“The first time she had been so surprised she didn’t cry out or try to defend herself. She had always said she would strike back if a man, any man, were to strike her.
But when the moment came, and he slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood, she didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in telenovelas.”
- identify the title of the text, Women Hollering Creek
- identify the author, Sandra Cisneros
- identify the speaker/thinker of the passage, Cleofilas
- Cleofilas is shocked that her husband hit her the first time, however after a while I assume she got more and more used to it and she sunk deeper into reality and realized how her life is nothing like the telenovelas. She didn’t break into tears or run away like they do in television. the reality of it is much darker than she imagined.
- The argument that the text as a whole is making is that Cleofilas life is nothing like how she was raised or what she imagined it to be and that is very unfortunate. However, she can control it just by her own actions if she wanted and she did by ultimately leaving her husband and going back to Mexico. All those hours of watching telenovelas only helped her escape to a dream world and by leaving with Felice in the end she was able to escape in the real world.
- In the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator was trying to escape from reality as well throughout the text, by the end she was finally able to break free by tearing apart the yellow wallpaper in her room but in a way she was also breaking free from her husband by going insane.
