Visualize a time period where women are treated as objects and you are in severe poverty. You constantly lose friends and sometimes you get desperate enough to pay for them. Esperanza has to cope with all of this as she struggles to find her identity in a tough world. In the “House on Mango Street” the author illustrates that Esperanza can’t accept her identity because of her gender and economic status.
Esperanza illustrates how her gender is looked down upon and treated badly. Women all around the community are beaten or locked in their houses by their husband. Esperanza notices that women in general have to serve their husbands and how girls around the area are abused. Esperanza mentions that “My mother says when I get older I will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow tame like the other who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.”(88) In this quote when she states she will not grow tame like the others who waited for the ball and chain she is referring to the other woman on Mango Street who didn’t take action. The quote by Esperanza implies that she will do something about this and not wait to accept the bad treatment. Esperanza is naturally given the identity of a fragile girl but she will not accept that and will do what it takes to get a new identity. In Esperanza’s race women are wanted weak rather than strong. Esperanza says,”...because the Chinese, like the Mexicans don’t like their women
Esperanza is able to look at her great grandmother and realize what she does not want to become, but also she realizes what she does want: to become a strong, independent woman.
In all aspects of life, women are pressured to be someone they are not. They are put in situations that force them to chose a path of life. In “The House on Mango Street”, Esperanza is forced to think about leaving Mango Street in the future, because she is surrounded by women who are pushing her to become an adult.
Sandra Cisneros’ novel, “The House on Mango Street,” is about the adventures and ways of a small side street. We get to see how the main character, Esperanza grows and matures throughout her time on Mango Street. Since the book is written in first person, Esperanza expresses her thoughts and feeling straight to the reader. In the novel, Mango street typically houses residents with poor backgrounds, and is used as a temporary home for most. Although many people who live on Mango street move out in a short period of time, Esperanza stays in the house she hates longer than anyone else. She constantly watches her friends leave, and has to make new friends every time someone moves in. After experiencing this many times, I believe that Esperanza no longer continues to see herself as a resident on Mango street, but a part of Mango street. This is her distinct point of view compared to the others on mango street.
It is true that in many of the stories in The House on Mango Street there is a man holding back a woman from being free. Esperanza is often feels sympathy for these women. These stories are used to show us how trapped behind her culture and expectations Esperanza feels. The helplessness Esperanza sees mirrors her own feelings of weakness. While I do believe many of the stories Cisneros gives us depict a rather stereotypical view of the Mexican American household, I also believe it is a tool used to reflect her main character’s struggle to break
In the collection of vignettes, The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops the theme that people should not be devalued because of their financial circumstances through metaphors of classism, the motif of shame, and the contrast between minor characters Alicia and Esperanza’s mother. Esperanza, the protagonist, is a Mexican-American adolescent living in the rural Chicago region. She occupies a house on Mango Street with her father, mother, two brothers, Carlos and Kiki, and little sister, Nenny. Mango Street is filled with low-income families, like Esperanza’s, trying to adapt to their difficult circumstances. Esperanza realizes it is difficult, but she dreams of leaving her house and Mango Street altogether.
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.
The House on Mango Street, it is evident through the characters of Esperanza, Marin, and Sally that society must lift the harsh expectations and constraints that suppress girls and women. In Sandra Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street, it is evident through the character Esperanza that society must lift the harsh expectations and constraints that suppress women. When Esperanza and her friends are
In Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Esperanza’s world influences her life for the better. Esperanza is living in poverty and watching all the mistakes people are making, her environment allows her to learn from the mistakes people around her are making. Sally, a girl living in her neighborhood, gets married like they expected, “Young and not ready” (Cisnero 14). Esperanza has seen someone get married too young before her eyes and now she will understand not to make the same mistake as Sally did. Esperanza living in this community allows her to understand what living at the bottom of the world is like, Esperanza becomes motivated wanting, “A house all my own” (Cisnero 15). Esperanza wants something better in life than living on
The house on Mango Street became very sentimental to Esperanza to which at the beginning she did not feel that way “It’s not the house we’d thought we’d get.” Cisneros 3. Living in a poor
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 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
Society has built a role for women. And there’s no better example of this idea than The House on Mango Street, in which Esperanza describes specific moments of her life which lead her to believe in women independence and feminism. She has different ideas and thoughts on the definition of women and what they should be. Esperanza doesn’t fit into the constructed definition Mango Street has of how women should be.
Esperanza as a child takes the responsibility to fight for all the women who suffer from men discrimination, because in “Mango Street” mostly women are abandoned and the others dominated by their husband, Esperanza takes the responsibility to invite all the women to organize themselves in order to protect each other from men violence. Esperanza consider herself as the one who can liberate those women such as Minerva, a young woman who have already two children and abandoned by her husband, there is also Rafaela held indoors the house by her husband and she spends all her time in the windowsill to watch what is happen outside and many other women who undergo sufferings caused by their men, that is what characterized her commitment for the liberation of the women of her neighborhood. So as the girl, Esperanza carry the burden to deliver all women in “Mango Street” from all pains and she feels she is the right one who capable to let know her neighbors’
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
Throughout one’s life, all have gone at least one time through a paradigm shift, a radical change of idea or a distinct belief from the usual way of thinking. Indeed, the majority of people tend to change when there is no other option caused by circumstantial reasons. This happened to Esperanza, the narrator of the story The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The development of Esperanza starts when she begins to observe the reality of her neighborhood, poverty, the submission of women, and what it means to be ' Chicana '. She belongs to a minority group being a Mexican-American and on top of that she is a woman within a patriarchal culture. It is also necessary to take into account her childhood experience within the social, sexual, and cultural. During the process of development and growth there is a change in: her perception about sexuality, the search for self-definition, her dream to be a writer, and the desire to have her own space.