Analysis Of Sandra Cisneros's Short Story : Woman Hollering Creek

“Women's history led to the historical study of gender. Gender includes the behavior, manners, morals, speech, and emotions expected of men and women because of their sex. Historians of gender have analyzed many characteristics of "masculine" and "feminine" behavior in relation to social stereotypes and economic power. The historians' studies have provided a means to understand a wide range of social behavior—from attitudes about sex to economic inequality—in terms of social conventions of gender” (Partner 1). This is a common factor in the novel “The Brief Life of Oscar Wao” by Diaz, he shows how the Dominican culture views their women and how they aren't always respected.

In this research paper I will focus on Sor Juana’s ability to challenge the patriarchal rule in Colonial Mexico through her the patterns language, and the publishing of her work in order to find out how her writing empowered more women writers. In order to answer my question, I will focus on male authority and will work to analyze how patterns, rhetoric, and overall publication of Sor Juana’s work challenge the power dynamic..The question I want answer is how Sor Juana’s work was able to alter cultural attitudes that did not permit women to pursue education and intellectual exploration. My argument is that through her critical language and the act of producing her poems Sor Juana is able to challenge the oppressive society run by males therefore creating a change in the gender norms of her time. This is based off of research of the history of patriarchy in Colonial Mexico, critical analyses of Sor Juana’s writing, understanding of the impact of her writing, and articles suggesting that Sor Juana was influential in altering culture in Mexico. Particularly, I found it interesting that articles explored her language focusing on the gender role she discusses. In this essay I will explore the restrictive cultural norms that pushed Sor Juana to enter the convent as a way to continue writing and publish her work and then proceed to analyze how her writing reflects her

Conventional sexual normative values for males typically include an emphasis of attributes that include self-reliance, dominance, assertion, and a healthy appetite for heterosexual behavior. By contrast, those that apply to females usually include a submissiveness and dependency that is all too oftentimes easily exploited by men. In this respect, the body of literature analyzed within this paper--Sandra Cisneros' "Bien Pretty" and "Anguiano Religious Articles" in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, as well as Junot Diaz's "Drown" and "Aguantando"--is demonstrative of these truths as an examination of the characterizations and storylines readily demonstrates. However, what is most noteworthy about Cisneros and Diaz's tales is that these authors also have a penchant for deliberately subverting the typical gender roles associated with each sex, particular those of male characters. In these instances, male characters forsake their traditional assertiveness and dominance and become objectified in ways that are usually reserved for female characters and women in general. In these instances, the authors present a fascinating dichotomy that appears incongruent in its depiction of manhood, for the simple fact that these portraits of male characters combine conventional male attributes with an objectification that is usually reserved for women.

In the story "Woman Hollering Creek" Sandra Cisneros discusses the issues of living life as a married woman through a character named Cleofilas; a character who is married to a man who abuses her physically and mentally .Cisneros reveals the way the culture puts a difference between a male and a female, men above women. Cisneros has been famous about writing stories about the latino culture and how women are treated; she explain what they go through as a child, teen and when they are married; always dominated by men because of how the culture has been adapted. "Woman Hollering Creek" is one of the best examples. A character who grows up without a mother and who has no one to guid and give her advise about life.

In this type of alpha-male household, the man wears the pants, and he is able to get away with abusing his wife or daughter(s). This is the cruel fate of Cleófilas’s future. She was going to have to tough it out, every time that Juan Pedro got drunk and laid a hand on Cleófilas. She is tough, considering how much abuse she has to take. The city was even a man’s world, where the women were never outside, just stayed home, cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children: “Because the towns are built to you have to depend on husbands. Or stay home” (242). Even then, it was considered taboo to have a woman in the workforce that was predominantly male. Unfortunately, in those times, a woman’s place in the world was a caretaker for the home and the children, according to men who lived in those times. Cleófilas has spent her entire life trapped in a world that conditions her to see herself as inferior, and to feel that males, fathers, husbands, or brothers are somehow superior beings that she must serve and honor.

A woman who sleeps around will be given the label of “whore” like La Malinche (León 11) who had children before marriage. Young girls are told to stay pure until marriage. It warns women with the outcome of La Llorona’s story to be careful how they live their life and the choices they make. If they are not careful they will end up like La Llorona who was reprimanded for promiscuity and murdering her children and was left in isolation and eternal punishment. La Llorona serves as a warning to those women who refuse their obligations as a mother and wife. These ideas about how a woman should act have been around for generations. And although these expectations have not changed much for women, the significance of La Llorona has been reinterpreted time and time again. This is how representations of La Llorona can be used for different

Cisneros emphasizes that women in different cultures suffer the same victimization and alienation, in the past and contemporary society. In the story, Cleofilas is given to Pedro by her father. In her marriage, Cleofilas is not allowed to drive not have access to a car. Besides, the woman is alienated with her child in the small homestead, where the primary roles include cooking, cleaning and caring for the family. In the story, Cleofilas is shocked, when she meets another woman, Felice, who owns a car, and is not yet married. As opposed to Cleofilas, Felice has a life full of freedom, as she can do anything without adhering to the norms of the society. Felice claims that women have been constrained by the sex roles, assigned by culture to women. She further addresses her disregard for violence against women, and the freedom of women. Felice calls upon Cleofilas and other women in the plight of sex roles to rise and stand for their

