“Cleofilas thought her life would have to be like that, like a telenovela…” (226). In the telenovelas, life was seen to be full of “all kinds of hardship of the heart, separation and betrayal” (220), but a loving woman, always patient and always kind, could expect happiness in the end.

She understood she would need to go through hardship, but felt her life to this point had been the hardship scene and married life would enable her to enter the happily ever after. This reinforces Cleofilas’ dreams regarding her future once her shining white knight arrives.

Sandra Cisneros’ main character, Cleofilas, grows up watching telenovelas, or soap operas, on TV in which the classic Cinderella themes are evidently played out over and over. This is the case for Cleofilas, the protagonist in “Woman Hollering Creek”, a short story by Sandra Cisneros in which the woman’s progress is followed from the ideological innocent to the female-rescued woman of the modern age. When this is the case, it is often only with the assistance of other women rather than the knight in shining armor that they are finally able to break the vision of the fairy tale to understand their realities and find a new means of approaching life. While the fairy tale suggests this life will be full of wedded bliss, the reality is all too often a life dominated by the dragon. Once they’ve entered into that ‘happily ever after’ world following the wedding (where the story leaves off), women suddenly find themselves managing the household, caring for the children and entirely confined within the boundaries of the husband’s property. Regardless of color or family circumstance, though, it seems all women have been victims of the Cinderella story only to find that life is rarely like it’s seen in the movies. While white women were expected to have servants, women of color were expected to both be those servants and perform these functions within their own homes. However, feminist issues extend well beyond this narrowly defined world into the lives of women of color, too, although there are slight amendments as to what is expected. Most feminist literature seems to argue against the traditional conception of woman as she has been envisioned in the white, middle-class suburban ideal.

Loose woman and woman hollering creek