The House on Mango Street is about a young girl named Esperanza, who looks at life from experience of living in poverty. Esperanza is a girl who struggles with finding her true self. She dreams of the perfect home, a home with beautiful flowers and also a room for everyone. When she moves to the house on Mango Street, reality is very different than the dream she imagined. Many of the other female characters identify what it is to be a woman, but her neighbor Marin, shows the “true” identity for women on Mango Street. Esperanza also sees how her mother is and how she is not like her. The main struggle that Esperanza has, is with beauty. This explains why most of the negative people that Esperanza meets on Mango Street, and the other women, helped her see the mold she needed to fill in order to give herself an identity. Esperanza sees all of the women around her, and how most of them are quite alike. The overall idea of the women that live on Mango Street is that they are property to their husbands. They cannot do anything unless their husbands allow them to. It also starts out at a young age. The young girls like Esperanza, also see the women that live around them and think that is the way to live. They admire these older women, so they start to mature faster than they should. We witness Esperanza blossoming from an innocent, shy girl to one who witnesses much, but all of this makes her strong and clear about her desires for her life. What she sees is the male
In “The House on Mango Street” gender socialization is a major theme incorporated throughout the novel. Accordingly, Esperanza expresses her own feminist views through her storytelling of her female friends and role models that are in her life. These women help Esperanza build her own identity through giving her awareness of what is expected of women and therefore helping her embrace women empowerment and the breaking of gender roles.
Throughout The House on Mango Street Esperanza learns to resist the gender norms that are deeply imbedded in her community. The majority of the other female characters in the novel have internalized the male viewpoint and they believe that it is their husbands or fathers responsibility to care for them and make any crucial decisions for them. However, despite the influence of other female characters that are “immasculated”, according to Judith Fetterley, Esperanza’s experiences lead her to become a “resisting reader” in Fettereley’s terminology because she does not want to become like the women that she observes, stuck under a man’s authority. She desires to leave Mango Street and have a “home of her own” so that she will never be forced
All the people on Mango Street were struggling to get by, but they seemed satisfied with just making it. Esperanza was not. There were characters like Esperanza’s mother who was a “smart cookie,” and could’ve been anything, but she let shame get the best of her and dropped out of school. There was also Rafaela who got married before the 8th grade just so she could move into her own house, but her husband never let her leave the house afterward. He never let her see her friends, and the highlight of her week was getting coconut or papaya juice from someone who would send it up in a paper bag attached to a clothespin since she couldn’t leave the house. Lastly, there was the time when she was left stranded by the tilt-a- whirl waiting for a friend that never came back and got molested by a group of boys. The only witnesses were the red clown statues that seemed to be laughing at her. Nevertheless, she let none of this stopped her from going forward and perusing her dream. She still seemed to be struggling with a sense of belonging, but maybe that’s because she didn’t.
As a young girl, Esperanza is a young girl who looks at life from experience of living in poverty, where many do not question their experience. She is a shy, but very bright girl. She dreams of the perfect home, with beautiful flowers and a room for everyone. When she moves to the house of Mango Street, reality is so different than the dream. In this story, hope (Esperanza) sustains tragedy. The house she dreamed of was another on. It was one of her own. One where she did not have to share a bedroom with everyone. That included her mother, father and two siblings. The run down tiny house has "bricks crumbling in places". The one she dreamed of had a great big yard, trees and 'grass growing without a fence'. She did not want to abandon
may be trapped forever. Esperanza is coming to realize she may never get out of Mango
Esperanza, a strong- willed girl who dreams big despite her surroundings and restrictions, is the main character in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Esperanza represents the females of her poor and impoverished neighborhood who wish to change and better themselves. She desires both sexuality and autonomy of marriage, hoping to break the typical life cycle of woman in her family and neighborhood. Throughout the novel, she goes through many different changes in search of identity and maturity, seeking self-reliance and interdependence, through insecure ideas such as owning her own house, instead of seeking comfort and in one’s self. Esperanza matures as she begins to see the difference. She evolves from an insecure girl to a
Throughout the course of Mango Street, Esperanza’s relationship towards her house change. As time passes her feelings about the house itself change and the emotional impact of the house of her changes as well. Esperanza’s house on Mango Street symbolizes her Mexican culture. For so long she has wanted to leave it. She envisions a different type of life than what she is used to - moving from house to house. “this house is going to be different / my life is going to be different”. One can look at all the things she envisions - the "trappings of the good life" such as the running water, the garden etc. as symbols for the new life.
