Woman Hollering Creek Short Summary

In the book Woman Hollering Creek, the author Sandra Cisneros recounts the ideal encounter of an original Mexican housewife by the name Cleófilas Hernandez. She is born in a family of six brothers and a father with no mother. Therefore, she learns the womanhood by watching the television’s telenovelas. Get the plot overview below

A Well-Composed Plot Overview

Here is a summary that will inspire you to read the whole story. The novel begins shortly after the wedding of Cleofilas and her man Juan Pedro who move in together in their new home on a different side of the Creek in the USA. The narration switches to the main character Cleofilas’ early life, where she lived in an environment that offered little entertainment. Therefore, she spent a lot of her time watching telenovelas. She liked the way love and passion were portrayed on television, and she kept deliberating how she would endure such feelings. She imagined loving someone wholeheartedly and suffered for love as the best thing that could happen to any woman.

She finds out that her current settlement is known as a woman hollering something that bothers her much. She keeps thinking why such a nice place can have a sad name like such. However, everybody is busy with their personal lives and never cared. The ladies in this locality are made to stay home and depend on the breadwinner who in this case, is the husbands.

Their relocation to Seguin, Texas from Mexico comes with frustrations and consequences. Their marriage starts to become abusive, and her husband starts to pour all his failure and anger to her by daily beatings. She is pregnant with her second child now, and Juan has taken to beating her regularly like a routine. Juan is working on the servant, which cannot sustain and support the minimum standard of living in this foreign land. The powerlessness and failure compel Juan to beat up his wife regularly.

Cleofilas gets mistreated by Pedro again when she is expecting their next child. He apologizes and tells his wife how sorry he is while persuading her not to say to the doctor the real account of what transpired. Cleofilas covers for him and tells the doctor that she had slipped and fallen something she says she has done for the sake of her children. The story switches to the same hospital setting but a different section. One woman comes in to undergo a sonogram and notices the strange marks all over Cleofilas body and demand for the truth before helping her.

She is taken to Felici, a friend of the woman in charge of the sonogram in that hospital. She finally decides to escape for the sake of her kids. In the end, Felici takes Cleofilas away and hollers at the Creek on their way out which scares Cleofilas, but she later explains what that means. The pain she went through while married gives her an ideal picture of the woman hollering creek.