The House on Mango Street is a novel about a Latina girl becoming of age in the streets of Chicago. Her family is very poor, and throughout the entire book she transforms from a little girl to a young lady. In the book, the main characters are Esperanza, Nenny, Mama, Papa. Sally, Lucy, and Rachel. Esperanza and her family moves a lot, but the little red house on Mango Street helped her become the person she is.
The reaction to this small house affects her to dream of living in a house of her own (Cisneros 4). Esperanza isn’t all that wealthy; this is evident when they can’t afford lunch meats so she makes a rice Maggard 3 sandwich (Cisneros 44). Overall Esperanza learns to cope with her living situation just talking to people and she also works really hard in school and at home and eventually moves away. These three characters have proved to all be very unique and different.
Esperanza’s interest is writing poem, appears in many of the chapters where it explains a way of bonding with her community by sharing poems with one another. Because Esperanza has become a writer her observations strengthen throughout the novel. One example of how she matures through writing is in the beginning of the book she told stories that were obviously meant for a younger audiences but through the middle of the book she started to use more observation based upon what she saw which helped develop the story more for the reader. This change shows that she is becoming an artist, and also that she is starting to distance herself from her community, since she focuses more on capturing experiences than living through them, she starts to further her self from interaction and focuses more on observation of the people around her. By the end of The House on Mango Street, she knows that she underwent a huge transformation and her relationship with mango st is starting to weaken.
Esperanza says that she will come back, she will come back for “the ones I left behind... the ones who cannot out”. (Cisneros 110). Esperanza is able to go through a change and accept who she is through her community and her family. She is able to use her situation to empower herself, and to be hopeful in her own
When upstairs, she starts crying while having a conversation with the nun, saying “I always cry when the nuns yell at me, even if they’re not yelling.” This is yet another example of Esperanza’s shyness and social awkwardness. Lastly, after being told that she can eat at canteen for the day, she cries and eats her rice sandwich alone. Esperanza is also physically weak and malnourished.
Esperanza does not realize that by her doing those things, just like Mamacita she is stopping her growth. If Esperanza would have kept with that constant cycle and not accepted her home and what she was
In the House on Mango Street, Esperanza is seeking for an identity of her own. In her current neighborhood, she struggles with economic, cultural, and gender based barriers to personal growth, and she believes that changing her surroundings is her solution; however, she realizes that to discover her identity, her ultimate destination is a home in the heart. The house on Mango Street was one that was the opposite of what Esperanza had dreamt her entire life. The house is, “…small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you 'd think they were holding their breath... bricks...crumbling in places, and the front door...so swollen you have to push hard to get in". (Cisneros 5)
In the series of vignettes The House on Mango Street, the author Sandra Cisneros details the life of main character Esperanza, a young girl living in a barrio of Chicago. As Esperanza tells the reader about her experiences in her day to day life, the reader hears about her struggles and dreams, her hopes and expectations in life and how these affect her. Being a young girl, Esperanza holds naivety and hope for the world, not having experienced many mature situations or society yet, and since she is going through the time in her life when she begins experiencing these issues, we see her heartbreak and the world she knew shatter. For example, when Esperanza and her family move to Mango Street, as our story kicks off, her parents would often talk about the life that they would get when they win the lottery, like having “A real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. And our house would have running water and pipes that worked.
She had to get a job because her parents couldn’t afford a good school, but her father said if you go to public school, you want to turn out bad. For example, “The Catholic high School cost a lot, and Papa said nobody went to public school unless you wanted to turn out bad.” (53) We can all assume that Esperanza is definitely not the type of girl that wants to turn out bad because she is willing to get a job to help her through school. Even if it was an easier job like when she said, “I thought I’d find an easy job, the kind other kids had, working in the dime store or maybe a hotdog stand.”
The name Esperanza plays a role in her identity, hope. The three sisters in the vignette The Three Sisters believe that Esperanza will move on in her life to do great things. The three sisters also have hope that she will come back for the people on Mango Street. Being that her name means hope plays a key role in her identity. Even Though Esperanza understands what her name means she does not like it.
II need a good title help A Quick Thank You Note to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, has many similar traits to Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. For instance, the fight for constant control over women and the inequal standards females have to endure are displayed through various examples within both works. Cisneros’s novel is based around this because of the struggles and hardships Esperanza goes through in her male dominated society; subsequently, the same is seen in the poem due to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath having to live through a society where they have made big names for themselves but still face gender inequality. The reader can see exactly what Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath have gone through because of lines like “Fee-FI-Fo-Fum Now
Esperanza is often humiliated not only by where she lives, but also by her physical appearance, hence causing a restriction in her climb to a higher social class. Esperanza is frequently ashamed of her family’s broken-down house in an urban, poor
The male-dominated society that Esperanza grows up in forces the idea that women are weak and should stay locked in their houses while men go off to work. The men are immoral and seedy, as expressed in the chapter in which a homeless man leers and asks for a kiss from the little girls. Esperanza experiences the evil of her community when she is sexually assaulted, causing her to lose her previous desire to explore her sexuality. Before being assaulted, she wanted to be “beautiful and cruel” like her friend Sally, because Sally was what she understood to be a perfect woman. However, after her rape she decides that she needs to discover her own identity for herself.
In the end, she embraced where she came from, and her concept of home was home in a heart and not a physical place. Esperanza in the beginning of the book did not want her home to be linked to her identity. She did not want people to know she lived in the house on Mango Street. To begin with, Esperanza was living in poor conditions by her having to share bedrooms and bricks crumbling in places. Then, a person bullied her because she
In the House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Esperanza suffers with insecurities within herself and her race. Racism has always been an issue in all different types of races no matter the location and no matter the circumstances. Anyone who would come into Esperanza’s community would be frightened because of their
