Absolving La Llorona: Yda H. Addis's “The Wailing Woman”

What is it about?

In this article, Rene H. Treviño recovers “The Wailing Woman” (1888), Yda H. Addis’s largely forgotten take on the traditional Mexican folktale of La Llorona (the Weeping/Wailing Woman). Framed conventionally as an indictment of the emotional instability of women, the story of La Llorona revolves around a spurned woman who commits infanticide and subsequently dies herself, only to return from the afterlife as a white-clad spirit condemned to cry out in search of her lost children for eternity. Rather than perpetuate this madwoman storyline, Addis punctuates her version of the tale with several key feminist-informed revisions designed to absolve La Llorona and incriminate the adulterous male character who deserts her. In recent decades, Chicana writers have created a substantial body of La Llorona-based writings that likewise challenge the conventional legend’s masculine foundation, but, as Treviño argues, “The Wailing Woman” shows that concern for rehabilitating La Llorona’s reputation existed from the earliest attempts to translate her story into English. Favorable representations of La Llorona in English were at best scarce and at worse nonexistent in Addis’s time, so the significance of her translation lies in its timing and in its refusal to allow the standard narrative’s harsh depiction of women to go uncontested. At the pivotal moment when La Llorona first began appearing in U.S. literature, Addis defied customary practice and introduced readers to a ghostly presence that diverts attention away from supposedly deranged women and toward the social forces that seek to render their subjugation invisible.

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Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash

Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash