"What is called Heaven": identity in Sandra Cisneros's 'Woman Hollering Creek.'

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994 by Jeff Thomson

Quite the opposite of Cleofilas, Clemencia, the narrator of "Never Marry a Mexican," is a dominant, willful woman who fills out a masculine pattern of power. She is self-aware and self-defined:

I'll never marry. Not any man. I've known men too intimately. I've witnessed their infidelities, and I've helped them to it. Unzipped and unhooked in clandestine maneuvers. I've been accomplice, committed premeditated crimes. I'm guilty of having caused deliberate pain to other women. I'm vindictive and cruel, and I'm capable of anything. (67)

Given Cisneros's personal statement - "I'm not kept by a university, and I'm not kept by a man" (qtd. in Prescott 60) - one might mistakenly believe Cisneros admires Clemencia and is setting her up as a paradigm of a successful woman. Cisneros recognizes her character's autonomy, but understands how her power rises from a misuse of sexuality and is a dangerous result of women recapitulating the mistakes of men. Like a stereotypical male, Clemencia takes lovers easily and leaves them quickly; she uses sex as power, as a weapon. She goes to bed with a man while his wife is giving birth to their child and then, years later, sleeps with that same child. Her sexual conquests, like those of her stereotypical Don Juan counterparts, are attempts at control: she wants dominion over her lovers without giving up any of her own authority. Clemencia has escaped her traditional identity as a female only to find herself trapped in a different system.

In a curiously conflicting statement, Clemencia explains her existence. "Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lovely" (83). Her world is formed around an emptiness, a vacant space she can never quite fill, and she believes all others must share this vacancy. Guitars make music only because they are hollow.

Cisneros has established the systematic difficulties of women's life, the stereotypes and enforced identity, the sexual violence of men, and the difficulty of escape. Ines, the witch-woman of "Eyes of Zapata," has escaped these difficulties and even forgiven Zapata (two necessary elements of "what is called heaven" [89]), but she has done so by abandoning the life of the body, by withdrawing from the corporeal world. She begins to live by forsaking her body and its pain. "Each evening I flew in a wider circle. And in the day I withdrew further and further into myself, living only for those night flights" (98). Her silent, unearthly wings reveal Zapata's faithlessness and despite her father,s advice - the eyes that do not see cause the heart no pain (99) - she looks deeply at this man and his other lover. The act of vision becomes essential; the act of seeing clearly and the capacity of memory become her sources of power because they are able to create an acceptable world - "what we call heaven" - in the face of feminine pain.

These two powers, vision and memory, are the resources of the true artist, she who is capable of altering the masculine paradigm: "The women in my family, we've always had the ability to see with more than our eyes" (105). Although the reader is led to suspect that Ines is capable of such an artistic act, her power remains in the world of pure emotion, the world of the wars that begin "in our hearts and in our beds" (105). It will take the final story of the collection to bring this triple unity of art, love, and life together.