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Erica Wolfe
Dr. Joan Kennedy
ENGL 1302.P06
14 September 2009
Andrea Yates and La Llorona: A Struggle for Power
On June 20, 2001, wife and mother Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the
bathtub at her home in Houston, Texas. In the essay, “The Woman Who Loved Water,” author
Kathleen Alcalá claims that the Andrea Yates story has been told before, many times in the
traditional Mexican ghost story, “La Llorona,” and that both contain the same underlying
message. Alcalá suggests that both stories convey the idea of helplessness in women and the
huge amount of authority society has on their lives. The La Llorona story has been told for
hundreds of years, in one version or another, and shares many similarities to the Andrea Yates
murders, demonstrating how accurately they portray real life. However, through Alcalá’s
reasoning and empathetic tone throughout her essay, she causes the reader to feel more
sympathetic to these women and compares them not as horror stories, but to account the
helplessness of women and their entrapment in society.
Alcalá draws connections to Andrea Yates and La Llorona to make a general statement
about stories: that they continue to be told because they express some sort of truth and help to
better explain the nature of human beings. In the beginning of her essay, she recounts the events
of the Andrea Yates murders, but begins with, “Once, there was a woman who loved water”
(Alcalá 1109) to make it sound more like she is actually telling a story. The reader automatically
is disturbed after reading the end of the story which bluntly ends with, “The woman filled the
bathtub and drowned her five children” (1109). By telling the events of the murders like a story,
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the author makes it sound much more similar to the Mexican legend, as La Llorona also drowns
all of her children at the end of every variation told. After realizing this, the reader draws a
connection between the two women; they both faced extreme hardships and both, despite
everything, loved their children. Discovering this makes the audience more willing and open to
be understanding of the motives behind the murders.
Yates was a woman with five children, postpartum depression, and extreme mental
illness (1110-1111). In the many variations of the La Llorona story, La Llorona had killed her
children due to a horrible occurrence, either her husband had cheated on her, her children were
starving, or enemies were coming to slaughter them (1110, 1112, 1115). Alcalá argues that while
both women are very different, “each adhere to the fundamental Christian belief system that
values the wife who submits to her husband” (1111). In both the Mexican culture as well as the
household of Andrea Yates, the women were expected to manage their entire lives around their
husband and children, with very little time or freedom to themselves. By portraying women in
this type of environment, and drawing particular attention to the hardships of being a wife and a
mother, and how women are degraded and put second after men, the reader further sympathizes
with the women who normally would be looked upon as wicked and murderous.
In one version of the La Llorona tale, “the woman drowned her children in the river
rather than watch them starve” (1112). Alcalá makes an observation about La Llorona, which can
also be translated to Yates: “If she killed her children out of pity and mercy, then she did it for
the right reasons—still a wrong act, but motivated by compassion” (1113). Three weeks after
Yates murdered her children, she told psychiatrist Phillip Resnick that “she was failing as a
mother and believed she had to kill the children to keep them from going to hell” (1112). Yates’
psychiatrist later stated, “she did what she thought was right in the world she perceived through
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her psychotic eyes at the time” (1114). Both mothers killed their children because they believed
they were failing as mothers and would rather sacrifice their children, than let them succumb to
starvation or the gates of hell. After drawing these conclusions, the reader’s attitude towards
murder is less severe and harsh and can better see through the eyes of the women and their
compassion towards their children. Although murder is hardly justified, no matter the situation,
one could argue that these mothers are not born killers, but a reflection of the helplessness of
women and their hopeless devotion to their children.
“The Woman Who Loved Water” makes some very interesting and thoughtful points.
The fact that a tragedy so similar to the stories being told for centuries shows that there is truth
behind them, not about the horrors of women who kill their children, but about the strife of
women and their place in society. In both instances, the women came from harsh maledominated situations, which trigger sympathy for the ghost of La Llorona as well as Andrea
Yates. Perhaps if La Llorona’s husband were not absent, or if Andrea Yates’ husband had not
disregarded her illness, had either woman not felt so powerless in their own homes, these tragic
stories would have never occurred. The actuality is that the women’s actions of these stories are
wrong, but the causes and motives that lie deep behind them are perhaps much worse.
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Works Cited
Alcalá, Kathleen. “The Woman Who Loved Water.” Making Literature Matter: An Anthology
for Readers and Writers. Eds. John Schlib and John Clifford. 4th ed. New York:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009, 1108-1116.