The House On Mango Street Analysis

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.

First, the book starts off telling the story of how Esperanza grew up in a loving wealthy family who owned El Rancho de las Rosas in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She was surrounded by generations of family members who loved her. The family had lots of servants who worked for them during the grape harvest season and they also helped them with everything else during the off season. Esperanza was a young girl who really didn’t understand poverty and was known to have a snobbish attitude at times when she was little because of her family’s wealth. She was surrounded by families that were just as wealthy as her own so poverty was not a norm in their community. There are many examples of her snobby ways in the beginning of book like when she first boarded a train in Mexico and realizes that she and her friend definitely wouldn’t be traveling first class. Her reaction to this was basically like: "You expect me to travel coach?! Yeah right." It was evident Esperanza did not use to a present lifestyle. Esperanza father was her biggest mentor and she followed his teachings very closely. After the death of her father, it was people like Abuelita, Mama, and Miguel that help keep Esperanza diva 'tude in check which helped keep her

Sally married young, “not ready but married just the same”(101). She grew up fast and traded her youth for a safer place, free from her father’s belt buckle. On Mango Street, we see many girls give up their childhood trying to move up in the world. When Esperanza takes a job to help support her family, she is sexually harassed at work. Sally loses her innocence in the Monkey’s Garden, kissing all the boys to get her keys back. Similar to Eve in the Garden of Eden, Sally can’t resist the opportunity to act older, so she gives up her adolescence. Many of the girls on Mango Street make this trade because they believe that to get out of the slums, they need to grow up and attract a man. When Esperanza explains Marin’s appeal, she states that, “Marin is already older than us in many ways”(27). On Mango Street, youth is often thrown off the boat first when girls are trying to lighten the load and stay above the water.

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.

Esperanza says, “I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free”( Cisneros 110). Esperanza tries to reassure herself by writing down that she will leave. The reassurance writing gives Esperanza is a form of freedom to her. Esperanza just wants to leave Mango Street but still return. Alicia says to Esperanza, “You must remember to come back for the ones who cannot leave as easily as you” (Cisneros 105). Esperanza realizes she is special and uses her education to get out of Mango Street. When Esperanza returns to help the ones who cannot leave as easily she will bring education back with her to share with all the women so they can also be free. Esperanza uses writing to make herself feel free from the roles forced upon her. She uses education to actually set herself free from society and one day comes back and give the women what they need to escape.

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.

The Novel, The House on Mango Street, was based on the writer Sandra Cisneros. She was writing this when she was living in Chicago. She was like Esperanza. She want though poverty. She has been heartbroken and deeply joyous. She inventing for herself who and what she will become. This is the life of Esperanza Cordero and based on Sandra Cisneros to all women out there.

In the novel, “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, the main character Esperanza has many positive influences on her life. Hardships do not define one’s life either in a mental or physical capacity. Throughout the novel, Esperanza’s grandmother, Marin, and Rosa Vargas enable her to overcome the hardships of becoming a woman.

In the book “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros we are advised the story of the protagonist Esperanza over a sequence of short scenes. Esperanza is a adolescent lady who moved out of her old home along with her parents into a new area called Mango Street. The new house is not what Esperanza wanted, she anticipated a big, white, provincial house with a backyard. Rather, she got a tiny, red, recap apartment in a Latino area in Chicago. It is a coming of age story where Esperanza blooms in many attitudes, all over the whole book we appreciate she wants to move out of Mango Street into her own house. One of the complications that Esperanza faces is the experience of shame. This happens through House on Mango Street, Rice Sandwich, Bums in the Attic, and Monkey Garden; the first three have to do with her despise of the new house. In the scene Rice Sandwich, Esperanza ambitions to eat in the canteen with the other “special kids” rather of having to walk back home to make lunch. She asks her mom to write a letter to the nun who is the principal of the school, she doesn't accept the letter as the grammar was amateurish and asks Esperanza where she lived.

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

Esperanza is the main character in the fictional novella, by Sandra Cisneros called, The House on Mango Street. Esperanza grew up in a harsh and changing world. As an outsider, she never felt like she would ever belong anywhere. Esperanza meets so many women stuck in abusive relationships. Throughout her life, she has seen women waiting or fighting for someone to change their lives.

This girl, who is slowly maturing into a woman, does not want a jaded life that is controlled by men but instead wants to have independence. The numerous events that occurred during Esperanza’s childhood may have affected her by giving her the tendency to be around bad things but she herself can decide her own future with her efforts.

In the novel The House on Mango Street the author Sandra Cisneros talks about a lot of issues that would be considered controversial. The controversial topics that are discussed in this novel would be rape, immigration, poverty, and religion and of course the role of women in society. The author shows that the issues discussed are not just issues that have a statistic attached to them. These issues effect real people in their everyday lives. They are issues that affect everyone they come across; even a young girl that is figuring out her place in this world.

One of the most common threads connecting The House on Mango Street is the recurring motif of women by a window. This motif shows how when women fall into the typical female gender role of being a housewife, they often spend their lives looking out the window, longing for the life they could have had. The first instance of this motif is when Esperanza is telling us about her Grandmother, whom she is named after. Esperanza informs us her grandmother was forced to marry, and in the end she, “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on their elbow” (Cisneros 11). This shows Esperanza's grandmother was forced into a marriage she didn’t want, and with marriage came her gender role of being a housewife. Her marriage stopped her from doing what she wanted, so she spent years looking through the window, never to accomplish her goals. Unfortunately,

The gender role is the issue that common in the whole world and it has different ideas between each culture. The book has several different issues and gender roles, is the one I would like to talk about. Esperanza mentions, “The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls.”(p.8) Esperanza means boys and girls have different instructions even when they are kids. Esperanza says, “It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse-which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female- but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.”(p.10) Esperanza is born in a place that people think women are weak and should obey men in everything as same as her grandmother did. Because people are human being naturally they make mistakes, however, people focus on women mistakes more than men mistakes. In some tradition, men force women to act or behave without giving their rights to live their real life. Females need to get their rights and opportunity as well as men to feel proud of themselves that they could make achievement and make the dream comes true.