For this blog post I want to talk about the run-on sentences that Cisneros uses in Woman Hollering Creek. For example: 

“…from the times during her first year when still a newlywed she is invited and accompanies her husband, sits mute beside their conversation, waits and sips a beer until it grows warm, twists a paper napkin into a knot, then another into a fan, one into a rose, nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve, tugs at his elbow, and finally becomes good at predicting where the talk will lead…”  

This device is always used when representing Cleofilas’ stream of consciousness or moments in her life when she’s uncomfortable, sad, uncertain, scared. It’s eerily accurate in representing her thought processes, because none of us think with punctuation anyways. For some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, it also has the effect of implying loneliness; perhaps this is because we (the readers) are put squarely inside of Cleofilas’ mind, and we all feel loneliest when we live only in our minds, too.  

The run-on sentences remind me of a book I’m currently reading called All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, which is about a young woman (Elfrieda) who for no specific reason wants to die. She hasn’t experienced acute trauma, doesn’t have anxiety, isn’t even particularly nihilist – she simply does not want to live anymore. Her existence every day is punctuated – perhaps defined – by thoughts of death. While Cleofilas doesn’t seem to want to die, it’s clear that most of her days are not happy ones. The run-on sentences in Woman Hollering Creek convey that in the same way as they do in Toews’ AMPS. What is it about run-on sentences that makes them so suited to stories of female struggle, I wonder? Open to suggestions