Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

by

Sandra Cisneros

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories makes teaching easy.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Themes

Themes and Colors
Love, The Joy of Life, & Interconnection Theme Icon
Female Objectification & Power Theme Icon
Cultural & National Identity Theme Icon
Loss, Longing, & Grief Theme Icon
Coming of Age Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Love, The Joy of Life, & Interconnection

In Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros is interested in exploring how romance can inspire characters to appreciate the joy of being alive. Of course, this recognition doesn’t always arise from completely positive situations. In fact, messy, discordant, and heartrending relationships often encourage Cisneros’s characters to reexamine their circumstances, ultimately opening their eyes to the world and realizing that all of humanity experiences love. By doing this, they gain a sense of interconnectedness, coming together in…

read analysis of Love, The Joy of Life, & Interconnection

Female Objectification & Power

In Woman Hollering Creek, female characters both accept and push back against how men treat them. Sometimes they acquiesce to gendered expectations, but more often than not they find ways to subvert negative treatment and disingenuous attention, leveraging misogyny to gain power. For many of these women, this means embracing and even accentuating their own sexual attractiveness and, in doing so, reclaiming control over an otherwise imbalanced relationship. By highlighting this process, Cisneros suggests…

read analysis of Female Objectification & Power

Cultural & National Identity

Though the characters in Woman Hollering Creek have cultural identities that follow them throughout their lives, Cisneros portrays identity itself as flexible and mutable. Indeed, many of her characters are from Mexico but have lived in the United States for long periods of time, an experience that can influence their original sense of home and self. Above all, Cisneros is interested in what happens when cultures come together, and she examines the intersection between Mexicans…

read analysis of Cultural & National Identity
Get the entire Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories LitChart as a printable PDF.
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories PDF

Loss, Longing, & Grief

The stories in Woman Hollering Creek often center around loss, but the nature of this loss varies greatly. Some characters pine over having lost control of a loved one due to infidelity. Others feel an acute loss of culture after having moved from Mexico to the United States. When faced with these feelings, many turn to religion with high expectations, hoping God or a saint will help them regain what they’ve lost or perhaps even…

read analysis of Loss, Longing, & Grief

Coming of Age

Many of the stories in Woman Hollering Creek portray growing up as a process full of contradiction and uncertainty. The children in these pages are striving to understand many things at once: social class, sexuality, cultural and national identity, religion, and attraction. Often times they ignore the complexity of things they don’t completely understand, as is the case when—for example—the narrator of “Mexican Movies” says that she enjoys being told to leave the movie…

read analysis of Coming of Age