100 Years of Solitude (Chapters 11-15)

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Significance of Fernanda

Fernanda's mother told her that she would be a queen one day and she believed it. Even the nuns at school said that she was going to be a queen. Her husband sleeps with Petra Cotes and says "that he had to do it so that the animals would keep on breeding." Fernanda pretended that she did not know the truth about Petra. Fernanda tried to impose on the family and impose the customs of her ancestors. She put an end to the eating in the kitchen and said that they should eat in the dining room. I think she kind of represents a foreigner who is trying to change the ways of the Buendia household, just as everything else in the novel is trying to make changes in Macondo. She tries to impose her ways to get them to see that what they are doing is wrong and they need to go outside of their family for once.

Arrival of modern inventions in Macondo

The people of Macondo were dazzled by the inventions. Marquez writes, "it was if God had decided to put the test to every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay" (224). The people do not know what to believe because they are always experiencing tragedy. When the railroad was built, a ticket window was built and a wooden station with a desk and a telephone. There were agronomists, hydrologists, topographers, and surveyors. The people of Macondo were suspicious of these people and thought they had something to do with the war. So many changes had taken place that the inhabitants had a hard time recognizing their own town. Aureliano Segundo was happy about the avanlanche of foreigners that came into Macondo. Colonel Aureliano Buendia did not feel the same way. He shut himself into his room because he felt like the foreigners were not really interested in greeting him because of sympathy. Ursula became excited every time the train came around. Remedios the beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague. She was happy in her own world of simple realities (229). She didn't understand why women wore corsets and petticoats. Men desired her, even when she shaved her head and did not do what the other women were doing.