Woman Hollering Creek

The ice house scene in Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek” begins with an image of all the men. Then, it continues with a long description of Cleófilas’ actions during the party but soon returns to a deeper observation of the men. Through her use of diction and figurative language in this passage, Cisneros suggests that gender roles restrict both men and women. They are limited in that neither can express themselves, except the men who speak through acts of domestic violence.
The longest sentence in this section focuses on Cleófilas and her non-verbal cues while at the gathering. The commas that separate each of Cleófilas’ gestures generate a rhythm that quickly moves the party along towards its desperate end. Cleófilas’ every movement …show more content…
Cleófilas recognizes the men’s despair when she “concludes [that] each is nightly trying to find the truth lying at the bottom of the bottle like a gold doubloon on the sea floor” (48). Cisneros’ simile captures the essence of why the men drink: to discover something as precious as gold that will similarly enrich their lives. Although the men have this desire, they keep the thought “bumping like a helium balloon at the ceiling of the brain” and only let it out as “a belch” (48). Through this simile, Cisneros expresses that the men want to say something but won’t for fear of showing weakness, and thereby failing to conform to the masculine norm of toughness. Since they cannot verbalize their feelings, they make “the fists try to speak” (48). This instance of personification posits that the reason the men turn to physical violence is to express “what they want to tell themselves” but won’t (48). As Maximiliano illustrates, they also act out of sexual frustration. While in the presence of Cleófilas, Maximiliano says “what she needs is… and ma[kes] a gesture as if to yank a woman’s buttocks to his groin” (51). This lewd motion indicates Maximiliano’s desire to express himself sexually, which Cleófilas realizes. She also sees that Maximiliano really needs sex for the sake of not “drinking each night at the ice house and stumbling home alone” (51). At the end of the

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