[April 22nd will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]
On two
ways a classic short story helps us understand a soap opera sub-genre.
The Mexican
American author and educator Sandra
Cisneros is most frequently and consistently associated with her wonderful debut
book, the short story cycle The
House on Mango Street (1984); that certainly includes this blog, where
I’ve written about House a
number of times. But while House
is indeed one of the greatest debut books in American literary history
(published when it’s author was only 30, no less), Cisneros has gone on to
write plenty of other compelling and important works over the nearly three
decades since. Among the best is the short story “Woman Hollering Creek” (1991),
which tells the story of Cleófilas DeLeón Hernández, a Mexican American woman
who finds herself in an arranged marriage in Texas with an angry and abusive husband.
Exacerbating that already fraught and painful situation is how distant it is
from Cleófilas’ dreams of her ideal marriage and future, dreams that Cisneros consistently
connects to the character’s childhood in Mexico watching the national (and more
broadly Latin American) genre of soap opera known as telenovelas.
Telenovelas
are a cultural genre linked more to other nations than to the U.S. (although
certainly part of American
TV and communities alike for many decades now, one of so many layers to the
broader idea
of creolization for which I’ve argued in
this space many times), and I’m not going to pretend to be able to
AmericanStudy them in depth here. But I would argue that Cisneros’ story helps
us engage with a couple layers not only to that particular genre, but to soap
operas overall as well. The more obvious level to their role in “Woman
Hollering Creek,” and an important topic to analyze to be sure, is the way that
the genre creates fantasy versions of men, romance, and marriage for young
women like Cleófilas. As Cisneros puts it in the story’s opening pages, in the
first reference to telenovelas and the kinds of perspectives they have helped
create in our protagonist: “passion in its purest crystalline essence. The kind
the … telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s
life, and does whatever one can must do, at whatever the cost.” The problem isn’t
simply that Cleófilas’ husband Juan Pedro is far from a fantasy man; it’s also
and especially that no person, and no love, is worth “whatever the cost,” not
if the cost is abuse and violence like that Cleófilas faces.
Those
limits and downsides to fantastic representations of romance and relationships
are of course a relatively ubiquitous
feature of soap operas (and many other cultural genres as well, to be
sure). But I would say that Cisneros’ story also features a more subtle but
equally significant second layer to what telenovelas can represent for a
character like Cleófilas: a feminist, or at least female-centered, alternative
to the patriarchal violence she endures on both sides of the border. As the
story unfolds through both flashbacks and ongoing events in the present, we see
that Cleófilas has been under attack by many more men than just Juan Pedro,
from her Mexican father’s patriarchal expectations to the harassment she endures
from men (Latino and non-Latino) in Texas. Her one source of escape and
enjoyment is her occasional opportunity to watch telenovelas, “the few episodes
glimpsed at the neighbor lady Soledad’s house.” “Soledad” translates to
solitude or loneliness, but of course those shared moments of
telenovela-watching are quite the opposite, one of the experiences of
solidarity in Cleófilas’ present life. And those moments foreshadow the female
solidarity that ultimately offers her a way out in the story’s hopeful
conclusion, one that, perhaps, embodies not the fantasies of telenovelas but
their shared, communal realities for an audience for whom they are far more
than just cultural escapism.
Next
soap-post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?
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