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

Abstract

Absolving La Llorona:Yda H. Addis's "The Wailing Woman" Rene H. Treviño Correction: An earlier version of this essay erroneously stated that Yda H. Addis also published under Y. H. Harris. It should have said that Addis also published under the name Y. H. Addis. Legacy sincerely regrets this error and any confusion it may have caused. The online version has been corrected. For roughly five centuries, the popular cultural figure known across Greater Mexico as La Llorona (the Weeping/Wailing Woman) has given rise to countless oral and written accounts of the legend that bears her name.1 Considerable diversity in the story's arrangement and function has developed in the course of time, yet at its core the tale revolves around a woman who commits infanticide after an unfaithful husband or lover deserts her. Following the deed, usually accomplished by drowning her children, the woman takes her own life by the same means or, depending on the version, dies from overwhelming grief. She subsequently returns from the afterlife as La Llorona, a white-clad spirit condemned to haunt the living and to cry out in search of her lost children for eternity. This madwoman story line, framed conventionally as an indictment of the emotional instability of women, has dominated La Llorona lore until recent efforts, most notably by Chicana writers, to vindicate La Llorona in some measure.2 Be that as it may, "The Wailing Woman," originally published in 1888 by California writer Yda H. Addis and reprinted here, shows that concern for rehabilitating La Llorona's reputation existed from the earliest attempts to translate her story into English.3 In her largely forgotten take on the traditional folktale, Addis portrays La Llorona as a victim of harmful patriarchal attitudes instead of as the monstrous personification of failed womanhood, thus locating the tale's source of terror not in the Wailing Woman's transgressions but rather in those of the adulterous male character who heartlessly abandons his family. Born in Leavenworth, Kansas Territory, to parents of Irish and American descent, Addis spent considerable time during her adolescent years in Mexico, [End Page 123] where she encountered the folklore and local customs that would later serve as the basis for the work upon which she built her literary reputation.4 In her short fiction, journalism, and local history and travel writing, Addis wrote often, sometimes in Spanish, about Mexico, its people, and its traditions. The majority of her work, which she typically published under "Y. H. Addis," appeared in the weekly San Francisco periodical Argonaut, where she introduced readers to Mexican and Spanish legends, publishing some in original form and others altered to reflect her outlook on society. "The Wailing Woman" belongs to the latter category, since it revises its source text, almost certainly "La Llorona" from Tradiciones y leyendas mexicanas, an 1885 volume of Mexican folklore set in verse by Vicente Riva Palacio and Juan de Dios Peza.5 Rare features of La Llorona folklore common to the two texts include the names of the principal characters as well as the particulars surrounding the mother's act of infanticide and ensuing demise. Whereas other contemporaneous versions fail to name the Wailing Woman, or conflate her with La Malinche, the Nahua woman maligned by some throughout Mexican history for her role in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, both of these narratives detail the ill-fated relationship between the maiden, Luisa, and her suitor, Don Nuño, the Marquis of Montes-Claros.6 Both also depict Luisa stabbing her children to death (as opposed to drowning them) and later falling lifeless moments before she can don the executioner's noose. These accounts depart from the norm in these respects, but each retains the recurrent themes in La Llorona folk traditions of class disparity and adultery. In the eyes of Montes-Claros, a man of great wealth and noble lineage, Luisa's striking beauty initially overshadows her lowly position in life, but the couple's incompatibility on this point eventually drives him, after fathering three children with Luisa, to forsake his family and marry another woman. Although Addis stays faithful to the source text's general plot...