Propriety, Sexuality, and Incest Theme Analysis

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, love and lust are inextricably tangled: familial love is confused with sexual love, husbands and wives have so little sexual chemistry that they must satisfy their urges with other partners, and the parentage of many characters is kept secret, heightening the risk of incest. These complicated circumstances are caused by the characters’ misplaced dedication to propriety and social norms. Márquez suggests that if the characters were more honest about their mistakes and desires, then their lives would be more straightforward and fulfilling.

Though the Buendía family is continually afraid of incest and its punishment (having children with a pig tail, as their incestuous ancestors did), their fear is not so strong as to overcome the power of their sexual attraction to their relatives. The patriarch of the family, José Arcadio Buendía, is the first character in the story to commit an act of incest when he marries his first cousin Úrsula Iguaran. Though the family warns them against marrying each other, José Arcadio Buendía says he doesn’t care if the child is born with a deformity because he loves Úrsula so completely; luckily, none of their children is born with the tail of a pig. There are negative social consequences to their union, though: José Arcadio Buendía kills Prudencio Aguilar for mocking him, and the couple leaves their hometown to found Macondo, a place where they won’t be judged. 

Throughout the story Márquez indicates that, despite the pervasive fear of a child with a pig tail, the real danger of incest comes from its social and psychological effects: causing divisions in the family and insecurity around the legitimacy of one’s parentage. For one, the Buendías’ inability to grow their family beyond its original bloodline exaggerates their isolation and solitude. Incest, in this context, keeps them from growing their community through intermarriage. And when characters do intermarry, it not only fails to incorporate new family members, but it also estranges old ones. For instance, when José Arcadio falls in love with his adopted sister, Rebeca, Úrsula disowns them. The couple is passionately in love with one another, and because the threat of the pig’s tail does not apply to their possible progeny (they’re brother and sister, but not by blood), they decide that their relationship is worth the sacrifice of the rest of their family.

In addition to these incestuous developments, many characters find themselves barred by social propriety from the person they love, a comment on the way that rules of decorum can end up causing more harm than good. Aureliano Segundo, for example, marries an outsider named Fernanda del Carpio to whom he is not physically suited, but Fernanda’s Catholicism causes her to refuse divorce and even look past his passionate affair with Petra Cotes. The passion between Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes has positive effects beyond just their mutual satisfaction, prompting extreme fertility in the livestock they raise together, a sort of proof from the natural world that they belong together, despite the fact that their community doesn’t accept their union. Furthermore, Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda’s daughter, Meme, has an illegitimate child named Aureliano through her passionate affair with Mauricio Babilonia. Fernanda insists on keeping the baby a secret, claiming he arrived out of nowhere in a basket and raising him as an orphan, never revealing his true parentage for the sake of social propriety.

This social shame takes Mauricio Babilonia’s life, destroys Meme’s, and creates secrecy about bloodline that results, finally, in the child with the tail of a pig. Despite generations of incestuous temptation, the first child born with this dreaded defect is born to Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula (who do not know they’re related), just before the city is destroyed by a hurricane. Both Amaranta Úrsula and the baby die shortly after birth, which seems to be a punishment for her and Aureliano’s sin, however unintentional. Incest, then, seems like a taboo that should be respected, as is pedophilia, since Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s young bride Remedios Moscote dies during pregnancy, perhaps a punishment for Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s pedophilic passion for her. Despite suggesting that the universe has some taboos that must be respected, though, Márquez generally shows that honesty and desire should take precedence over social propriety. Following social norms leads to unfulfilling relationships, shame, loneliness, and life-destroying secrecy.