Journal 2: Literary Critic “My Wicked Ways” by Sandra Cisneros

In “My Wicked Ways” Sandra Cisneros illustrates through an abstract speaker that children are innately wicked because they are receptive to their surroundings from the moment they are in the womb of the mother. The speaker of the poem is reveal in the last stanza of the poem as being a baby in a womb. This poem explains the conflicts that led to the innate wickedness of the child. In the first stanza, the narrator presents her father who uses his appearance to attract women. The second stanza reveals the life of the mother who lives a peaceful life before she meets the narrator’s father. Her father makes her mother suffer because later he started cheating on her mother. Her mother continued living in a turmoil which affected her while the daughter was in the womb.
Each stanza conveys a cause that led to conflict between the couple and ultimately affected the baby in the womb. Cisneros’ poem is in freestyle meaning that it does not have any rhyme because she chose to tell it a narrative form in order to make it seem like the story that the reader going can relate to. Cisneros purposefully changes the time of the poem, the poem starts in the past then moves into the future and then returns to the present. Towards the end of the second stanza the narrator conveys that his father will have a lover that will lead into her parents fighting and her mother conforming to the fact that her father has a love. The narrator refers to the lover of her father as “The woman, / the one my bather knows, / is not here / she does not come till later.” Cisneros emphasizes the important role the “other woman” plays in the destruction of this family so Cisneros makes the line “The woman” stand by itself. Instead of revealing that the baby in the womb is the speaker of the poem at the beginning of the poem, Cisneros chose to tell the history of the family first and then reveal the speaker to evoke sympathy from the reader. After reading about the family’s conflicts the reader feels more compel to think about who is really responsible for how the baby in the womb turns out, the parents or society.