The House On Mango Street Analysis

As the book progresses, Esperanza witnesses the emerging sexuality of her peers and begins to encounter her own sexuality, too. This is a confusing state to be in, and Cisneros captures the confusion by blending these moments of sexual exploration with the brutality of gendered violence. Men beat their wives and daughters, and in most cases the sexual encounters in The House on Mango Street are unwanted. The boys and men of this book tend to take things, while the girls and women deal with the consequences. Esperanza knows all this already, and it contributes greatly to her desire to

In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros creates the theme that when a young girl is growing up without role models and a community that doesn’t support her development, she will have uncertainty in her identity and will search for her way out of the endless cycle. Cisneros does this through the main character, Esperanza. Cisneros creatively weaves the uncertain identity though many of the vignettes, but the vignettes that have the strongest meaning are number one and four. In vignette one, “The House on Mango Street,” Esperanza describes the places that she’s lived before

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.

One of the literary devices Cisneros uses well in THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET is imagery. It is used to represent something that is sometimes complicated to talk about in a more beautiful and understandable way. In THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, Cisneros writes, “My hair is lazy”(p.6). Literally, hair cannot be lazy, however the adjective takes place to represent long, falling, and soft hair. My second, but not less important, is “Yup, she said disgusted, stirring again. I was a smart cookie then” (p. 91). In there, and during most of the vignette, Esperanza’s mother talks about her life when she was young; before she married. Then she was a good student, at least until she stopped studying because she

Esperanza wishes to be grown so she can be free from Mango Street, but she is faced with a sense of powerlessness and no role models to show her to be powerful. Esperanza is surrounded by women who have submitted to their fate instead of standing up for themselves, except for Alicia. Esperanza, instead of following every woman who has submitted to their powerlessness, has chosen a role model who is showing her to be powerful. After Esperanza is raped, the peak of her powerlessness, she is speaking with Alicia, “No, this isn’t my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I’ve lived here...No, Alicia says. Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you’ll come back too. Not me. Not until somebody makes it better. Who’s going to do it? Not the mayor” (Cisneros 106). Alicia is telling Esperanza that no matter how hard she tries, Mango Street will always be a part of her past, and she will come back someday. But at the same time, she’s hinting to Esperanza that she is strong enough to come back and change Mango Street for the better. Because who else is going to do it? Esperanza understands Alicia’s message to her and reflects upon what she wishes her future to be like, “One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away...They will not know I have gone away to

In conclusion, we know that Esperanza’s negativity of herself begins to slowly change as she slowly experience what accepting means and how she began to accept where she was from . Throughout this book, Cisnero showed us accepting is an important part of growing in life as well as determining the true you. In the beginning she hated her life always wanted to escape out of Mango Street versus the end she says she is going to come back. From the beginning to the end, Esperanza finally accepted where she was from and how Mango Street has developed who she became

In life, we are often deeply influenced by the people who surround us. Consider the age-old adage “Birds of a Feather Flock Together”; this familiar saying reminds us that, in life, we gravitate toward people who appeal to us, and those people can have a great impact on who we are and the choices we make. In Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, Esperanza meets many women who play a role in her life. Some of the women impact her in negative ways, but others help her to see that she can make more of her life than what her Chicago neighborhood offers. Of all the women in Esperanza’s life, Esperanza is most influenced by her mother and Alicia because they teach her to rely on herself in order to escape Mango Street.

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.

Esperanza is the strong-willed main character who wants to break free from the limitations and expectations of a women set by her community. Unlike majority of the women in her neighborhood, she dreams of her escape from this discriminatory treatment. As she blossoms from a young girl to a mature women, she comes to the realization that she can never escape, because that house on Mango Street is a part of her. She can only learn from her experience living her never flee from it. When Esperanza creates creates an original piece of poetry, she shares it with Aunt Lupe, who in return, shares some insightful advice. (60-61) Writing through all forms can allow people to escape the realities and bounds of life.

In the novel,The House on Mango Street, Cisneros uses a powerful collection of imagery however, one of the strongest examples would be in the chapter My Name, which displays Esperanza’s insecurities in a land who struggles to accept her. “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting,” (Cisneros pg.10). Esperanza explains the meaning of hope for Hispanic people in a few simple words: sadness and waiting. For millions, it represents the wait of a new life, a better life for them. It’s sadness, knowing many reject them in a land they were promised opportunity. This motif of repudiation and racial discrimination appears frequently throughout the novel which greatly affects Esperanza’s life.

But when she saw the house that they moved into, it was not what she had expected. In the book, Esperanza says, “But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don’t own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. There are stairs in our house, but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom-- Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny.” (Cisneros 4). By reading this, the reader can see the parallel between the house and Esperanza’s struggle with her identity. Esperanza expected her house to be this beautiful, huge, almost mansion-type place, whereas in reality it was a small house, with not much inside. Just like that, Esperanza wants to be this amazing, strong, confident, prolific writer, whereas she does not even know who she is yet. Like the house she imagined, she wants there to be so much to her, but now, she is like her house on Mango Street with not much to her that she has discovered

Esperanza “is a young girl surrounded by examples of abused, defeated, worn-out women” (De Valdes). On Mango street, most of the women experience a lack of freedom, compared to their husbands who are free to do whatever they please. Women are commonly left to “stare out of windows, locked indoors waiting for their spouses to return or for something to happen” (Martinez 1). Esperanza’s own great-grandmother “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on their elbow” (Cisneros 11). In addition, “Rafaela, who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets

Many would agree that finding one’s identity is essential to making a life of their own. In the novella “The House on Mango Street” Cisneros expresses the discovery of Esperanza, as well as how it affects her later in life. Throughout the story, the idea of realization is placed on the main character Esperanza, through which she displays by her thoughts and feelings about herself. Esperanza’s negative view of herself slowly changes as she begins to focus on her larger community and her place within it.

For my project I decided to draw a picture of Esperanza’s dream house where she can go to write about her experiences on Mango Street. When I was drawing the picture of the house, I made the house to fit Esperanza’s dream of what will bring her happiness and an inspiration for her passions. This house acts as a safe place where she can write about her true emotions about Mango street. “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” (110). This chapter and project reveals Esperanza’s true feelings about Mango Street and how she can make use of those feelings. A deeper meaning that is explored in this chapter is that women do not need a man to be happy and productive because when Esperanza thinks about this house, a man is not in the picture.

As stated previously, Cisneros' style in The House on Mango Street suggests to us that liberation can be achieved through an art form, rather than physically picking up and moving your residence. Esperanza overcomes her condition by creating the realm of literature, rather than the physical reality of another house in another time and place. In this way, she is able to distance herself from her community and family. But all the while, still holding on to her heritage and ethnicity. By affirming her own artistic ability, Esperanza is able to blend all of her dreams. Because of this we come to understand that one can achieve self-discovery and even independence through something so remote as literature. This is where I find Cisneros' influence the most powerful. I believe she is stressing a theme here, not just for Hispanics, but for all minorities as well. She lets them know that liberation can be achieved within several realms of the human experience.