Fernanda del Carpio — Righteousness, Order, and the Cost of Being Right
Readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude tend to file Fernanda del Carpio under the unbearable one and move on. It is an understandable reflex and a small act of cowardice, because she is the character in the book whose conduct is most easily defended on paper. She keeps the house clean. She protects the family name. She enforces mourning, decency, schedules, prayer. Almost everything she does can be justified by a principle, and almost everything she does causes damage. Gabriel García Márquez built her as a machine for demonstrating that those two facts are compatible. …