Notes
BookRags Literature Criticism
Critical Essay by Jean Wyatt
For the online version of BookRags' Critical Essay by Jean Wyatt Literature Criticism, including complete copyright information, please visit:
http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/cisneros-sandra-1954_4/
Copyright Information
©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
©2000-2012 BookRags, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Critical Essay by Jean Wyatt
SOURCE: "On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros's 'Never Marry a Mexican' and 'Woman Hollering Creek,'" in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 243-72.
In the following essay, Wyatt explores the transformations of feminine "icons" of Anglo and Mexican gender ideology by "borderland" cultural assumptions in "Never Marry a Mexican," "Woman Hollering Creek," and "Little Miracles, Kept Promises."
Like many of the stories in Woman Hollering Creek, the title story and "Never Marry a Mexican" describe the advantages and the difficulties of "straddling two countries," as Cisneros describes the condition of living on the border between Anglo and Mexican cultures. In addition, these two stories deal with a problem specific to women: the female protagonists of "Woman Hollering Creek" and "Never Marry a Mexican" wrestle with Mexican icons of sexuality and motherhood that, internalized, seem to impose on them a limited and even negative definition of their own identities as women. In "Never Marry a Mexican" the protagonist, Clemencia, throws her energy into defying the model of La Malinche, a historical figure who over centuries of patriarchal mythmaking has become the representative of a female sexuality at once passive, "rapeable," and always already guilty of betrayal. In "Woman Hollering Creek" the protagonist, Cleofilas, must redefine La Llorona, the figure of traditional Mexican folklore who wanders wailing for her lost children, in order to redefine her own
Critical Essay by Jean Wyatt
For the online version of BookRags' Critical Essay by Jean Wyatt Literature Criticism, including complete copyright information, please visit:
http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/cisneros-sandra-1954_4/
Copyright Information
©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
©2000-2012 BookRags, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Critical Essay by Jean Wyatt
SOURCE: "On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros's 'Never Marry a Mexican' and 'Woman Hollering Creek,'" in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 243-72.
In the following essay, Wyatt explores the transformations of feminine "icons" of Anglo and Mexican gender ideology by "borderland" cultural assumptions in "Never Marry a Mexican," "Woman Hollering Creek," and "Little Miracles, Kept Promises."
Like many of the stories in Woman Hollering Creek, the title story and "Never Marry a Mexican" describe the advantages and the difficulties of "straddling two countries," as Cisneros describes the condition of living on the border between Anglo and Mexican cultures. In addition, these two stories deal with a problem specific to women: the female protagonists of "Woman Hollering Creek" and "Never Marry a Mexican" wrestle with Mexican icons of sexuality and motherhood that, internalized, seem to impose on them a limited and even negative definition of their own identities as women. In "Never Marry a Mexican" the protagonist, Clemencia, throws her energy into defying the model of La Malinche, a historical figure who over centuries of patriarchal mythmaking has become the representative of a female sexuality at once passive, "rapeable," and always already guilty of betrayal. In "Woman Hollering Creek" the protagonist, Cleofilas, must redefine La Llorona, the figure of traditional Mexican folklore who wanders wailing for her lost children, in order to redefine her own