English
‘Woman Hollering Creek’ is a collection of short stories that was written by Sandra Cisneros. This collection of stories is essentially about a cultural conflict that is faced by a Mexican-American young woman named Cleófilas who is apparently seen to be persistently residing in a cultural frontier. The work primarily highlights the struggle of many woman like Cleófilas living near Mexico’s border and their incessant struggle for balancing the patriarchal needs of their native community as well as their imminent need for individualism and independence.
The plot of Woman Hollering Creek is that a young Mexican woman named Cleófilas is got married to a highly dominant and obnoxious man living in the border of Texas. After tolerating her abusive husband and being beaten up badly by him for quite some time, along with also going through the innumerable insults and betrayals, she finally escapes successfully from her husband and reaches the house where her father stays. Things however do not get any better for Cleófilas even here as she is subjugated yet again by another dominating male - her father.
The term ‘woman hollering’, according to many researchers, is in fact a loose translation of a Spanish term. In reality, it is a myth or possibly even a legend, that is popular in Mexico as well as the South western regions of the United States, where elders tell children about ‘La Llorona,’ which means a weeping or a wailing woman. The story is about a woman who wept for her children who got drowned in a river. Likewise, one can find a number of creeks in and around Texas whose names are almost very depressing in nature. These names actually do not denote anything special or unusual, but are rater the names given to these creeks by early settlers by relating them to whatever is found either within or close to the water; like for instance, Mud, Sandy, Elm, Plum, Catfish, and Brushy among others. This is another kind of myth related to the creeks in Texas.
While living in Texas with her husband, she get curious about the origin of the creek’s name, La Gritona. She finds this to be a highly funny name that could ever be given to such a beautiful abyss.
Cleófilas recollects her childhood memories of having be told that such names are normally give to a creek that ran behind the house, although it is not clear if the hollering of the woman was a result of either anger or agony. The natives were just aware of the arroyo having crossed on the way to San Antonio once, and a second time on way back, and was finally called Woman Hollering. Essentially, this was a name whose meaning was hardly understood by a few, and yet never questioned by any for years now.
With her curiosity of understanding the origins of the creek’s name increasing and having found no accurate information, Cleófilas ultimately settles by relating it to the myth of La Llorona. Her desire to know more about the hollering woman essentially is a result of her personal life situations and is not a result of her keenness in geography. She comes to Texas from Mexico as a newly married young woman, incited by a plethora of hopes, more of which were in fact a combination of fairy tales, romantic stories she had read, as well as several soap operas she had viewed earlier in life.
However, the reality after reaching Texas is not what she imagined as she is continuously beaten up by her abusive husband and is also repeatedly humiliated by him. With the passage of time and with no change in her personal life situation, Cleófilas gets bored with her routine life filled with nothing but domestic violence, and she craves for love, pleasure, new and fashionable clothing, as well as also a nice house of her own. As she gets increasingly desperate in her marital life, Cleófilas, similar to the myth of La Llorona, is seen being drawn close to the water. She constantly sits by the creek, which she had imagined to be “so pretty and full of happily ever after.”
She ultimately starts realizing the fact that anguish and desolation is one important aspect which can draw any woman towards destruction. Cleófilas does not believe in La Llorona as a mere story of a woman who drowned her own children for selfish reasons or malevolence. She rather contemplates the same being the root cause which might possibly lead a woman to "the darkness under the trees."
Works Cited
Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1991. Print.
