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

The Gothic tales of Yda H. Addis that engage with the issue of women’s sexual rights situate her work within the late-nineteenth-century tradition of American women writers who examined womanhood through supernatural... [ view full abstract ]

The Gothic tales of Yda H. Addis that engage with the issue of women’s sexual rights situate her work within the late-nineteenth-century tradition of American women writers who examined womanhood through supernatural fiction. Scholars have heretofore viewed this tradition, now known as the Female Gothic, as one that performs cultural work exclusively for white American, middle-class women. However, as I argue in this paper, Addis’s “The Wailing Woman” (1888), which promotes a transnational approach to the women’s rights movement gaining momentum at the time of its publication, complicates Female Gothic studies. Addis based “The Wailing Woman” on the Mexican legend of La Llorona, the tale of how a jilted woman who commits infanticide becomes a white-clad specter known for her incessant weeping. Addis’s version, however, contains a number of feminist-informed revisions to androcentric accounts of the legend that gloss over the act of male sexual license that brings La Llorona into being. Portraying La Llorona as the victim of such harmful patriarchal attitudes, instead of as the monstrous embodiment of failed womanhood, the tale encourages American readers, especially those familiar with the unequal application across genders of repressive codes of propriety, to compare their experiences with those of Mexican women. Merging the supernatural tale with principles of racial inclusivity and gender solidarity, “The Wailing Woman” ultimately prompts us to reconsider how American women writers at the turn of the twentieth century employed the Female Gothic to portray and resist the gendered social conditions of women at large.