when she grows up, and decides that he can't wait that long. Then this passage happens:
"She was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees, but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse."
The hero of Love in the Time of Cholera, ladies and gentlemen. Let's give him a round of applause.
If anyone wants to join me in the corner, I will be staying here for the rest of the week.
4913 likes · Like
�
flag
Sign into Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to see if any of your friends have read
Love in the Time of Cholera.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Comments Showing 1-50 of 696 (696 new)
message 1:
by
De
(new)
Aug 08, 2013 11:52AM
Thank you for taking this bullet so that i will NEVER have to read this book.
reply
|
flag
lol (if it's ok to laugh here) you perfectly pointed out all the issues i had with this book while reading it some 15 years ago. but i still can't give it less than 4 stars, despite all that pissing me off in Florentino.
Soo funny. A few other reviewers that I respect said about the same, so I watched the movie instead. Oooh, but those beautiful quotes! The idea of someone getting so whipped on someone for such a long time is what draws all the unrequited readers into the web. It's really a story about obsession. Agree:)
There are many times when I think women cry "rape culture" where it doesn't really belong. Sometimes, a guy is acting like a jerk, but that doesn't mean he's acting like a rapist. However, I think your review is SPOT ON. And what's more, I never really could put a finger on all the reasons I didn't really like this story until now. The prose was gorgeous, but I didn't like the story itself. And this is a big part of that reason, I think. It just didn't sit well with me.
Thank you, this can now safely go on my "probably won't read" list.
There are many times when I think women cry "rape culture" where it doesn't really belong. Sometimes, a guy is acting like a jerk, but that doesn't mean he's acting like a rapist.Teaching moment!
"Rape culture" is not men acting like jerks. Rape culture is colleges telling freshman girls to not dress provocatively and always travel in groups at night, rather than telling freshman boys not to rape. Rape culture is people asking a rape victim what she was wearing or how drunk she was when the attack occurred. Rape culture is the belief that women are chaste flowers who must be protected from the uncontrollable urges of savage men. Rape culture is the idea that women are "playing hard to get" when they are really saying no. Rape culture is strangers telling me I should smile. Rape culture is the belief that sex is conquest.
(As you can see, I still have my Feminist Rage hat firmly affixed to my head. I've been trying to get it off since writing this review, but the damn thing seems to be stuck)
I understand what rape culture is. What I am saying is that I have often heard women talk about rape culture when it isn't the case. I've heard the term being used too loosely, and I think that's a dangerous slope. I've heard people throw the term around when what they really mean is guys being crass or whatever. A guy talking about how sexually attractive he finds someone may be objectifying her, but thy doesn't mean he wants to rape her. (I would also argue that you can find someone sexually attractive without objectifying them but that's another argument for another day.) And I've heard several people go down that road.
I loved the prose so much that I kind of bypassed how creepy some of the story was. The whole thing was just too romantic for me to hate. The part where he had the affair with the child was completely gross but for me that was the worst of it. I love your review though. Especially the comment about the pedophilic rape sundae :) I must say I also loved withering heights, maybe it speaks volumes about the way I love or want to be loved. what a disturbing thought.
Sorry if my comment seemed mean, Sarah - I really didn't intend it to come off as high-and-mighty as it sounded. I got called a cunt by a commenter on another review yesterday, and it's still making me feel angry and combative.
For the next book I recommend 'In Praise of the Stepmother' by Llosa ;-)
Wait... Rape culture is strangers telling you you should smile? I don't follow.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It took me over 6 months to finish this book, not because I'm a slow reader, but because I kept having to stop, breathe into a bag and read something else until I was calm enough to come back to it. Thanks for articulating what's wrong with this "romance" so well! Keep that Feminist hat on!
Thanks Madeleine, you certainly made me see this book differently. This unfortunately a recurring theme in GGM books but had not understood why I found it uncomfortable. Thanks for pointing it out.
