Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Sandra Cisneros - Susan E. Griffin (essay date 1997)

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Sandra Cisneros - Susan E. Griffin (essay date 1997)

Susan E. Griffin (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: Griffin, Susan E. “Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown, pp. 85-96. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

[In the following essay, Griffin considers how cultural influences shape and limit the lives of the women in Woman Hollering Creek.]

In her prefatory poem to My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Sandra Cisneros asks, “What does a woman [like me] inherit that tells her how to go?” (x). This question about the cultural inheritance of Mexican American women and how it shapes their perceptions of the choices available to them is central to Cisneros' work. Throughout her poetry and fiction, she has depicted the material and ideological forces that circumscribe Mexican American women's lives.1 In her novel The House on Mango Street, and in several of the poems in My Wicked,...

[The entire page is 5239 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the: