Love and Patriarchy Theme Analysis

From its opening lines, Pedro Páramo invokes the classical association between identity and paternity: Juan Preciado seeks out his estranged father, Pedro Páramo, in order to cope with his mother Dolores’s death and claim the property that is his birthright. But Pedro Páramo is dead, and everyone in Comala is also Pedro’s descendant, giving them an equal claim to Pedro’s land. Juan learns that Pedro exercised absolute power over all the women and property in Comala—but then destroyed the town precisely by becoming its patriarch. Through his misogynist, possessive, patriarchal view of love and family, Pedro also erodes his own capacity to give, receive, or recognize genuine love. As a large-scale version of a traditional nuclear family structure, the town of Comala shows how patriarchal social and family structures, in which men possess and control women and property, are both profoundly violent and fundamentally self-undermining. Whereas Pedro Páramo treats his numerous wives, mistresses, and children like objects, other characters show that a different kind of love is possible: one that’s genuine, selfless, and predicated on equality.

Pedro Páramo becomes Comala’s patriarch by controlling land and women. Pedro spends much of his time cheating the townspeople out of their land—for instance, by suing and killing Toribio Aldrete. But, more insidiously, he also manipulates all the town’s women into sleeping with him. He hopes that this will ingratiate them to him and ensure that all the children born in Comala are his. He turns the town into an extended family, with himself as the all-powerful patriarch. But Pedro also refuses to recognize almost all of these children as legitimate heirs, which lets him avoid materially providing for them. Pedro forms his family in order to possess and control people—not for love, companionship, or posterity. But ironically, despite building up an enormous family, vast estate, and mythical legacy, he dies alone, without an heir. By taking patriarchy to an extreme—compulsively accumulating and controlling women, children, and property—Pedro shows the incoherency in the argument conventionally used to defend it: that men need absolute power over their families in order to protect them and pass an estate to their children. In reality, Pedro terrorizes and plunders his family rather than protecting and securing property for it.

Pedro’s possessive concept of love also profoundly injures the women in his life. His cruelty shows how control and ownership are incompatible with genuine love. This is clearest in his relationship with Susana San Juan, the only woman he thinks he truly loves. First, Pedro ruthlessly exploits and oppresses Susana to convince her to marry him. First, he treats her as property and tries to trade her father Bartolomé a house in exchange for her. Bartolomé refuses, so Pedro kills him, leaving Susana with no option but to marry Pedro. In fact, she was willing to do so anyway, but only to get away from Bartolomé, who also mistreats (and possibly sexually abuses) her. Because they conceptualize love as control and possession rather than a reciprocal agreement based on genuine feeling, both Pedro and Bartolomé terrorize Susana, then still expect her to love them back. Traumatized, Susana locks herself inside and spends her life writhing around in bed, daydreaming about freedom and reminiscing about her first husband, Florencio.

But Rulfo doesn’t play into harmful stereotypes about women by portraying Susana’s behavior as crazy or frivolous—rather, he shows that Susana’s fantasies are actually how she finds freedom from Pedro. Her favorite memory is swimming in the sea—first with Florencio, and then alone, which represents a vision of absolute freedom from male control. This shows that she can envision both love and freedom, but she understands that they are impossible to achieve with Pedro. In contrast, after Susana’s death, Pedro lives out the rest of his days sitting on his chair, physically and emotionally frozen in place, fixated on the fact that he never got to live out the marital bliss he envisioned with Susana. While Susana responds to Pedro’s control by shrinking into the only domain where she can truly be free—her fantasies—Pedro loses the ability to feel any sense of freedom at all, because his sense of love depends on depriving others of their freedom.

Despite the novel’s general pessimism about love, some of its characters do offer a competing vision of love based on equality, respect, and consent, which offers a counterpoint to Pedro Páramo’s patriarchal mindset. The clearest example of this mindset is the other protagonist, Juan Preciado, who goes to Comala to fulfill his mother’s last wishes and make sense of the memories she used to recount to him. His journey is a pilgrimage in honor of the mother he loved, and he carries a photo of her in his pocket, against his heart, which symbolizes this love. The marginalized, maternal figures Juan Preciado meets in Comala—from Eduviges Dyada and Donis’s sister to the beggar Dorotea—care for him selflessly. Even after Pedro Páramo has left them invisible and destitute in Comala, much like Susana, they are still capable of love, while he is not. Finally, Pedro’s death also symbolizes genuine love defeating patriarchal cruelty. The burro driver Abundio Martínez—one of Pedro’s numerous sons—stabs him to death in a fit of rage and grief over the death of his wife, whose terminal medical condition Abundio worked tirelessly to cure. Abundio’s love for his wife, in other words, drives him to take revenge for his father’s cruelty.

Rather than reinforcing the archetype that one’s paternity defines one’s identity, Rulfo instead undermines it. Pedro Páramo’s vicious rise to power depends upon possessing land and women, and the cruelty he inflicts on both illustrates that the possessive love normalized under the patriarchal model of family is not real love at all. Pedro’s downfall at the hands of his illegitimate sons—Abundio Martínez, who kills him, and Juan Preciado, who retakes the story of Comala from him—represents a victory for a more egalitarian view of love.