The Conflict with Evil Stepsister

“The House on Mango Street is ours, and we don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it's not the house we'd thought we'd get… The water pipes broke and the landlord wouldn't fix them because the house was too old. We had to leave fast. We were using the washroom next door and carrying water over in empty milk gallons.” ( chapter 1, page 4.) For Esperanza, the idea of having a house of her own becomes sort of an obsession. The image of the house becomes a symbol for various ideas. Esperanza is so ashamed of where she lives. She also, denies that she lived in Mango Street. Esperanza also stated that is she had the chance she would erase the years that she lived in it. Cathy who was Esperanza's friends until Tuesday was so ashamed of where Esperanza lived. Cathy felt bad for the house that Esperanza called her home. “Where do you live? She asked. There, I said pointing up to the third floor. You live there?” ( chapter 1, page 5.)

Esperanza is new to the neighborhood, and was never proud of her previous houses, but the negative intonation that the nun uses on her makes her feel like she is being judged, not on who she is, but what her family can afford. There is the place Esperanza now has to call home and the degrading presumption that the neighborhood already has causes her to accept that she can’t change her image without money and let her personality shine through. She seems to accept her label as poor in the story, “A Rice Sandwich”, where she believes the special, also known as rich, kids get to eat in the canteen and she wants to be part of that narrative, so she begs her mother for three days, to write her a note to allow her eat in the canteen. When she couldn’t endure her daughter’s nagging anymore, she complied. Thinking this would be enough affirmation, Esperanza went to school the next with the note and stood in the line with the other kids. She wasn’t recognized by the nun who checks the list, and has to face Sister Superior, who claims that she doesn’t live far enough to stay at school and asks Esperanza to show where her house is. “That one? She said, pointing to a row of ugly three -flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into. Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn’t my house,”(45). Esperanza was compared to the most raggedy men, and had to accept

Ever since that faithful day they moved onto Mango Street, Esperanza has always wanted more. At a young age, she recalls moving quite a bit, and never finding a place that screams home. Her new house on Mango Street is an improvement, yet it doesn’t satisfy her. It is small and red, with tiny windows, crumbling bricks, and everyone in her family has to share a bedroom. Esperanza remembers when a nun drove by her old home on Loomis and said “You live there”, in a quite disgusted manner. She recalls feeling sheepish, as she looked up at her raggedy house and longed for it to just vanish. At this point, Esperanza wrote

She said it was small and the bricks were crumbling. And she didn’t want to be there. Now that Mango Street is her home she tries to understand it more, but she still isn't happy living there. Another problem Esperanza faces is finding herself.

house that is unlike the others. Esperanza knows she is stuck on Mango Street, and that

Lucy and Rachel losing their baby sister was an awful tragedy, everyone gathered to view the baby before she was buried. The sisters compliment Esperanza’s name and tell her that she’s very special. Her wish was a selfish wish and she starts to feel guilty. They tell her that she will always be on Mango Street and even though she has to leave , she should come back for others. Alicia is lucky that she has somewhere to call home, Guadalajara, and she will return there someday. “You live right here, 4006 Mango, Alicia says and points to the house I am ashamed of.” Esperanza refused that she doesn’t have a home or come from Mango street until someone makes it better which is

A few months ago a girl named Cindy's parents took a vacation to America, leaving her alone with her aunt and two daughters, Tiphisha and Moya. Her parents lived in England and were extremely wealthy, and for that reason her aunt, Lorna and her daughters were jealous of Cindy and despised her very much.

Showing ideas about Eliza’s problems how she begins with limited freedom then shows her strong will and changes into a Cinderella like character. When meeting the people who will be in their future who they soon meet while still living in the society standards of poverty.

At the beginning of the novel, Esperanza is an naive eleven year old girl who at first did not comprehend why her family would move constantly. Furthermore, she is the older sibling of five kids, and she was expected to take all the responsibility. Moreover, Esperanza mentions that her parents would always told her “one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each

Chapter 1 A young woman appears out of nowhere and quickly catches up to another who's dashing along a moonlit lane. "Are we late?" She asks as she falls into step besides the older woman. "No not yet, but we need to hurry, we don't have much time." "Follow me," the older woman replies, and her dark cloak billows about casting shadows on the high stone walls that border the lane. They walked side by side in silence for a long ways and then through a set of huge iron gates swung opened before them and onto a narrow driveway. A manor house grew out of the darkness at the end of the straight drive, lights glinting in the windows. Gravel crackled beneath their feet as speeding toward the front door, which swung inward at their approach, though

Question #1: Explain how the house on Mango Street is different from the other places Esperanza has lived.

Following the death of her son Aibileen gets a job working as a maid for Elizabeth Leefolt who has just had a baby girl Mae Mobley and is in need of help taking care of her. Aibileen tries her best to teach Mae Mobley

“That’s why they were only taking a few things at a time; they weren 't really coming for ivory and paintings. They wanted me!” Even when she wasn’t in her room she was always afraid of something. “I always dreaded that my parents would divorce. It was my third biggest fear, right next to the fear that one of them would get abducted by heartmen on the road to Sugar Beach, or my first fear, that I would get sucked into the lagoon by neegee.” Out of all three fears only one seemed to happen. Her parents relationship finally came to an end after a lot of fighting, disagreement, and cheating. “Daddy, I hold your foot, don’t leave us. Daddy, please, I beg you” she cried that day. From then on, except the servants and cook, “it was only women at Sugar Beach.” Even after dealing with something so hard in her life that wasn’t even what affected her the most.

Once upon a time, in a time period of war and division, there lived a traveling businessman who was known for both his riches and his greed. The businessman had a daughter who was as beautiful as she was kind and that they called her Belle, a Southern Belle. Though her father loved her in his own way, his love for money was his ultimate love. But his riches could not last forever and the war between the north and south had taken a turn for the worst. The Union soldiers had cut off the routes that he had always taken and his riches were depleting faster than he thought imaginable. After just a month the family was in poverty.

The narrator describes the entire mansion from the hedges to the gates, to the garden as “the most beautiful place ever”. All of it is beautiful except for the bedroom in which she is kept in, but again the room selection was not her choice. “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it.” The room had previously been a child’s nursery, and had bars on the window. Though she recently had a child, her newborn did not occupy this nursery. The baby was looked after by Johns’ sister, something he had also arranged, and the narrator had very little contact with her child. As the story progresses, the narrator begins to fill more and more trapped by the room and completely obsessed with the “repellent, almost revolting” yellow wallpaper that surrounds her. In many of her secret