Balancing Acts - Cisneros

Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

"[T]o suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end." Cleofilas, in the title story of Cisneros' collection, believes this message, expressed in her favorite soap operas. But her romantic fantasies about life suffer when she faces the ordinary man who is her husband, who can be abusive, who lives in a macho world where women have little value beyond sexual use. Even the hardworking life she knew in her father's home seems preferable. The last we see of her, she is escaping back home to Mexico, riding to the Greyhound bus station with a woman named Felice, crossing Woman Hollering Creek. Cisneros does not allow us to know what becomes of Cleofilas; there is no "happy ending" in which she finds herself or achieves any kind of power. But there is hope, for on the bridge over the creek, she laughs with Felice, whose independent life and strength amazes her; she shares that moment of freedom to "holler like Tarzan."

This story not only names the book, but begins the longest of its three sections: There Was a Man, There Was a Woman. It serves as a sort of thematic center for this collection of stories that deals with the lives of Mexican-American women in south and central Texas. Cisneros explores what it is like to grow up in this environment, to live balanced between the cultures of Mexico and the United States. Cleofilas, newly arrived in the States from Mexico cannot speak English. Others--the young girls of the first seven stories or the hip artist of "Bien Pretty"--are native citizens of the U.S., but still strongly connected to their Mexican ancestors and ways of life. These women seek to come to terms with both worlds in themselves; they struggle to achieve dignity and a measure of self-determination and self-knowledge. And, in many of these stories, they try to understand what love between men and women means. Without minimizing the depth of the struggles or the variety and complexity of the issues involved, Cisneros shows us women who may, for a moment, share a "holler" of confidence and hope.

In this book, Cisneros contributes to the growing number of Mexican-American and other Hispanic writers published in the U.S.in the last twenty years. These writers reveal the poverty, the violence, the confusion of living in two cultures. But they also celebrate their roots, their parents' and grandparents' ways of life, preserved in big city barrios and small rural towns across this country. For these writers, la raza, the sense of community among Mexican-Americans is important. In Woman Hollering Creek Cisneros emphasizes this community in her mix of voices through the stories. Although most of the stories are written in first person, the author never indicates whether several stories are being told through the voice of the same person or whether all are told by different narrators. We hear a variety of women speaking in this volume, from children to grown women, yet we hear also a collective voice, a unity created from both individual and shared experience.

Suggestions for further reading

Alvarez, Julia.  How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.   Chapel Hill, NC:  Algonquin Books, 1991.

Chavez, Denise.  The Last of the Menu Girls.   Houston:  Arte Publico Press, 1986.

Cisneros, Sandra.  House on Mango Street.  New York:   Random House, 1991.

Esquivel, Laura.  Like Water for Chocolate.  New York:   Doubleday, 1992.

Return to Top 

Balancing Acts - Hale

The Jailing of Cecelia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale

Tears and rain and alcohol all three combined bring Cecelia Capture to a jail cell on a DUI charge, with the further threat of prosecution for an old welfare fraud. Now a promising law student, she is still pursued by the frustrations and pains of her past; she is alienated both from the middle class white world of her husband and from the world of her Indian roots. And because of her arrest, she faces the destruction of the future she has been building. But in confinement, she has time to consider her life, to remember parts of her history that she has not wanted to face before, and to realize that there are many ways to be "in jail."

In this novel, Janet Campbell Hale opens questions about how women can be trapped, and about what life can hold for them, if they finally free themselves. As a child, Cecelia is caught between her Indian father, who wants her to fulfill his own failed ambitions to outdo the white world and her half-white mother, who blames Cecelia's birth for keeping her in an unhappy marriage. The desires and angers that fill Cecelia's childhood are not her own, but they shape her world and help shape her future.

Cecelia's story is the story of her struggle not to be trapped, to manage, while supporting her young son, to get an education, to "get ahead." But, unlike Taylor Greer, who finds a support network to help her establish a temporary balance in her life, Cecelia struggles alone. She is an outsider in every group she enters. Her relationships with men are unsatisfying and do not last; even her marriage does not offer her a place to feel secure. Both her isolation and her determination are emphasized by the fact that though we hear her tell her story in her own voice, we are almost eavesdroppers. She is talking to herself more than to us.

