In Love in the Time of Cholera, the author expresses Fermina as being someone who does not love. She only finds someone to fulfill her needs. At one point in the third chapter, the author says that she is haughty and that she inquires. She has never expressed the emotion of love. She is hardened. She has married someone who is willing to love her, instead of Florentino who is willing to love for the both of them. Dr. Urbino is young and lusted after; therefore, it is easy for Fermina to see that she would want someone that other people want. He is also successful which her father, and friends would like to see. She has married up in the world.
Her choice of marriage might mean nothing to her. This is the person for which she is suppose to grow old with. She grows to live with him, not love him. He has grown to love her for perhaps different reasons, maybe one of respect, or unity. She has never gotten the chemical feelings of love when she has been around him, only lust. This book divulges into the differences with Florentino especially. He is beginning to try to fill the void that Fermina has created. She is living her life as she needs to, but is too naive to realize that she is missing love. How is she to know what love feels like, or if it even exists? She has been hardened from the experience with Florentino. She thought she loved him, but from her father making her leave him, she created an elaborate illusion in which reality was not better.
Love is not definable. It has no boundaries. You cannot even call it love for that is setting it into a binary to love someone, and to not. There are all kinds of degrees of love. A person can only give out so much of one kind. Fermina gave out her heart to Florentino, and she has not discovered that she has given it out yet. She is living life to its standards. Love has no standards, and the reader pities Fermina for her lack of experience with love. Florentino is driven by it. He cannot seem to get rid of it. She has tried to fill it as well, but they are both being told at different ends of the story still attached by each running paragraph.
1 comment:
Caitie--as always, you've got me thinking after I read your blog. I'm not sure I agree that Fermina does not love (we know that the first thing she thinks when she hears the doctor fall from the ladder is something like Dear God don't let him die before I tell him how much I love him. But perhaps you mean the younger Fermina, and I'm trying to remember what the narrator wants us to think about her heart. I think her position limits her emotions to some extent: love and marriage are really two separate things in her experience (not that she's allowed to have much experience at all).
But then you seem also to suggest that having given her heart to Florentino and then rejected him, she has no heart left to give the doctor. Or am I misquoting you?
One last question: you said, "She has never gotten the chemical feelings of love when she has been around him, only lust." I didn't quite get the point you were trying to make there.
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