RIZAL NOLI ME TANGERE 3

1. Identify the five major characters (including villains) in the novel, excluding Maria
Clara.
Ibarra, Elias, Tiago, Damaso and Salvi

2. Describe briefly each character’s relationship with Maria Clara or the particular
encounter with Maria Clara or set of events involving Maria Clara that helped propel
the main plot of the Noli forward.

Juan Crisostomo Ibarra y Magsalin- Noli Me Tangere's main protagonist. He was the
childhood sweetheart and fiance of Maria Clara.
It is out of love for her that Ibarra returns from Europe and offers the schoolhouse as
a gift to her. Having grown up together as childhood friends, María Clara and Ibarra
are engaged to be married, though Father Dámaso—her godfather—is displeased
with this arrangement and does what he can to interfere.

Because Maria Clara says that she has never seen a live buwaya (crocodile) before,
Elias–who is fascinated by her and moved by her kindness to him–jumps into the
lake to catch it, thereby initiating the chain of events that puts him in debt to Ibarra for
saving his life and leads him to discover the truth concerning the entanglement of
Ibarra’s family in his own family tragedy.

Don Santíago de los Santos- commonly known as Kapitán Tiago. With her mother
dying in childbirth, Maria Clara was raised the daughter of Capitan Tiago. When
Ibarra was away in Europe, Capitán Tiago sent Maria Clara to the Beaterio de Santa
Clara where she developed into a lovely woman under the strict guidance of the
religious nuns.

Later in the novel, María Clara discovers that her biological father is not Capitán
Tiago, but San Diego's former curate and her godfather Padre Dámaso. Towards the
end of the novel, Maria Clara begged Padre Damaso to enter her in a convent. This
came after finding out Ibarra passed away, noting she cannot live without her fiancé
and she needed to forget him. She found out everything she learned about the
nunnery was a lie.

Fray Salví is a meticulous and cunning man who uses his religious stature for
political influence, benefitting both himself and the church. For instance, to ruin
Ibarra—who is engaged to María Clara, the woman Father Salví secretly loves—he
organizes a violent rebellion against the Civil Guards and frames Ibarra as the
ringleader.

3. Present the plot.

Juan Crisostomo Ibarra is a young Filipino who, after studying for seven years
in Europe, returns to his native land to find that his father (Don Rafael), a wealthy
landowner, has died in prison as the result of a quarrel with the parish curate, a
Franciscan friar named Padre Damaso. Ibarra is engaged to a beautiful and
accomplished girl, Maria Clara, the supposed daughter and only child of the rich Don
Santiago de los Santos, commonly known as “Capitan Tiago.”

Ibarra resolves to forego all quarrels and to work for the betterment of his
people. To show his good intentions, he seeks to establish, at his own expense, a
public school in his native town. He meets with ostensible support from all, especially
Padre Damaso’s successor, a young and gloomy Franciscan named Padre Salvi, for
whom Maria Clara confesses to an instinctive dread.

At the laying of the cornerstone for the new schoolhouse, a suspicious accident,
apparently aimed at Ibarra’s life, occurs, but the festivities proceed until the dinner,
where Ibarra is grossly and wantonly insulted over the memory of his father by Fray
Damaso. The young man loses control of himself and is about to kill the friar, who is
saved by the intervention of Maria Clara.

Ibarra is excommunicated, and Capitan Tiago, through his fear of the friars, is
forced to break the engagement and agree to the marriage of Maria Clara with a young
and inoffensive Spaniard provided by Padre Damaso. Obedient to her reputed father’s
command and influenced by her mysterious dread of Padre Salvi, Maria Clara
consents to this arrangement, but becomes seriously ill, only to be saved by medicines
sent secretly by Ibarra and clandestinely administered by a girl friend.

Ibarra succeeds in having the excommunication removed, but before he can

explain matters, an uprising against the Civil Guard is secretly brought about through
agents of Padre Salvi, and the leadership is ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned
by a mysterious friend, an outlaw called Elias, whose life he had accidentally saved;
but desiring first to see Maria Clara, he refuses to make his escape, and when the
outbreak page occurs, he is arrested as the instigator of it and thrown into prison in
Manila.

On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to
celebrate his supposed daughter’s engagement, Ibarra makes his escape from prison
and succeeds in seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to reproach her because it is a
letter written to her before he went to Europe which forms the basis of the charge
against him, but she clears herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured
from her by false representations and in exchange for two others written by her mother
just before her birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her real father. These letters
had been accidentally discovered in the convento by Padre Salvi, who made use of
them to intimidate the girl and get possession of Ibarra’s letter, from which he forged
others to incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the young
Spaniard, sacrificing herself to save her mother’s name and Capitan Tiago’s honor and
to prevent a public scandal, but that she will always remain true to him.

