SOURCE: "Fairy Tales and Opera: The Fate of the Heroine in the Work of Sandra Cisneros," in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, University of Georgia Press, 1997, pp. 278-87.

In the essay below, Gutierrez Spencer analyzes the way Cisneros inscribes "feminine" motifs of fairy tales and librettos into her narrative art.

Within the Western narrative tradition, female characters are commonly presented within the narrow confines of polarized roles limited to either madonna or whore, villain or victim. In a similar fashion, the fate of these characters also tends to fall to extremes. Depending upon the narrative form, the female protagonist all too often finds either an early end in death or an equally premature, if metaphorical, "demise" as she conveniently disappears into a cloud of anonymity after the hero has come to the rescue and married her. In so many plots, the...