I remember loathing and detesting this book when I read it twenty years ago and everyone telling me how beautiful and romantic it was. I hated it. I just thought, 'it's Spanish'. And that's what I still think, especially after having read some Isabelle Allende, which I also hated and was also told was beautiful and romantic. I also hated A Hundred Years of Solitude, which could easily be the title here instead, as well as Three Hundred Pages of Utter Death. Hang on. I liked Blood Wedding by Lorca and he is Spanish too; all Lorca as it happens, but he's rather vivid and insane, and everyone goes berserk with social restrictions and he is a poet, so. I'd like your view on Lorca because he seems more close to the knuckle and not soppy shit like this dull, remorselessly dull, sententious, Love in the Time of Blathera insult to Literature and Love and all the rest of it. I'm with you on rape culture though. That's not really why I hated the book. I just thought it was boring, and he was boring, and and he definitely didn't love her, and most people don't love each other and that is why they find these sorts of books romantic, because they endlessly spin out trying, boring, nonsensical faddy non-love situations because two minutes together and the cracks would show, as would the rape and all the rest of it, and yes, all women should dress as hookers and most men shouldn't be allowed to have sex at all, not until they've proved they have a soul, and this book doesn't do that. And I'm not quite sure any book does. Hamlet, maybe. Dante had the same thing about loving some woman he'd met once when he was nine, and turning her into this goddess who he never encountered as an adult - I think he saw her on a bridge once - till they joined up in Paradise and she told him what an ass he was, but that seemed to have greater reality to it. Nothing wrong with idealism. It may have been the cynicism posing as idealism I most hated here. He (the author) seems to want us to let him (Florentino) off the entire time, FOR this dubious love thing, and she just gets passed from man to man like a potato side dish. Had no value at all. Wuthering Heights is all right though - she does go off with Edgar Linton, so, deserves all she gets and SO WHAT if Heathcliff drives that other bimbo insane and uses her for the drab she is? I'd do exactly the same, but 'I am Heathcliff' (op. cit). The point here, the problem here, is that this is just some overweight, smug, unscrupulous, weak-minded fool with no emotion above the kind of thing you feel for an expensive pastry, trying to make out he's got some specialised take on passion, and he ought to just shut up.
Wait a minute, you hated this book but liked Wuthering Heights? That makes no sense to me.
Madeline wrote: "Wait a minute, you hated this book but liked Wuthering Heights? That makes no sense to me."Have you reviewed Wuthering Heights? It isn't a terrific favourite and it is very flawed, but I rather liked those two rushing about on the moors together, yes. It doesn't bear comparison to this book. Do you feel it's following the same prescript of obsession termed as love? I thought they proved they were soulmates, so had every right to be as obsessed as they liked, even beyond the grave. Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't do that; no mutuality is established whatsoever, still less any expression of identity that has found its reflection in another, and I do think Wuthering Heights establishes both those things. Do you think it doesn't, or do you think it's just too far-fetched? Or what.
I think Kathy and Heathcliff were both sociopaths and therefore incapable of feeling actual love. Obsession was as close as they were able to get.
I will re-read the book with this in mind. But she is a genius, no? Or no.
Oh, I don't deny that even I swooned at Cathy's speech about how she and Heathcliff share a soul, and their final scene together was breathtaking. The book is really good, I just hate how everyone misinterprets it as a beautiful love story when it's really a horror story of two crazy people who destroy everything they touch.
Two perfectly matched sociopaths fall into mutual obsession and ruin lives happily ever after. Does it get any more romantic than that?
Now now. If they like each other, this is fine stuff. They just shouldn't get involved with other people; nor DO they, or want to, except when forced to - that's what the book is about! But I have always held - and I doubt my view will change even on an enlightened re-reading - that everyone else was plain boring, stupid, evil, or bourgeois in a pernicious way - far more destructive than either of them at any rate. ('The dogs bite and draw blood in Thrushcross Grange but not in Wuthering Heights', op cit.) Edgar Linton is just a poisonous little pageboy in a murderous doll-house, and if we followed his way, it really would be A Doll's House, the Ibsen one, or maybe the House of Dolls one. At least Cathy gets, uh, exercise, with the outcast, 'the little black thing in the snow'. And Heathcliff? I hate everything he hates. I agree with these people. They're not sociopaths if they feel passion. Sociopaths feel nothing at all but perilous social rules and bankrupt animosity. Edgar Linton's the sociopath. Behaving well doth not a good man make.I'm very concerned, however, that I may have misread this book. I generally do not misread things, and I generally agree with Madeleine. So I will re-read it and I will re-read it with extreme exactitude. It is possible that I just do like horror stories and crazy people, but I think it's a bit off to see two people with expressive personalities surrounded by insensitive dullards as insane or evil. Cathy does die as a result of repression of personality, stuck in some suburban stereotypical nightmare, so I wouldn't call HER the destructive one, and I just don't think anyone else feels anything aside from social climbing, respectability, good manners, and murdering off emotion - if anything it's about the lack of empathy in society versus the untrammelled soul, at least that is what I always thought.
What's your view on Jane Austen? I am dreading your reply.
And the romanticization of pain! Do not forget the romanticization of pain :)
It's hard for me to disagree with you, especially because I am in tone with all the issues you had with the story and what it represents. However, I must come in defense of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and say that the ''realism'' in ''magical realism'' still works. The book illustrates a plausible love story from the late XIX-Century Colombia, and perhaps the author was not worried in apply our current moral standards to his work.