Hale, herself a Native American, knows what it means to try to balance between the demands of conflicting cultures. Like the other novelists in this series, she is also keenly aware of the ways any woman can be alone, outside the structures of the society in which she lives. She clearly sees how women can be trapped by their own choices, as well as by others' choices, in worlds not of their making. Cecelia realizes, at a party with her husband's white middle class friends, "It was as if she did not belong to her own life anymore. She had so painstakingly constructed this life for herself, and now she didn't belong to it. Her soul did not belong to it."

But after acknowledging imprisonment and alienation, what is left? Cecelia comes close to committing suicide. When her sentence turns out to be lighter than she expected and death is no longer a reasonable choice, she is completely disoriented. "How," she asks herself, "was she going to be able to handle being free?" The author suggests that freedom is not easy to achieve or maintain. It does not mean fulfillment of one's dreams, doing everything one wishes. But it can still mean affirming one's life as it is, with all its limitations. A woman can still make choices her soul can belong to.

Suggestions for further reading

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

______________ Tracks. New York: New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

Green, Rayna, ed. That's What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Hale, Janet Campbell. Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter. New York: Random House, 1993.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Seaver Books, 1981.

Return to Top

Balancing Acts - Kingsolver

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

A woman can undertake a journey for many reasons: to escape, to seek a new way of life, to find adventure, to find love, to return to someone or something, or simply to keep moving. In Barbara Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, the main character Taylor Greer journeys in many of these ways. She leaves her rural Kentucky home to escape from the life she will be expected to live there. She has no goal toward which she is traveling. She intends only to keep driving until her old Volkswagon breaks down; then she will stop. She even chooses a new name by chance; she names herself after the town where she makes her first stop.

But her simple escape from all her past ties changes into a different sort of journey. When Taylor is given an abused baby, she must begin to balance the freedom of her travel with a new responsibility, the need to give care, to find a job and provide for both her foster child and herself. She gradually begins to establish herself among other women with similar concerns and problems. And she finds that, finally, she must make another journey, back the way she has come, to become "legally" the mother of her child and to help a couple of illegal aliens on their own escape from fear and journey to freedom.

Through the story of Taylor's journeys, Kingsolver deals with issues of women as mothers and as survivors who manage to maintain some humor and grace. She writes of loss and fear of loss, of the ways in which people's lives twine together, often without their conscious choice, but always with strong effects on one another. The Taylor who sets out for Oklahoma to claim her daughter both is and is not the same Taylor who drove boldly away from Kentucky. Since she provides the main voice for the novel, we can experience her uncertainties, her decisions, her hopes and fears at first hand. But all the characters in the novel share in the attempt to balance stability and loving relationship with the necessity of change, of loss, of always "traveling on." And though Taylor is headed back, at the novel's end, to her network of friends in Tucson, she has not arrived yet; she's still in the car, on the road.

The lives of all these people, Kingsolver suggests, grow like the wisteria, the "bean trees" of the novel's title or like the purple beans in Mattie's garden. One of the first things Taylor sees in Tucson, Mattie's plants are offspring of seeds brought from China eighty years before, a gift from another woman's garden saved and replanted year after year. The plants are sturdy, "trooping on down the block, climbing over anything in their path." And these beans, like the wisteria trees, can thrive in poor soil because they have a support system at their roots, provided by other organisms. Like these plants, the individual characters of Kingsolver's novel, only ordinary people, survive through their connections to one another.

Suggestions for further reading

Atwood, Margaret. Edible Woman. New York: New York Popular Library, 1976.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal Dreams. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

———. Pigs in Heaven. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Mason, Bobby Ann. Shiloh and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

Paretsky, Sara. Tunnel Vision. New York: Delacorte, 1994.

Return to Top

Balancing Acts - Naylor

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

In her poem "Wonder Woman," poet Genny Lim asks, "Why must a woman stand divided?/Building the walls that tear them down?" In these two lines, woman becomes both single, "a woman," and plural, "them." Gloria Naylor's novel does much the same; it presents the stories of seven separate African-American women, whose lives weave together to form one story. The women are old and young, heterosexual and lesbian; some have children; some have lovers. Brewster Place, the street on which they live, holds them all in one community. The place itself begins and ends the novel; it provides a temporary center for all these lives, the place they make home and the place in which they encounter each other.

