Figurative Language In The House On Mango Street

In the novel The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros utilizes vignettes, which typically captures a single moment by using imagery, and explains a lot with not as many words to explain Esperanza’s life that shows the complex feelings relating to her childhood. Cisneros uses imagery to capture a single moment in the book many times throughout the novel. In the vignette “Bums in the Attic” (Cisneros 86), Esperanza dreams about having a house on the hill like the ones her family visits. She feels ashamed but imagines that people living on the hill have forgotten about poor people like her family. She figures out by the end that she still wants to have a house like theirs but wants to invite the bums into her attic so she is able to help the

They are amazed at how the shoes suddenly have the attractiveness of a woman. Until a man warns them about how the shoes are not for little girls, and when they ignore them, other men tease them with sexual comments. Rachel also gets flirted on by a drunken bum and he tries to kiss her for a dollar, so the girls run back to Mango Street and hide the shoes where their mother throws them away. Cisneros uses figurative language many times throughout The House on Mango Street, in this quote she uses allusions, “Hurray! Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly, and we laugh at Rachel's one foot with a girl's grey sock and a lady's high heel.” (Cisneros 40) The characteristic. figurative language, reveals in Esperanza’s childhood that she is very excited to have those high heels on in the beginning. We know by the end of this vignette that she regrets wearing those shoes but at the beginning of “The Family of Little Feet”, Esperanza is delighted to be able to be like Cinderella and wear “adult” shoes. Cisneros utilizes this characteristic of vignettes to relate the way that Esperanza's feet fit in the shoes to something the reader can easily