Étude du roman L'Amour aux temps du choléra de Colombien Gabriel García Márquez

Fermina's Lovers (in the Time of Cholera)

I know it is rough, but I want to make sure the idea is good and that there is sufficient evidence. It is not as good as it could be, but essays are not my forte. Italicized points are sorts of questions. For the title, I was also thinking of "Fermina's Loves (in the Time of Cholera)"

Throughout Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fermina Daza (Fermina) has loved only two men: Dr Juvenal Urbino (Urbino) and Florentino Ariza (Florentino). She found the love between Florentino and herself, as adolescents, to be childish and immature. Eventually she married Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a wealthy doctor; he grew to love her but she was ambivalent, though she did feel like she loved him dearly. After Dr. Juvenal Urbino's death, Florentino courted Fermina and she began to love Florentino once again, in a fuller sense. Fermina Daza falls in love with two characters, who exhibit very few similarities and many stark contrasts.

As every novel is, Love in the Time of Cholera is open to interpretation, and Marquez's intentions for his novel are ambiguous. Marquez may have included Fermina's love of two opposite people to show that love has no concrete definition and can be experienced by anyone at any time in many different ways.

Both Urbino and Ariza continue to work in their old age. Urbino works as a doctor still performing house calls; Ariza is the president of the River Company of the Caribbean (RCC). Florentino is happy with his old age and sees it as just time spent waiting for Urbino to die so that he can be with Fermina. Urbino was unsure whether or not he "agreed with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour that old age was an indecent state that had to be ended before it was too late" (40). Although "he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age"(8), "He took something every hour … because … it was easier for him to bear other people’s pains than his own"(8). He was scared of the effects of old age, yet tried to keep it "always in secret" (8). Urbino was unwilling to accept things would change as he got older.

Attire and appearance are very important to Urbino and Florentino. Florentino dressed in "a dark suit with a vest, a silk bow tie and a celluloid collar, a felt hat, and a shiny black umbrella that he also used a walking stick" (48), "which was how he always dressed"(48). He dressed this way to impress and display class. it can be interpreted that he dressed in Urbino appeared very fancy because he wanted to appear immaculate. Urbino's "horse-drawn carriage was distinguishable from the handful left in the city because the patent-leather roof was always kept polished, and it had fittings of bronze … and wheels and poles painted red with gilt trimming like gala nights at the Vienna Opera. […] he still required his coachman to wear livery of faded velvet and a top hat"(12). This was to display his superior class and family name.

Urbino "was what he seemed: a useful… man"(pg 48). In fact, Fermina did not know "if their mutual dependence [in later life] was based on love or convenience". However, Fermina "preferred not to know the answer". This could show that although she does not admit it, she wants to believe he loves her so she can feel justified

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