Ibarra’s escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a banka up the
Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by the Civil Guard that Elias leaps
into the water and draws the pursuers away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies
concealed.
 On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood, Elias appears,
wounded and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio beside the corpse of his mother
(Sisa), a poor woman who had been driven to insanity by her husband’s neglect and
abuses on the part of the Civil Guard, her younger son having page disappeared some
time before in the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of
Elias’s identity, helps him to build a funeral pyre, on which his corpse and the
madwoman’s are to be burned.

Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake, Maria
Clara becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed godfather, Fray Damaso, to put
her in a nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of their true relationship, the friar
breaks down and confesses that all the trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has
been to prevent her from marrying a native, which would condemn her and her children
to the oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties and she enters
the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salvi is soon assigned in a ministerial capacity.

4. Why is Maria Clara the fulcrum of Noli's plot, even though Ibarra and Elias are the
“heroes”

So first let us define what a fulcrum is. Fulcrum is something that plays a central role in or is
in the center of a situation or activity. In other words, she is the gear that allowed the events
to happen in the story. She was the instrument on why Ibarra was exiled, why Padre Damaso
had such a heavy grudge on Ibarra, and really a lot of stuff that happened in the novel. So
even though Ibarra and Elias are the heroes in the novel, they would not become so without
the events that were triggered by Maria Clara.

So why is Maria Clara the fulcrum of the story, well, based on the readings she was a meek
girl a sample of what a Filipina was supposed to be during the Spanish period. And I think
because of this meekness this weakness, she was easily manipulated and turned against her
lover, Ibarra, she was too wrapped up about keeping the honor and integrity of her parents
that she forgot/did not care what the consequences of her actions would cause to the people
that surrounded her. And I think it was this kind of mindset and characteristic that made her
into her role as a fulcrum in the story. Like a siren in the old greek myths she was the one that
lead Ibarra into ruin. (Lols)

5. What do you think of Maria Clara? What kind of female character is she?

Maria Clara is a TYPICAL, but not the IDEAL Filipino women. She was
described as an ideal image of purity and innocence of a sheltered native woman during the
Spanish occupation who is overly religious, submissive, obedient and conservative.
However, Rizal seemed to have not intended Maria Clara as a model of Filipino womanhood
because for him, Filipino womanhood was to be an enlightened one. She lacks mature
intellect and industry that rizal praised among german women who “cared more for
substance of things than appearance”. What he meant by this is that German women
is serious, studious, and diligent, and as their clothes do not have plenty of color, and
generally they have only three or four, they do not pay much attention to their clothes or to
jewels. They dress their hair simply, which is thin, but beautiful in their childhood. They go
everywhere walking so nimbly or faster than men, carrying their books, their baskets, without
minding anyone and only their own business. German women are active and somewhat
masculine. They are not afraid of men. They are more concerned with the substance than
with appearances. This statement by Rizal is completely the opposite of Maria Clara who
often wore dainty dresses and an epitome of beauty.

At 21, she is immature and unable to form her own convictions without the approval
of her confessor or elders.

Rizal exposed her weakness: Lack of courage and sound judgment. Blind
obedience to her parents.
But despite her shortcomings, rizal treated her with compassion and he loved
her.

6. Why do you think that, of all the characters in the novel, Maria Clara has been
subject to the widest range of interpretations?

Based on the readings, I think that Maria Clara has been subject to many interpretations
because Maria Clara became an important figure in the life of filipino people. There are three
personalistic interpretations of her as a woman: a paragon, a caricature, and a parody.

As a paragon

Back in the early 20th century, after rizal's generation, many people viewed maria clara as
"the ideal filipina". She has been celebrated in song and oratory as a paragon the paragon of
Filipino. Many believed that Rizal intended her to be "the ideal for the woman of his country,
the noblest blossom of womanhood. Maria clara even became a legend in the Filipino mind,
to the point of becoming a standard of measurement for succeeding generation of Filipino
women.

As a caricature

Maria Clara was weak to be a model for the Filipino women. The character of Maria Clara
was not intended to be a glorification of the women at rizal's time, but as a satire, a
caricature, of their weaknessRizal's Maria Clara was not meant to be ideal because it can be
shown in the novel that she was helpless, feeble, and filled with fear. That in Rizal's time,
filipina women didn't possess that kind of qualities. Many filipino worked hard and were
intelligent, like Tandang Sora and his mother, Teodora Alonso. Some even joined in the
revolution.

As a parody

Many filipino women in Rizal's time tried to copy Maria Clara's beauty. Maria clara had big
eyes, sharp nose, small lips, curly hair, white skin; similar traits of a european person. Maria
Clara was an ideal image of purity and innocence of a sheltered native woman during the
Spanish occupation. in trying to look like her, the aura of their Asiatic beauty gradually
disappears.
Because of her popularity, many interpretations were made.