ABSTRACT
In Laura Esquivel's magical realist novel, Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) space and time creates a reality that is constructed around the activities of cooking and eating and that are informed by medical discourses related to illness, death, madness and healing. Food and eating are essential to self-identity and are instrumental in the definition of family, class and ethnicity. This chapter argues that Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate exemplifies how the interaction of love, sickness and healing facilitates the discursive circulation of the female narrator's reflections on a legacy of gendered, political and cultural conflict and by extension, how the writing act effects a therapeutic self-reconciliation. The novel's physical consequences, viewed through a medical and scientific representation of the body by means of illness, injury, treatment and death focus especially on physical and cultural pathologies and on the psychological effects that self-manifest in destructive social behaviour.
