"Woman Hollering Creek"

"But what Cleofilas has been waiting for, has been whispering and sighing and giggling for, has been anticipating since she was old enough to lean against the window displays of gauze and butterflies and lace, is passion. Not the kind on the cover of the Alarma! magazines, mind you, where the lover is photographed with the bloody fork she used to salvage her good name.  But passion in its purest crystalline essence.  The kind the books and songs and telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one's life, and does whatever one can, must do, at whatever cost".

   In Sandra Cisneros' short story, "Woman Hollering Creek", the main character Cleofilas goes through a transformation from a naive girl stuck on the idea of passion and a beautiful marriage, to the abandonment of a life filled with servitude to a husband and gaining the perspective of what a woman can do with self-liberation.
   This passage occurs before her arranged marriage and shows her expectations of what it will hold. The omniscient narrator conveys to the audience that Cleofilas, "has been whispering and sighing and giggling" about her marriage.  From that one can sense the anticipated and excited mood Cleofilas has toward her getting married, an almost child-like dream with all the "gauze and butterflies and lace". But with the gauze, lace, and butterflies Cleofilas believes that passion is in the mix, that passion will come with the marriage and that it will just happen. Cleofilas seems to be in love with the idea of love and passion that can be in a marriage, however the narrator mentions Cleofilas fascination with the passion that comes from the media, from books, songs, and the telenovelas. It implies that Cleofilas is oblivious of the fact that all she has read and heard and seen is not reality, but a manufactured kind of passion that the media has created, one that she dreams of.
   By having so much media mentioned in the passage it sets up a false hope for Cleofilas that is foreshadowed by the violent imagery of "the bloody fork she used to salvage her good name".  With such an intense phrase in the otherwise eager and good-natured  passage, it makes a statement that her passion is not all it's cracked up to be and may possibly aide in the deflation of her high spirited idea of "passion in its purest crystalline essence".  This pure passion is exactly that, an essence that will eventually fade away, and at that time Cleofilas will realize how harsh the married life has become, how it was not like the books she read or the songs she heard or the shows she watched, but instead like that bloody fork. It also foreshadows violence, because of the blood, and also because of the word "salvaged." It is as if Cleofilas will be able to get away from her preconceived ideas of marriage, but also of the marriage that might fail.
   Cleofilas is so caught up in dreams, and what might be, that she fails to recognize reality. That she does not really know the man she will wed or the town she will live in, but instead for her "passion"  and for her "great love of one's life" she will do "whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost".  It is sad in a way that she does not recoginize things yet, and it's hard to read that she could be hurt or heartbroken later down the road.  It is so finalizing sounding when said, "whatever the cost".  A feeling of desperatness to make something work that should not really be is what insight one gets from that phrase.
   Overall this passage shows how a desire of something so bad can blind someone to reality, and later come back to bite them in the ass, as well as how media plays a role in aiding the feelings of false passion.

My Question:  Why is Cleofilas so okay with marrying a man she does not know? Is it because she is so blind by the idea of passion, or is it because of a culture thing where this is normal?