Throughout the story, Inés also remains static in how rebellious she truly is, and never reveals said rebellion or accompanies her thoughts with action. Pregnancy often results in women craving certain foods, either for comfort or supplementary need. Even though it is natural, “Inés will avoid telling him about the fudge cookies she devoured that morning in the supermarket parking lot.” She would rather binge, on Richard’s coined term “illegal foods,” than bring those desired foods home and face him. Nevertheless, she still consumes them. As a child, during her pageant days, “her father had predicted wistfully that she would never marry.” Inés could not accept Manolo without marriage out of spite toward her father. The flaws in her relationship
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She could have spoken up to her father that she didn’t want to play the piano at his every desire and that she was maturing into a woman, transitioning from “daddy’s little girl” as her developing breasts suggested. Inés settled for Richard, an “adequate lover” who “lacks imagination” instead of Manolo, who she enchantingly characterized as the pelt-skinned, mesomorphic Cuban that engaged in dark elaborate rituals in the bedroom. Inés allows the men in her life and their desires to overshadow her own. Once again, the selfless sacrifice of a woman presents itself. Richard, Inés’s husband, imposes high standards of beauty and expectations that are dangerous and unrealistic for a pregnant woman even though he himself is not particularly physically attractive. In an interview from Latina Self-portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writer, Garcia commented that in some ways her writing of “Inés in the Kitchen” reflected muffled feelings of her own marriage at relation to “what [she] saw around [her], cousins of [hers] getting married, moving to the suburbs, having, as the old phrase goes, quietly desperate lives”(Kevane and Heredia,72). The author realized the trend of women being unhappy and silently settling into miserable lives and wove it into Inés’s
She could have spoken up to her father that she didn’t want to play the piano at his every desire and that she was maturing into a woman, transitioning from “daddy’s little girl” as her developing breasts suggested. Inés settled for Richard, an “adequate lover” who “lacks imagination” instead of Manolo, who she enchantingly characterized as the pelt-skinned, mesomorphic Cuban that engaged in dark elaborate rituals in the bedroom. Inés allows the men in her life and their desires to overshadow her own. Once again, the selfless sacrifice of a woman presents itself. Richard, Inés’s husband, imposes high standards of beauty and expectations that are dangerous and unrealistic for a pregnant woman even though he himself is not particularly physically attractive. In an interview from Latina Self-portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writer, Garcia commented that in some ways her writing of “Inés in the Kitchen” reflected muffled feelings of her own marriage at relation to “what [she] saw around [her], cousins of [hers] getting married, moving to the suburbs, having, as the old phrase goes, quietly desperate lives”(Kevane and Heredia,72). The author realized the trend of women being unhappy and silently settling into miserable lives and wove it into Inés’s