Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that he
wanted to write a book about incest, and of the various reoccurring and
prominent themes throughout 100 Years of
Solitude incest is perhaps the most prevalent. Macondo is essentially a
town founded on incest, and despite their various misfortunes throughout the
novel, the Buendia family can’t seem to get enough of each other—literally.
Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran’s children may not have been born with
pig tails as they had feared, but their children surely lacked something to be
desired: Colonel Aureliano Buendia and his seemingly endless and pointless war,
the marriage of Jose Arcadio and Rebeca (though the two are technically not
brother and sister, the way they were raised as such can be seen as a sort of incest
in itself), and Amaranta’s cruel refusal of Pietro Crespi which ultimately led
to his suicide give us just a glimpse of the consequences of incest.
Incestuous desires seem to be the
greatest weakness of the Buendia family; even when given the chance to love
(and be loved by) someone outside of the family the Buendias’ can’t help but to
gravitate towards each other. Both Rebeca and Amaranta fall in love with—the
seemingly desirable and endearing—Pietro Crespi, but Rebeca is overcome with
Jose Arcadio supposed “manliness,” and Amaranta, though she obviously regrets
her harsh decision, refuses Crespi when he finally gives himself over to her.
It seems Amaranta would rather torture herself by having incestuous
relationships with her nephews than break the Buendia family tradition of
‘keeping it in the [Buendia] family.’ Even when Amaranta “listened to the
waltzes of Pietro Crespi she felt the same desire to weep that she had had in
adolescence, as if time and harsh lessons had meant nothing” (277). It seems as
though time and harsh lessons, from the death of Prudencio and the founding of
Macondo to its udder ruin, meant nothing to any of the Buendia family.
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