Instructions:

Your responses should be comprehensive and exploratory, addressing ambiguities, symbolic

meaning, specific language, or resonances with other passages from the text. Also, think about
how each quote makes you feel or think about the speaker, or affects how you feel or think about
the drama itself.

Selected Passage:

“Angela Vicario was the prettiest of the four, and my mother said that she had been born like the
great queens of history, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But she had a helpless
air and poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for her” (32).

In this passage the narrator begins to describe the enigma that is Angela Vicario.
Previously, the reader has been informed that Angela Vicario has been “raised to suffer” in a
strict household dominated by traditional gender roles. Luisa Santiaga, Marquez’s voice of
matriarchal wisdom, seems to imply that Angela’s unique, queen-like beauty stems from the
experience of suffering from her very first breath. This implication reinforces the belief that what
makes women in this community desirable is determined by their propensity to suffer. Angela’s
difficult birth endowed her with a predisposition to suffer thus making her a remarkably
desirable bride. Yet, the narrator foreshadows uncertainty and potential marital trouble
“augured” by Angela’s “helpless air” and “poverty of spirit”. He appears to think suffering has
taken a toll on Angela - she is helpless, depressed, and constricted - thus the reader is left
questioning what has she done, what will she do, and why?