Epiphany to Late-Flowering Love: A Psychoanalytical Reading of Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera

Abstract

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera primarily deals with the anatomy of illusory and immature love, and its psychological impact on the characters in a physical world or society where rules, norms, systems, etc. are of crucial significance. Since it deals with the psychological and biological aspect of the characters, its prime emphasis is on the explication of the individual characters and their formation of identity or subjectivity in a restrictive society. In other words, love is treated psychoanalytically in the novel, for it delineates how the protagonists or main characters named Dr. Juvenal Urbino, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza have spent the life of illusion and hence suffer from neurosis as one would suffer from Cholera. Florentino's unrequited love for the haughty, stubborn Fermina brings psychological upheavals in him when she goes and marries another man, Dr. Urbino. Florentino suffers from this as he might suffer from any fatal disease and conflates his physical agony with amorous agony. He spends whole life vowing eternal fidelity and everlasting love for Fermina Daza though he makes hundreds of sexual encounters with other women in pursuit of solace. Ultimately his suffering ends to some extent after the union with the lady of his heart after Fermina's husband Dr. Juvenal Urbino's accidental death. They come to the epiphany or realization of the significance of mutual love for jubilant and stable life. Their love blooms late in their old age, however, they have not utterly deserved their solid identity because they have started the journey without destination in a sea. So they are still in the process of 'enunciation'.