Character Analysis
A Helpless Young Girl Vs. Fate and Santiago Nasar
If you want to know how this town expected its girls to grow up, look at Divina Flor. Even though her mom despises Santiago so much that she is complicit in his murder, Divina Flor kind of likes him. She knows that he'd probably rape her if he could, but she still feels sympathetic towards him. What's up with that?
Well, she was basically raised to believe that she has no free will:
Divina Flor, who was the daughter of a more recent mate, knew that she was destined for Santiago Nasar's furtive bed, and that idea brought out a premature anxiety in her. "Another man like that hasn't ever been born again," she told me, fat and faded and surrounded by the children of other loves. (1.15)
Destiny. Did you read that? Divina Flor believed that it was her destiny for her virginity to be taken by Santiago. Obviously, it wasn't, but why did she believe that?
Because she was a girl, and girls can't do anything while men can do whatever they want. She felt so helpless that she couldn't even warn Santiago:
She, on the other hand, didn't warn him because she was nothing but a frightened child at the time, incapable of a decision of her own, and she'd been all the more frightened when he grabbed her by the wrist with a hand that felt frozen and stony, like the hand of a dead man. (1.20)
How helpless do you have to be that you can't even warn someone else when they're about to be murdered?
When we see Divina Flor after the whole incident, she is fat, faded, and still wistfully thinking about Santiago Nasar—the total opposite of the type of woman Angela Vicario turned into. But if it weren't for her realization that the way society wanted women to behave was pretty lame, Angela probably would have been exactly the same as Divina Flor. Sad, old, and alone.