Female Resistance to Patriarchy in Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), a Nobel Prize–winning Colombian writer, is internationally renowned as one of the foremost practitioners of magical realism. Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), established him as a central figure of the Latin American Boom and remains a seminal text in world literature for its blending of myth, history, and everyday reality. While this novel is celebrated for its multigenerational narrative and magical realism, the nuanced way that Márquez has adopted to portray women’s roles in a patriarchal society is still underexplored. The present paper examines how Márquez constructs female characters who resist patriarchal structures by exercising resilience, economic participation, and ethical authority. Úrsula Iguarán, the central character of One Hundred Years of Solitude, emerges as the moral and structural backbone of the Buendía family. At a time when male characters in the novel are consumed by obsession, war, and fantasy, Úrsula keeps herself firmly grounded in reality, ensuring the family’s survival across generations.