In keeping with her focus on community, Naylor tells these stories all in the third person; none of the characters speaks her story as a separate "I." But we are still allowed inside each woman; we share her feelings, memories, desires, hopes and pains. And each woman's experience comments on every other's. Etta understands her friend Mattie's love and faithfulness when she hears Mattie playing her blues records, waiting up for her after a depressing evening. Kiswana and her mother say little to each other about their affection, but Kiswana understands their closeness through even such a small detail as her mother's painting her toenails to please her husband.

Strong ties of affection and care bind these women together. But they are also joined in community by loss. Every woman in Brewster Place has suffered or now suffers some loss. Some of them, like Kiswana's abandonment of her family's values, are not causes for grief. But most of these women face deep, painful losses of a home lived in for thirty years, of an adored child, of a cherished dream or the loss that cuts most deeply into the life of the whole community, Lorraine's loss of sanity, her loss of her very self, as the result of a gang rape.

Naylor is one of many contemporary African-American women who write powerfully about black experience, the way lives have been shaped, controlled, and lost because of poverty, violence, and prejudice. Yet the women Naylor writes about are not simply victims; one woman's knowledge of pain and ability to survive can be passed on to another, as Mattie's understanding and strength help save Ciel and begin her healing. Together they can withstand the pressures of loss and pain that threaten to destroy their lives.

As most of the other novelists in this series have done, Naylor offers us no neat "happy endings." Instead, she gives us two conclusions. Brewster Place itself will die, part of the slow decay of ghetto neighborhoods, and the women, or others like them, will make new homes on other streets. But the community, on the eve of its block party, survives in Mattie's dream. All the women of Brewster Place together rip down the wall stained with Lorraine's blood. Violence against women is translated into a new kind of violence that tears down old imprisoning walls and lets the women's shouts be heard out in the streets.

Suggestions for further reading

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Shange, Ntozake. Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Return to Top

Balancing Acts - Robinson

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Sometimes, on a windy, chill evening, a person might take a walk, enjoying the evening light and the wildness of the wind. Even the cold seems exhilarating; walking alone in it makes one feel alive and vital. Even when the cold begins to bite and the walker begins to think of returning to warm rooms and the comfort of being inside and cozy, she still regrets leaving the wild, dark outside world. She lingers, unable to make a decision--go in or stay out a little longer. In Housekeeping, Robinson shows us the attraction of both wildness and domesticity--the conflicting pulls of stability inside traditional lifestyles and communities and of freedom outside, recognizing that traditional stability itself is easily broken and destroyed.

When their mother drives a car off a hill into Lake Fingerbone, Lucille and Ruth move into their grandmother's house. The grandmother and, at her death, their great aunts, try to shelter the girls in that house, try to assemble an ordinary life for them out of the daily tasks of housekeeping and the taken-for-granted connections among relatives. But when the great aunts, too, die and the girls are left in the care of their aunt Sylvie, the ordinary, daily world of housekeeping begins to crumble. Sylvie is a transient, a drifter. She provides unusual, random meals, leaves blow through the littered rooms of the once orderly house, the parlor fills with heaps of tin cans and old paper. Without a traditional family structure for stability, Ruth and Lucille try to keep their balance between Sylvie's world and the more conventional world of the small community of Fingerbone. Close at first, each sister must finally make her individual choice between those worlds, "outside" or "inside."

In a frosty early morning, Ruth stands in front of a collapsed house on the island Sylvie has brought her to. She imagines children lying under the fallen roof and walls of the old house. For her at this moment, even her grandmother's house begins to seem deceptively solid, as if it too were liable any minute to collapse under its own weight. "It is better to have nothing," Ruth says. And as she accepts loneliness and transience for herself, she feels Sylvie's arms around her. The two have become, as Sylvie will later say, as close as sisters or as mother and daughter.

Robinson makes us understand loneliness, wildness, and the impermanence of both relationships and material objects. Yet she also shows us that these qualities, usually seen as wholly negative, have their own beauty and value. Sylvie and Ruth take their dangerous night walk across the railroad trestle above Lake Fingerbone, an act of courage and delicate balance, into their chosen home a world stripped down to its essentials of change and motion.

Suggestions for further reading

Blew, Mary Clearman. All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family. New York: Viking, 1991.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

Leek, Leslie. Heart of a Western Woman. Pocatello, ID: Blue Scarab Press, 1987.

Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Latham NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1988.

Return to Top