How Christianity Contributes to Patriarchy - Essay Example

Sandra Cisneros Struggles Against Patriarchy A great deal of feminist literature shares the same weaknesses as male literature in that it is commonly told from only a single viewpoint. Although female characters are seen to be constrained, able to see only a small portion of what their lives might have been, they are nevertheless placed within the concepts of the white, middle-class suburban ideal. However, feminist issues necessarily extend well beyond this highly defined world into the worlds of women of color who are also victims of male patriarchy. Regardless of color or family circumstance, it seems all women have been victims of the Cinderella ideology fostered by this patriarchy only to find that life is rarely like the movies. Once they’ve entered into that ‘happily ever after’ world following the wedding at the end of the story, the patriarchal concept of women has them managing the household, caring for the children and entirely confined within the boundaries of the husband’s property. While the fairy tale suggests this life will be full of fancy dresses, grand parties, leisure and pleasure in domestic felicity within the grand castle of the prince – the songbird in the golden cage – the reality is all too often a life dominated by the dragon. When the story takes this turn, women find themselves as the beaten-down house slave forced to bend all of her effort to someone else’s thoughtless whims and desires regardless of the harm this might bring upon herself. It is only with the assistance of other women 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. An understanding of how this patriarchy has affected the female psyche, whether it is the actual fairy tale presented or merely stories couched on a similar theme, provides a great deal of insight into the feminist issues illuminated through Sandra Cisneros’ stories “Woman Hollering Creek” and “One Holy Night.” In “Woman Hollering Creek,” Sandra Cisneros’ main character, Cleofilas, grows up watching telenovelas on TV, which are like soap operas, in which the classic Cinderella themes are played out over and over, reinforcing Cleofilas’ fantasies regarding what her future life will be and the patriarchal vision of women’s approved roles in society. 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. “Cleofilas thought her life would have to be like that, like a telenovela…” (226). The Cinderella story exists in some form or fashion in just about every culture of the world. The archetype encourages girls to take on the social roles of a patriarchal society (Welter, 1966). In other words, the one thread of truth through all of these tales is that the woman is expected to be at home, is not expected to take any aggressive actions regardless of her home situation and this subservience is expected to win her recognition, love and splendor according to the male view regardless of what reality might tell us. However, rather than teaching women to be content with this position as they live through it, the Cinderella story also encourages women to compete with each other in the strength of their subservience thus guaranteeing women are too busy fighting among themselves to be concerned with fighting with men or assisting each other to see the brutal truths of their situations. She who is most obedient is she who wins the prize. It is very fair of Rob Baum to claim that “Cinderella serves the female, directing us to similarly anti-social behaviors and antipathetic familial relations: to hate and compete with other females, suffer in silence, and seek rapport with males through the mysteries of flirtation, fashion and marital fitness” (2000). Thus, she is deluded from childhood into an expectation of marriage that is both unrealistic and potentially dangerous to her own well-being and that of her children. At the same time, she becomes cut off from the very people in society who might be able to understand and help her through a built-in antipathy toward women seen as her competition. Finally, she is directed to exert all her attention and energy in competing with women rather than the men who oppress them. The spell of the Cinderella story, in all its many variations, is only broken when the role of the subservient wife comes into conflict with the role of the caretaker of the children. Cleofilas is willing to sacrifice herself, numbly accepting Juan’s unexplained beatings and unknown absences, as she silently witnesses her neighbors’ troubles. Soledad’s husband leaves without giving her any indication of where or when he’ll return, rumors exist that Juan’s friend Maximiliano has actually killed his wife, and yet these women didn’t leave their husbands forcing Cleofilas to accept the lesser crimes committed against herself in her attempt to be a ‘good’ woman. Cleofilas gradually loses all misimpressions that things will somehow turn out right. “Now the episodes got sadder and sadder. And there were no commercials in between for comic relief. And no happy ending in sight.” (226). Her final despair doesn’t come, though, until she begins to consider the implications of her husband’s beatings upon the bodies of her young son and as yet unborn child. These fears are well-grounded in scientific research. In homes where domestic violence has been reported against wives, the children are 15 times more likely to have been abused and/or neglected. “Over 3 million children are at risk of exposure to parental violence each year” (McKay, 1994). The majority of women who have been forced to seek a shelter to escape their tormentor