A girl is taught that she must follow the path of womanhood, a girl is teached these things by her mother doing these things, and the the child such as Esperanza has no other choice but to want to do what there parents do, because an innocent child assumes good, and bad. Mothers like Alicia that have fallen in the trap of womanhood in a marginalized community’s, those are the people showing the next generation to follow their path into womanhood through example. Even though Women have fallen into the traps males have set in a marginalized community, girls have been relatively young when they were blinded by male dominance. The instances when young girls are captured by the monster of male figures is worse, because it could take apart a family in an instance, for example on vignette number thirty three, “Minerva Writes Poems”, Esperanza claimed when she is describing Minerva's life “Minerva is only a little bit older than me but already she has two kids and a husband who left. Her mother raised her kids alone and it looks like her daughters will go that way too. Minerva cries because her luck is unlucky. Every night and every day. And prays”(Cisneros 84). The power that males have on a community like in Esperanzas, is overwhelming, the power to make or break a family like Minerva's, the power to force a woman to leave her own family for the chance of

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the way women have been represented and characterized gives us an idea of how the female gender are treated differently from the male gender as well as children in Latin America during the 1950s. The husbands were given all the authority, also known as machismo, whereas women weren’t allowed to take charge of anything, and were portrayed as weak and impotent.

In the literary work Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros we are able to analyze the short story through a feminist perspective, with the feminist criticism critical theory. A literary criticism has at least three primary purposes in developing critical thinking skills, enabling us to understand, analyze, and judge works of literature, of any type of literature. It can resolve any question or problem within a literary work that we do not understand from merely reading the literature. Look into multiple alternative outcomes to the literature and decide which the better outcome in the end. We can form our own judgements, our thoughts about what we feel from the literature. By analyzing Sandra Cisneros in depth as an author, we can see her

Since Caballero’s recovery in the 1990s, scholars have emphasized Jovita Gonzàlez and Eve Raleigh’s challenge to Mexican-American patriarchy by defining the novel as an interethnic feminist undertaking. In fact, María Cotera’s critical epilogue to the text, which appears alongside the novel’s print debut, celebrates the authors’ politicization of the domestic sphere and their “deconstruction of the idealized male hero” (340). Collaboratively written in the 1930s and 1940s, but set in 1846-1848, the manuscript struggled unsuccessfully for years to find a publisher. By the mid-nineteen seventies, the manuscript had allegedly disappeared, in what José Limòn believes to

In Columbian culture, the job of a woman is to devote her entire existence to her husband and children so “That at times one forgot she still existed” (Marquez 31). Angela’s mother, Purisima Vicario, raises her sons to be masculine men while teaching her daughters the ins and outs of domestic chores and marriage. Angela and her sisters are fated to do nothing more with their lives than to marry and have children, and according to the narrators mother, “’Any man will be happy with them because they’ve been raised to suffer’” (Marquez 31). There is no expectation for women to contribute to society except for producing sons who can.

Back in those days a woman who loses her virginity was seen as a disgrace to her family and community. Her so called husband had disappeared and there was no real witness to support her story. Here Cervante uses the misfortune of Dorotea to point fingers at those who took advantage of women and got away with it. The irony here is that the victim finds herself running while the oppressor continues his conquest of destroying women lives. Cervante shows here how Don Fernando who represented a threat for women in the society was untouchable and not seen as an abuser. Since Don Fernando was a man a Hidalgo (Member of the Upper class), no one questioned him. Cervante brings up the subject of rape that everyone in the Spanish society pretends to not see. Cervante though Dorotea shows how women’s lives are destroyed due to the assail behavior of men. Don Fernando’s banditry led Dorotea to exclude herself from the society, she finds herself living in the mountains far away from home in order to avoid insults. Cervante openly describes his disagreement towards this bullish behavior towards women. Cervante tries to explain that it’s not normal that woman who had lost their virginity were regarded as sinners, considering that there may be different reasons which led to

Through the character of Guiterre, he exposes the male obsession with status and the delicacy of a man’s pride, also showing just how far one might go to protect it. With Mencía we are given a victim, who symbolises the flaws in such a system based only on a purely social construct; we also perhaps see, through her excessive death, Calderon’s own opinion that those old ‘morals’ which were held up so highly were merely superfluous and had, by that point, gone too far. Finally Leonor provides us an alternate female perspective to match that of Guiterre, to highlight that much of his success in life compared to her was due to the patriarchy and a woman’s inability to hold her own. This is also not to say that Calderon believed women were incompetent or did not live up to men’s standards, far from it; Leonor takes her future into her own hands, once again assuming role of médico, just as a man did earlier, and stands up for herself before the king. This strong character proves another point which Calderon may be trying to make, that women’s inferiority is simply a conception of society and institutions such as the church, while in reality both men and women are created equal. These key polemic statements which run through the undercurrents of the play could be interpreted in different ways, yet given the nature of literature at that time, they are meant to represent