The present study on the novel Love in the Time of Cholera is a critique of idealized
patriarchal concept of love divided into higher and debased love by Freud. Love in the
novel is predominantly physical and sexual in nature that involves the politics of body and eroticism by creating what Freidan calls feminine mystique. Love, omnipotent in the novel, is choleric in nature showing multi-facets of structured sexuality ranging from extramarital violations to child abuse. The novel projects intensive display of genderism and patriarchal sexual fetishes that gratify whatever masculinity can possibly imagine. There is noticeable narrative indifference towards the women presented as weaklings fallible to commercialized sex, pretty fit in their gender role exhibiting internalized sexual oppression and violence. Florentino has been promoted as an indefatigable stud and celebrated macho with magically exaggerated virility and inexhaustible libido. He has deconstructed the concept of virginity where one may have many partners but still is a virgin as one could not conquer the desired womb. The multifarious sexual violations of women, celebrated as debased love in the text, is to be mourned in the world where textualization of amour is all about sexualisation and sensationalization of female bodies resulting into exclusion of authentic female images except the character of Leona Cassiani who resists patriarchal assumptions.
The character of Bertha Mason has been stereotyped as a “madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Bronte’s novel “Jane Eyre (1847).” Jean Rhys in her novel “Wide Sargasso Sea (1966),” has tried to re-inscribe her character as Antoinette by analyzing how the imperialist and patriarchal forces led a woman from the wide world of Sargasso Sea to the attic of Thornfield Hall England. My contention to this corrective process of rewriting as rerighting is that, in an effort to authenticate Antoinette’s character, this writing has othered Annette, Antoinette’s mother, and has, in return, created another madwoman who has been left unattended in the plot that should have written back to the canon instead of furthering canonical images.
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