I share with you all your outrages, but it is important to put the story into its socio-historical perspective. Marquez's objective definitely wasn't to simply to tell a generic love story from some random place in time, it was to symbolize love as a plague (the cholera), a desease that consumed Florentino until the end, and caused suffering all around him through his aging.
It was a highly detailed and realist account, speckled with colorfulness and darkness for ambience's sake, and the omniscience of the narrator does not engage in moral judgements.
But I can totally understand that, even taking all of that into account, it is hard to simply bypass those social issues.
I criticize Marquez's portrayal of sexual assault as romantic and you dismiss it as "current moral standards"?Arthur, people have been horrified by rape from Year One.
I read Arthur's account as symbolic, and even there it still doesn't work in presenting the protagonist as suffering from anything at all but egomania and self-satisfied delusion, yet both those things entirely with authorial approval. I have to say I missed 'current moral standards' and 'social issues' but I think I'd overturn all that if the book was what he says it is, as Othello, for example, is a play in which a man ends up murdering his wife and none of us, including Shakespeare, think that's a wise move, however besotted Othello is with notions of sacrifice and justice. There we are given a heap of symbolic reasons and a huge emotional plethora of psychic damage and never once do I feel, as I feel all the way through Love in the Time of Cholera, that I am dealing with someone who is pleased with himself and not someone tortured by his own complaint. There would be no problem with depictions of rape, stalkerdom or anything else were it not for the fact that the protagonist is a smug bastard who thinks what he's doing is right, as does his author.
Matilda wrote: "I read Arthur's account as symbolic, and even there it still doesn't work in presenting the protagonist as suffering from anything at all but egomania and self-satisfied delusion, yet both those th..."I completely agree.
However, Marquez and Shakespeare are different authors with different approachs. Florentino is not Othello, he is a pathetic simpleton, too thick to even notice his own impropriety. His obssession exacerbates precisely what his social ambient allows, and the realism of that situation allows for him a chance of a happy ending after all, independently of all our outrage regarding his conduct.
I must say that, even though I didn't like the book, I do love when authors allow a good chuck of randomness to cause some deep injustice. Simply enough, a hugely flawed, almost unlikeble character had a good closure. No conveniences for the reader, no deus ex machinas, just the inequity of reality.
That's all I'm defending here, since Garcia Marquez's sexism is undeniable, although calling him apologist of rape and pedophilia may be too much.
Madeline wrote: "I criticize Marquez's portrayal of sexual assault as romantic and you dismiss it as "current moral standards"?Arthur, people have been horrified by rape from Year One."
Once again, see the issue with a socio-historical contextual eye. Humans have not been horrified by rape since ''year one''; in fact rape was acceptable (for husbands) through most of human history; and the scene of the girl that was raped on the rocks wasn't even counted as rape, for the sexist society always assumed that the woman took it with pleasure, and so does the narrator, realistically, for our unconfortableness. After all, rape culture in the sense of blaming the victim and sex as a conquest (as you put it) was as real in the times of the cholera as it is now.
I'm not saying you shouldn't feel disgust for the Florentino, or the story, or even Marquez (I felt aswell)... but just to consider that maybe the author was not worried to fulfill our modern generic conceptions of love, and risked towards something that would instead make people unconfortable regarding how a (not so)different socio-historical context dealt with love.
It's all in the title: ''love as an illness in a socio-historical context.''
PS. I wasn't gonna mention pedophilia as historically acceptable because Mohammad. =P
Let me rephrase: women have been horrified by rape from Year One.
I'm reading Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch and there is quite a bit of rape in that book too. Almost just brushing it aside type of thing.
Yes, Marquez tends to have that attitude towards rape, doesn't he?
But so do a lot of people. I think this is partly to do with the stress laid on the desirability of innocence, which valorises coercion; the more brutal the better and the younger and less competent the victim. While the idea of purity reigns, we will have more than just rape in books but state-legislated rape and legalised pedophilia. Right now a law is being drafted in Iraq that will allow girls as young as nine to be married to adult men and submit to their every whim: I'd say this was 'just abroad' were it not that it chimes in so well with the general horror and disgust at female sexuality, the rise of porn, which limits emotional content and discredits the soul, the overwhelming amount of sexual desire for children, and all that's left is to legalise this rather than making these feeble attempts to see any of it as offensive. Too many people believe it's right; it will take very little to simply get everyone to vote in favour of what they want rather than the reverse. A book like this is representative of a common belief, not an aberration or mere fantasy.
I am reading this book.Do you think it is good?
