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Cisneros The House On Mango Street

228 Words1 Pages
Cisneros has said that she began writing "The House on Mango Street" after reading about "the poetics of space" at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. There, she learned that everyone in the class but her understood their consciousness in terms of "house" metaphors--the "house" of memory, with its different rooms, for example. Cisneros, who moved repeatedly as a child and never really felt that she belonged to the dingy houses she lived in, rejected these ideas. However, "Mango" is very much about the search for identity, as symbolized by Esperanza’s search for a house. When she is ashamed of her house, she is ashamed of herself. Even toward the end of the book, she says her "real" house exists only in a dream--much like her "real" identity, which
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