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Active, small, severe, that woman of unbreakable nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing seemed to be everywhere, from dawn until quite late at night, always pursued by the soft whispering of her stiff, starched petticoats.
This description of Úrsula appears in Chapter 1, establishing her character for the rest of the novel. Although Úrsula never seems truly happy, never singing, her tireless care for the family keeps them all afloat. Throughout the novel she will make sure the family has enough money, that there is enough space in the house, and that everyone is clean and cared for. Her attempts at beating back the tide of entropy and solitude that plagues her family, however, only work for the short term.
Before Arcadio had time to react she let go with the first blow of the lash. “I dare you to, murderer!” she shouted. “And kill me too, son of an evil mother. That way I won’t have the eyes to weep for the shame of having raised a monster.”
This quotation comes from Chapter 6, when Úrsula stops Arcadio, mad with tyrannical power, from executing Don Apolinar Moscote. Unlike so many other members of the Buendía family, Úrsula’s view of the world is practical and rooted in things that are tangible. Don Apolinar Moscote’s longtime friendship with the family thus matters more to her than his Conservative views and dissent. Furthermore, to Úrsula, Arcadio is still the boy she raised, and she will discipline him like a child if she sees fit. She is thus able to reduce Arcadio from a tyrant to a cowering boy.
With a vitality that seemed impossible at her age, Úrsula had rejuvenated the house again. “Now they’re going to see who I am,” she said when she saw that her son was going to live. “There won’t be a better, more open house in all the world than this madhouse.”
This quotation comes from Chapter 9, as Úrsula puts the house through another remodel at the end of the war. Throughout the novel, Úrsula fights against her family’s tendency toward solitude by making the house bigger and more hospitable. Her desire for an open, bustling house is an essential part of her identity as caretaker and provider. Her remodels breathe new life and energy into the house, bringing new people into the Buendía orbit.
She felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.
This moment comes from Chapter 13, when Fernanda sends José Arcadio to seminary. Úrsula feels as if time has sped up and is undoing the order and values she has attempted to put into the house. She notes how Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo do not seem to grieve others the way she does, and that her candy business has fallen to the wayside because Fernanda doesn’t approve. For a moment, she wonders if all her caretaking efforts, her fight against solitude with order and openness, have accomplished anything.
