Woman Hollering Creek

     Before Cliofilas is bonded with her husband in holy matrimony she is in essence a giddy schoolgirl with a distorted view of the realities of marriage, in love with the idea of pasión. Sandra Cisneros’s internal omniscient narrator gives the reader a window into Cliofilas’s mind (on p.45) with very short and sometimes fragmented sentences to depict Cliofilas’s pre-marital thoughts. “Far away and lovely. Not like Monclova. Coahuia. Ugly.” This indirectly characterizes Cliofilas as an overly excited, and slightly caffeinated, teenager who has lost all ability to think rationally.

      

     Cliofilas also naively sees the town she will move to as a married woman, Seguin, Texas, as an almost magical safety haven of happily ever afters and wealth, compared to her Mexican hometown where she lives with her father and six brothers. She longs for the day that she can move with her perfect husband to Seguin, which she finds to have “a nice sterling ring to it.” Sterling ring has a double meaning here. Not only does Cliofilas think it sounds pretty, but she associates the town with marriage, with a pun on the word ring, and with wealth, in that the ring in question happens to be “sterling.” The following  sentence, “The tinkle of Money,” furthers Cliofilas’s obsession with the idea of wealth and the endless amounts of it that she thinks her Romeo-esque husband will provide her with. It should also be noted that there is yet another pun on the word “tinkle” referencing the motif of the creek that will become embedded in Cliofilas’s harsh marital reality in the near future.

     Cliofilas again gives the reader a glimpse of her disconnect with reality when she muses upon the outfits she will wear once she is married which will be just “like the women on the tele.” The telenovellas provide Cliofilas with a camp and bombastically over exaggerated depiction of love, marriage, and life. Her dependence on the telenovella to form her opinions and ideas of reality again depict Cliofilas as an immature child, set up for disappointment in married life because of her expectations that her reality will somehow intersect with the reality of a fictitious character from a soap opera. Later in the story, when things start to sour for her, Cliofilas still uses the telenovella as a lens. She says that her husband “doesn’t look like the men on the telenovellas,” and later that her life is become like a telenovella “only now the episodes got sadder and sadder.”

      

     Cliofilas even concludes this passage hoping that she will make her childhood friend (and later, bridesmaid) Chela jealous. It is almost as if Cliofilas is caught up in the romanticism of the idea of marriage, designing a scrapbook with plans for her future engagement, sitting on the floor of her bedroom of her parent’s house, dreaming of the day her prince will leap off of the pages of her favorite fairy tale. She obviously has a few innocent, yet immature, delusions.   

      

     Which brings me to my question: Are all delusions about marriage bad? Can escaping into alternate realities, (such as the telenovellas) temporarily, be beneficial to a person?