report that their children are also being abused. These children are “three times more likely to have been abused by their fathers” (McKay, 1994). While Cleofilas understands that she should sacrifice her own welfare for the sake of the family and as a means of earning her future happiness, she begins to realize that this ‘someday’ has not come fast enough to protect her children from the dangers. The maternal instinct to protect her children finally overwhelms her submission to the Cinderella syndrome enough to force her husband to get her to a doctor. Although Cleofilas doesn’t necessarily openly confess her problems to Graciela, the nurse at the doctor’s office, Graciela’s narrative account of Cleofilas’ visit highlights the need for women to help each other rather than suspect each other. This chapter features Graciela on the phone explaining to a friend how a pregnant woman, presumed to be Cleofilas, came in with bruises all over her body, couldn’t speak English and had not been permitted to call or write home since moving to Texas. This emphasizes the degree to which Cleofilas has been isolated from the rest of the world and the dangerous position she’s in. Graciela arranges for her friend Felice to give Cleofilas and her young son a ride to San Antonio, from where she might be able to reach her father and return to her family home. As they leave, Cleofilas discovers the tremendous degree of Felice’s independence. At no level does Felice need a man to survive, having purchased her truck herself using money she earned herself, “she didn’t have a husband” (228) and yet she was doing just fine. As the women crossed over Woman Hollering Creek, Felice lets loose with a great scream that first terrifies, then liberates Cleofilas. Within the feminist circles, this scream is recognized as a scream of liberation, defiance and self-assertion. “We are damaged – we women, we oppressed, we disinherited … We are damaged and we have the right to hate and have contempt and to kill and to scream” (Dunbar, 1969). To scream with such abandon is to act assertively, undeniably, deliberately and independently. On her way to a strange city, speaking only Spanish, traveling with a small child, pregnant and unsure of what her future might hold, it might be assumed that Cleofilas would be terrified of what might happen between this moment and the hoped for moment when she is reunited within the safe arms of her family. Her laughter indicates through the help of these other two women her own power to bring about change and the better life she’d always hoped for. In “One Holy Night,” the author uses flashback to tell the story of a young girl who is seduced by an older man again promising the Cinderella dream as he presents himself as disinherited royalty. This one night determines her entire future as she becomes pregnant by him. After her one night with him, though, the man leaves town and she is unable to locate him. The family is, however, able to establish contact with his family through their search and discover that everything the girl had thought she’d known about him was a lie. Instead, the man is revealed to be a mass murderer, having already killed eleven young girls that he had first seduced as a means of showing his power. As a result of the shame she has brought on her family, the girl is sent off to Mexico to live with her cousins before the baby is born. The information provided in the story regarding the girl and the man she fell in love with, as well as what happens to her and what she can expect in her future, is all presented in piece-meal format, leaving more to the reader’s imagination than is actually spelled out within the text. This motif of telling the story in small pieces helps to illuminate the way in which the young girl is forced to live her life – understanding only small pieces of her own story at a time. The motif of broken pieces is also applied to several other elements of the story as well, including the development of the main characters as the patriarchal attitude of a ‘ruined’ girl is played out. The girl is revealed to the reader through small revelations made throughout the story. From her introduction, the reader is able to deduce that she has become pregnant out of wedlock while still under the care of her elders, but little else is known about her other than her firm placement within patriarchal law. That she is not too proud is demonstrated in her willing admission that she is bad and follows in a long line of bad behavior, but despite this admission, the reader is not given a very deep glimpse into the reasons why she thinks herself bad other than that she has thought about sex before. Her innocence is also illustrated rather than stated in her gullibility to the man’s statements and in her belief that love is like magic and will transport her into another, more glamorous world. It is almost halfway through the story before the reader is given a name for the girl, Ixchel, but it remains unclear whether this is her true name or a magic name she’s given herself as the consort of the Mayan king and even further before we gain an understanding of her age as she is pulled out of eighth grade when her uniform becomes tight. There is actually more information provided in the text about the man who seduces her than there is about the girl. The reader is provided not only with the name by which he is known around town but also with a secret name by which he insists he is known to his people, the ancient Maya of the Yucatan. The girl describes him in glowing terms but acknowledges that he might be considered a bum by