The Power of Women in Gabriel García Márquez’s World

A palette of vibrant and resilient female characters delineates García Márquez’s work. His heroines are the material and spiritual axis of families and communities whose survival depends on women’s most ordinary skills as much as on the supernatural expressions of their strength, fecundity, and knowledge. Yet echoing the tensions surrounding women and women’s power in Caribbean and Latin American cultures, most of García Márquez’s protagonists are primarily defined by their roles in the lives of the men they are intimately linked to. A complex hierarchy of women, and men, emerges from those intimate relationships. This article delves into García Márquez’s portrayal of women both to celebrate his powerful female protagonists and to explore the contradictions that the notions of gender, love, and sexuality embedded in his work impose on women’s bodies and subjectivities. Although many of his characters are fully desiring women reluctant to surrender their autonomy and their right to pleasure, those who openly defy social conventions or fail to subjugate their desires to the needs and initiatives of men are often faced by a variety of reprisals, ranging from isolation to magical disappearances and not excluding physical violence and death. Beyond the private negotiations of power, affective and sexual relations in García Márquez’s work speak of the intimate anchors of social (public) power. By grounding the reading of García Marquez’s women in studies of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean, this article also contributes to the analysis of two other major topics of his work, power and love.