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?
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