others. She tells us his imagined history and calling and reveals his great secret regarding the gun collection but indicates she did not ask too much about his past because “I didn’t want to know” (29). After he disappears, the girl learns about his true story in bits and pieces, much in the same way that the reader is learning the story. Only after she is out of school and learning the skills a mother needs to know does the girl learn of the man’s family and the details that might have saved her. “He was born on a street with no name in a town called Miseria … Boy Baby is thirty-seven years old. His name is Chato which means fat-face. There is no Mayan blood” (33). Later on, she is sent a newspaper clipping that provides a little more information. Rather than simply telling us he was a murderer, the girl gives us a few phrases that jump at her from the clipping, “the Caves of the Hidden Girl … eleven female bodies … the last seven years” (34) and a brief description of the picture of him in the paper, flanked by police. The reader is left to fill in the rest of the details. Cisneros uses the motif of broken pieces to illustrate the theme of brokenness she exposes in the story as they have been brought about by the broken society in which one gender is given full power over the bodies and minds of the other. The events as they are reported are broken as they shift in time and place, first backward, then forward, first with the child’s innocent perspective, then with the woman’s cynical knowledge. The girl is broken in that she is now no longer a girl but a woman, she no longer has the potential for a bright future in America but must endure the dust and the decay of old Mexico, she is no longer the beloved only child in the house but the disgraced other who must live in limbo between the older married cousins and the younger cousins too young to know not to ask. The man is broken in that he gains his sense of power and prestige from the seduction and destruction of young women much less than half his age while his features are constantly described as stony, illustrating he cannot feel. Society is broken in that this scenario was made possible by the necessity of the girl working the pushcart in order to make money for the family to live on instead of being under the protective custody of her grandmother. Finally, the generations are broken in that the girl lives with her grandmother rather than her mother and is sent to live with her cousins as another break in the family occurs. All she has to look forward to in life is more pain and suffering, indicating yet more brokenness as the reader gains a glimpse at the girl’s spirit. All of this is conveyed in the simple motif of brokenness the author adopts in her narration. The struggle for equal rights for women will never be completely successful until the insidious elements of the fairy tale myths conveyed through so many media channels begins to provide alternative routes to happiness for women. As Cisneros’ stories reveal, her characters are strongly influenced by the patriarchal myth that a man of noble birth will come along and rescue her from the deprivations and low status of her child-life with her family. Cisneros’ young Mexican woman of the creek was exposed to the Cinderella myth through the story progressions of her novellas on television, constantly reinforcing the idea that her job was to get married, suffer and patiently endure through unnumbered and unknown trials and difficulties to finally be rewarded in the end with the perfect life she’d always dreamed of. Expecting her life to be taken care of through marriage, that she would live ‘happily ever after’, Cleofilas, like many other young woman, soon discovered that this was not the case. After marriage, she was considered the property of her husband, to be used and abused as he saw fit and stored in the household when he wasn’t interested in playing. This was endured for as long as possible, again by many women, not just Cleofilas. Rather than fighting for her own rights or expecting to be appreciated or cared for to the same extent that she cared for others, the woman had been taught to remain submissive, to accept whatever difficulties came her way and to never complain. To complain was to forfeit whatever rewards would be forthcoming. However, as time went on and things continued to get worse, many women realized that these rewards would never come. This was particularly true in “One Holy Night” where the girl was just lucky enough to escape with her life, although it was now forever damaged. While some resigned themselves to their fate, such as the young girl sent to live with cousins in Mexico, Cleofilas managed to escape this fate thanks to the help of other women willing to reach out and help. By providing the necessary physical assistance as well as demonstrating the possibilities, Graciela and Felice open Cleofilas’ eyes regarding what she might accomplish in the future and clear the airways for Cleofilas to develop her own scream of liberation. Works Cited Baum, Rob. “After the Ball is Over: Bringing Cinderella Home.” Cultural Analysis. Vol. 1, (2000). Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Dunbar, Roxanne. “Who is the Enemy?” No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation. Cambridge, MA: Cell 16, Vol. 1, N. 2, (February 1969). McKay, M. The Link Between Domestic Violence and Child Abuse: Assessment and Treatment Considerations. Child Welfare League of America, N. 73, 1994, pp. 29-39. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly. Vol. 18, N. 2, P. 1, (1966), pp. 151-74. Read More