Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra

Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

The work of Sandra Cisneros entitled: "Woman Hollering Creek" is a story of a woman named Cleofilas and is of the nature that "extends and revises" histories of women who have attempted to escape poverty or other life situations thorough marriage. This story is primarily related in the third-person omniscient narrative voice. This work was stated by Campbell in a New York Times Book Review to be of the nature in which Cisneros utilizes men's behavior as a catalyst that "...propels her women into a deep search within themselves for the love that men have failed to give them." (New York Times Book Review, nd)

This story is of a woman who having married to escaped finds herself sitting alone in the house of her husband in fear to even venture outside without express permission. In this book, Cisneros writes that Cleofilas looks "at the walls, at how neatly their comers meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake." This story is said to open "...a borderland space where old myths take on new resonance and new forms and where new stories are possible." (Doyle, 1996) Cleofilas is in search of a manner of expressing her personal story in combination of the untold stories of the females who have been silenced and who are: "...victims of male violence in the newspapers." (Doyle, 1996)

I. The CHARACTERS, the PLOT, and the THEME

Cisneros' work 'Woman Hollering Creek' begins as Juan Pedro Martinez Sanchez is granted permission by Don Serafin to marry Cleofilas, Don Serafin's only daughter. Don Serafin sees with the eyes of a father knowing that while Juan Pedro would be taking his daughter to the United States to live that someday Cleofilas would turn southward with longing to be at home with her family. Don Serafin tells Cleofilas prior to her leaving with her husband following the wedding that he is her father always and will never desert her however, Cleofilas is to busy to pay any attention to her father and does not recall her father's words until after she has become a parent herself. Upon recall of what her father said at her wedding, Cleofilas reflects upon how a man and woman's love is temporal, changing, and unsure but how the love of a parent for a child is never changing.

Juan Pedro and Cleofilas live in Texas after their marriage and running behind their house is a creek, which has been named 'Hollering Woman Creek' although no one can quite recall why this name was given the creek. Juan Pedro beats on Cleofilas and suffers the beatings silently. After the beatings, Juan Pedro cries and Cleofilas comforts him. The town that the two live in is desolate and Cleofilas is sure that another woman had been in her home while she was gone to the hospital giving birth to their first child and yet, she still does not verbalize this belief and stays silent.

II. CHANGES and REALIZATIONS

At the time that Cleofilas became pregnant with the second child between herself and Juan Pedro she tells him that she must go see the doctor and goes only after Juan Pedro extracts a promise from her that she will not reveal to the doctor where the bruises on her body came from and will instead claim a fall caused the bruises. The story shifts as the character of Graciela, an employee of Cleofilas doctor speaks on the phone and relates how she gave a sonogram to a woman who was not only bruised all over, but who was crying and speaks no English and moreover, has not been allowed by her husband to call or write her family.

The woman to whom Graciela spoke was the character Felice. Felice makes arrangements to pick up Cleofilas to give her a ride to the bus station and as the bridge over Hollering Woman creek is crossed, Felice lets out a wild yell. It is amazing to Cleofilas that the truck they ride in belongs to Felice who chose the truck and purchased the truck independent of a husband or father.

Cleofilas grew up innocently believing in love and passion at its very essence of purity and believes that it is noble to suffer for love and that this results in a sweet pain that is a worthy cost to pay for love. Because of her beliefs, Cleofilas is very vulnerable to her husband and his cycle of abuse. Cisneros seems to project her own life into the character of Cleofilas as Cisneros herself is stated by Doyle (1996) to have entered into a discussion of the difficulties that she herself had known as a Mexican-American "...always straddling the two countries...but not belong to either culture...trying to define some middle ground." (Pillar, 1990; as cited in Doyle, 1996)

This divide of cultures, religion and gender are a type of 'borderlands' as defined in the work of Gloria Anzaldua and these borderlands exist not only geographically but in physic realms as well. According to Doyle, "Woman Hollering Creek" charts "psychological, linguistic and spiritual border crossings." (1996) the work of Candelaria (1986) posits that the meanings held within the story of Hollering Woman Creek have survived due to the multiple meanings and cultural resonance.

Ultimately, Cleofilas flees her husband to return to her father and having returned home it is related by Doyle that Cleofilas "...overcomes the tradition of silence." Doyle additionally states that Cleofilas:

through successive dislocations...relocates herself and her posterity, leaving behind a dusty town 'built so that you have to depend on husbands' and experiences a self-reclamation "in the fluid liminal space of this 'trickle of water' with its 'curious name' this 'muddy puddle' growing in strength to become a musical torrent. If she made her first passage across the Rio Grande in thrall to romantic dreams, she frees herself from this ethos of feminine submission in her passage back."(Doyle, 1996)

III. CISNEROS: PROVIDING a VOICE to the DISPOSSESSED

Matthew Gilbert writes in the work entitled: "Cisneros Gives Voice to the Dispossessed" that Cisneros "is the impassioned bard of the Mexican border, as well as the border between humiliation and rage. With a language that is at once lyrical and sharp, she gives voice to the dispossessed Mexican and Chicano women and children who suffer on either side of both lines. In "Woman Hollering Creek," a collection of stories that is like a series of first-person monologues, Cisneros proves that she is a writer of deep sympathies, one able to create from within a socio-political milieu without compromising the art of her fiction." (1991)