Esperanza had always desired a new home, but realizes Mango Street will always be a part of her. “I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it” (5). At first Esperanza wanted an escape from Mango Street, she was embarrassed of where she came from. But as she grows as a person and is exposed to devastations in other people's lives around her, she realizes something much more ugly than just the looks of Mango Street. “You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn’t know what she meant” (61). Writing kept Esperanza free, and helped her cope with her problems. Esperanza later perceives why her aunt wanted her to continue writing, because not everyone had something to set them free from Mango Street. “They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones who cannot out”(110). Instead of leaving to never return, Esperanza realizes the women in her community have it
In The House On Mango Street, Esperanza and the other female characters are helpless and have no control over the terrible situations they are placed in. The women are forced by society to become tame, obedient wives and mothers while they had dreams they were forced to give up. A recurring image in The House On Mango Street is the window. Many women sit by the window as they watch their own lives pass them by. They are trapped and the only access they have to the world is the window they sit for hours by, watching the world they could be a part of. The women of Mango Street are imprisoned by marriage and family ties.
In The House on Mango Street, we see how the youth struggled with the discrimination being pushed on them by Whites. Esperanza describes how they lived in such a poverty-stricken area of the city, and did not interact with the Whites. She talks about how the Whites saw Mexicans as bad people who committed crimes. Esperanza shows how personal identity for Mexicans was made
Esperanza is a shy but a very bright girl. She dreams of the perfect home now, with beautiful flowers in their luscious garden and a room for everyone to live in comfortably all because of the unsatisfied face the nun made that one afternoon--when she moves to the house of Mango Street. She thinks it’s going to be a “grand house on a hill that will have a bedroom for everyone and at least three washrooms so when they took a bath they would not have to tell everybody.” (Cinceros 4) Reality is so different for her when her dream is shot down in a heartbeat when she
In The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, a little girl from a Latino heritage is given birth to. Not literally, but in the sense of characterization. Esperanza is a fictional character made up by Cisneros to bring about sensitive, alert, and rich literature. She is the protagonist in the novel and is used to depict a female’s life growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Cisneros creates the illusion that Esperanza is a real human being to communicate the struggles of growing up as a Latina immigrant in a modern world, by giving her a name, elaborating her thoughts and feelings, and illustrating her growth as a person through major events.
Everyone has challenges in their life, their feelings behind their actions make them who they are. In the novel The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros there are many conflicts which explore the characters, to get to know them closer. The internal conflict is used to discover the identity of the main character, Esperanza.
Not very often do people get to experience watching a little girls view change in a short amount of time. In this reading by Sandra Cisneros, Esperanza, who is a young teenage girl, gets to experience wise words from close people yet a terrible situation that causes her views to change on humanity. In Cisneros’ story, The House on Mango Street, she shows the changes of Esperanza's life through her experiences by the way she views men and women and the way she views herself.
A novel by Sandra Cisneros, titled The House on Mango Street in its unassuming and sincere writing style, shines a beacon of truth on the socioeconomic condition of its time, by scrupulously describing the living situations of the protagonist and her immediate family. The narrator of the story Esperanza, paints an accurate picture of her family’s inability to remain anchored at any residence up to the point when we catch up with her in the story, where she reveals that “We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot” (Cisneros, par. 1). In our society, where the distribution of monetary funds is rather uneven, there will always be those individuals who don’t benefit from the reserves as much as their needs require them to live comfortably. Even if there is indeed enough money to go around, the largely accepted assumption is that the dividing gap between the rich and be the poor will remain. Nevertheless, this postulation does not resolve the issue, and we shouldn’t move on without a real, working solution.