Throughout As I Lay Dying, Dewey Dell confronts an unwanted pregnancy and struggles with barriers to medical treatment. Reproductive and bodily autonomy are common themes in the American literary canon. This learning module compares Dewey Dell’s journey to a similar fight for bodily and reproductive autonomy in Sandra Cisneros’ story “Woman Hollering Creek”.
Using the Digital Yoknapatawpha Event Search tool, students will analyze how gender and class form barriers to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy.
This learning module has also been tailored for pairings with similar journeys in other classic texts, including:
The event search function allows users to search for events based on very specific conditions. In this instance, the search is utilized to find events where a specific character, Dewey Dell, is present and which also include keywords related to Health and Illness > Abortion.
The Digital Yoknapatawpha editors manually entered these keywords were for each event. They are fundamentally interpretive.
Now that you have surveyed the notable events and places that make up Dewey Dell’s struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy, examine the barriers she faced.
Write a short response to the following interrelated questions:
In “Woman Hollering Creek”, Sandra Cisneros tells the story of a pregnant young woman obsessed with telenovelas as a form of escapism from her increasingly abusive husband. Cisneros invokes the mythological figure of La Llorona, an indigenous character from Mexican folklore who drowns her children after her white lover abandons her. In the second half of the story, Cisneros depicts the protagonist’s escape from her husband with her baby and unborn child.