Destiny Nicole Iwaniusz wrote: "I am reading this book.Do you think it is good?"Well Destiny Nicole, Madeleine marks it as 2 out of 5, explains that its philosophy is repulsive, and much of the argument on the page goes on to express the view that it's a pretty bad book. So why ask? It's a terrible book. But you don't seem to notice that. Not for yourself, and not when you read a review that slates it, and loads of other people commenting on the review do the same, in copious detail or en bref. Either you are prohibitively stupid or you're just here to annoy everyone. Or maybe just me. Well you DO annoy me. There's no point telling you anything. Read a cookbook or maybe wander around with placard saying: 'I am an idiot. Do you think I should be shot for that reason or can you think of a use for me other than to pleasure killers?'
Sit down, Matilda. That was unnecessary.
Thank you for writing this! I am aware that it's not supposed to be the most pleasant story and maybe the author wanted us to dislike Florentino Ariza or at least feel uncomfortable with his conduct (the sexual assault of the housemaid & extreme emphasis of America Vicuna's youth and childishness), but I hate how so many reviews seem to be rooting for Florentino Ariza to get the "girl"/trophy while waxing on about unrequited love without even acknowledging these horrible things he's done, except for maybe mentioning that he is "sex-crazed" with a dark seductive nature. I definitely agree that the way the text frames rape and consent is problematic and indicative of rape culture in our own society (Florentino Ariza's theory that women just want to be worn down, Florentino, Leona Cassiani & America Vicuna enjoying being sexually assaulted). However, the biggest indicator of rape culture in relation to this book is how this story is interpreted and portrayed in reviews and within our own current culture. In trying to get my head around this book I have read numerous reviews which characterise the relations with America Vicuna as scandalous or indicative of the dark side of Florentino's seductive character. Florentino Ariza is a disgusting lech, rapist, child molester and obsessive stalker but due to our society's habit of apologising and making excuses for rapists, he can be interpreted as "lovesick"
Point for point, could not have said it better myself. I was furious at the end that Florentino doesn't die of cholera. That's the ending I was holding out hope for.
Wow! How intense!! Love it, I heard about this book at school as being the most romantic story of all(I grew up in Spain) obviously Spanish mentality is slightly different and seen more like "easy going"... I just started reading it so will give my opinion when I'm done... :)
Do you think Marquez felt Florentine was a flawed character?
You can't judge slavery the way it appeared in the books Roots or Gone With the Wind by current standards. Just like you can't judge this book by today's rape culture standards. I mean you CAN, but what is the sense in doing so? It's a STORY illustrative of the time and place in which it was set. Getting all indignant about rape culture in times past does not change the facts. Women were chattel not that long ago.
Please tell me, Lisa, at what point in history I am allowed to be "indignant" about rape culture. What is the cutoff? Give me a specific year.
ALSO. Hang on, so I'm not allowed to get upset about slavery because it was "illustrative of the time and place in which it was set"? I have news for you, dear: there were abolitionists when Roots and Gone With the Wind were taking place, so not everybody was cool with slavery, even back in Ye Olde Tymes. And more to the point, the people who were actually enslaved when those books were taking place were most likely VERY NOT COOL with slavery, and saying that we shouldn't get upset about those issues because they were just a symptom of the times completely negates their experience.
Lisa asks, " Just like you can't judge this book by today's rape culture standards. I mean you CAN, but what is the sense in doing so?"The "sense" is called critical thinking. I am reading 100 Years of Solitude and clearly the author was a critical thinker about many things and even had respect for the strength of the matriarch to keep things going while the men played cards or war--excluding sex. His thinking about sex was from a cartoon stereotype of the caveman era.
Sent too soon: and that cartoon stereotype was/is very abusive of women's bodies. Too many teen boys still have it. Critical thinking might actually make a dent one of these years.
I think you can judge the abhorrent social ISSUES in the book, but I do not think it is productive to judge the LITERARY VALUE of a book based on social issues which are subject matter of the book. A current example to illustrate my point: the movie Twelve years a Slave-the subject matter is a social issue which is abhorrent, however, the film itself cannot be dismissed as BAD because the viewer is hates slavery. Follow?
You can be indignant about rape culture all you want and whenever you want. Just remember great works of literature may have uncomfortable subject matter, but that in no way lessens their LITERARY greatness!
Lisa: my problem was not that the book had instances of rape. My problem was that I was supposed to root for the main character, despite the fact that his feelings for Fermina were not reciprocated, his pursuit of her was not appreciated, and she only ended up with him because he wore her down. My problem is a minor character telling a story about how she fell in love with her rapist and we as the reader are just supposed to accept that as romantic. My problem is the overall message of this love story, which seems to be "when a woman says no, this is an invitation to change her mind."To use your own example, no one tried to portray the slaveowners in 12 Years A Slave as the heroes.
