Woman Hollering Creek Summary

The story “Woman Hollering Creek” is about a woman named Cleófilas, a lover of telenovelas, who married a man named Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez. At first, Cleófilas thought her life would be perfect and follow the same structure such as the telenovelas she watched once she married a man. However, it was the exact opposite because she had married an abusive man who would cheat on her. When she was taken to the hospital with her second child, the nurses saw the signs of abuse and one of the nurses, Graciela, called her friend Felice to take Cleófilas back to Mexico to her father. As Cleófilas was on her way, she was fascinated by Felice and made her happy to be away from her husband. Throughout the story, there were lines that divided it up
The long distance is highlighted by creating a long, drawn out sentence. It also seemed that Cleófilas was growing up and moving away to mature as a person, getting further away from her home and going out into the unknown. This also brings out an introduction-like feel to the paragraph as the sentence was mainly descriptive while trying to provide context as to how the abuse all started, similar to a prologue, and drops us off in the middle of the Cleófilas’ life. As a result, we get a telenovela-like feel from reading “Woman Hollering Creek” Also, there is a single word or a short phrase in the beginning of each scene such as “La Gritona” (46). This format is used in a script to mainly indicate what the scene is or where it takes place. Cisneros uses this to specifically use the format of a script and replicate a telenovela by using the same format of a script in her story. Due to Cleófilas’ love for telenovelas, the whole story is written like a telenovela with scenes and a script format to tell Cleófilas’ story as a telenovela. This results in a story that closely resembles a