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Beauty In The House On Mango Street

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Beauty is a very powerful and prominent thing. It’s what makes you get out of bed in the mornings and makes the world go round. Despite all that, there are some negatives of it as well. “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros gives a window back in time to a point where a little girl named Esperanza grows up on the streets of Chicago. Through the numerous rapes, abusive relationships, and the absence of respect for women, Cisneros portrays a theme that beauty is a double edged sword through the characters Esperanza and Sally. Beauty is a double-edged sword for Esperanza because she’s optimistic, lacks self-confidence, and innocent. To begin with, Esperanza is a very optimistic person due to her goal of not ending up like other women …show more content…

She represented the theme of beauty is a double edged sword by being “fabulous”, beaten, and abused. To start off, Sally is “fabulous” through her pulchritude. This is how Esperanza describes her, “The boys at school think she’s beautiful…when she laughs, she flicks her hair back like a satin shawl”(Cisneros 81)Sally’s beauty makes her happy and content. She’s pretty, elegant, and graceful, which causes everybody to rave her looks. This is a major plus point for beauty. Another much darker thing that represents Sally is how she gets beaten. In the following excerpt, Esperanza describes how Sally’s father beats her. “He hit her with his hands just like a dog, she said, like if I was an animal” (Cisneros 92). The thing about this quote is Sally’s beauty can be a plus and a negative. On the plus side, she’s “fabulous”, as I described earlier. On the negative side, boys are more willing to rape her. To prevent this from happening, Sally’s father forbids her from talking to boys. At this point, it becomes extremely ironic. Her father tries to protect her from abuse by other boys, only to beat and abuse her himself. The father’s love turns out not to be so loving after all. In this case, her beauty is a ticket to get violated either at home or outside. Last but not least, Sally gets abused by boys because of her beauty. In “The Monkey Garden”, a group of boys steal her keys. This next excerpt is the most shocking,

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She dreams “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” (707). Esperanza believes that she can change the way she is living and live a better life. She is trying to get a good education to become a more improved and intelligent person so one day she does not have to be poor.

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Esperanza uses the hope she finds in her friends to discover her home and to push past the setbacks that she encounters in her life. While Esperanza is eager to make her way home, she shows that she

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But still feels lonely. Also, throughout the story Esperanza gets negative attention from boys because of her culture. For some men she comes across in the story they see her as a toy for her ethnicity and not being from America. This also embarrasses her as she is still trying to find out what love is but can’t because if the negative attention. Therefore, even though she struggles pushing through with her ethnicity, others have it just as hard as well, showing how different ethnicities can clash.

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