Four Skinny Trees In The House On Mango Street Cisneros
Characters Comparison/Contrast Essay Intro: Include one or more sentences summarizing each story and describing each character. Esperanza and house on mango street: Esperanza is a young girl who lives for a year on mango street and gradually grows into a mature young woman by a series of encounters and situations on her quest to learn more about female sexuality and later conclusion on rejecting sex as a form of escaping reality but rather focus on the importance of community and family. At the end of the book, Esperanza becomes a important figure for women’s help in her community and proves herself as an artist and writer through her analysis and observations through her writings.
Esperanza’s house on Mango Street is not the house she dreamed on when she lived on Loomis Street, not the kind of house her parent’s talked about, not the house she wanted. Her house on Mango Street is a small, red house with even smaller stairs leading to the door. The brick are falling out of place and to get inside, one must shove the door, swollen like Esperanza’s feet in later vignettes, open. Once inside, where you are never very far from someone else, there are small hallway stairs that lead to the only one shared bedroom and bathroom. This house is just, “For the time being,”[5] Esperanza claims, for this is nothing like the house she longs for.
House on Mango Street analysis essay: Hopes and Dreams In the House on Mango Street, a novel by Sandra Cisneros, she suggests the notion that hopes and dreams can be obtained even when people are at the bottom of the totem pole as seen in Esperanza’s desire to live in a better place and find friends. One way that Sandra Cisneros suggests this theme is when Esperanza feels ashamed of her current house and knows “she has to have a real house. One she can point to and feel proud of (Cisneros 5) Another example is when Esperanza and the nun are talking and the nun asks where Esperanza lives and she is forced to “point to the the third floor, with the paint peeling”
In “Four Skinny Trees”, Cisneros establishes an inspiring tone through the use of personification and metaphor in order to develop the theme, one must learn to adapt to their environment and find inspiration where they can. Cisneros utilizes personification by giving the four skinny trees human traits in order to portray the idea that Esperanza finds herself connecting to the trees in a place where she feels she does not belong. “They are the only ones who understand me,” (Cisneros 74.) The author utilized this piece of personification in the Vignette in order to show that the four skinny trees around Esparanza are like humans to her and not just plain useless trees. This part is personification as trees do not have the ability to understand
Esperanza, which means hope in Spanish, is the name of the main character in the House on Mango Street. Throughout the first chapter of the story, Esperanza tells the reader about her past experiences in all the houses she and her family has lived in since she was born. Esperanza recalls how each house was different. Alike many children Esperanza’s age, can be very materialistic.
The House on Mango Street consists of many short stories that explain the life of a young girl named Esperanza. It also explains her living situation; poverty in a crime riddance neighborhood. In addition, she also states the various obstacles that she has to overcome in her everyday life, such as wearing cheap clothes, eating the lunches her mom makes, living in her home, etc. Reading the book once without looking at it through an analytical perspective the book may seem two-dimensional and flat. While Cisneros’ stories may be short, after re-reading it to get a deeper understanding as to what she really means, the significance of the text becomes even more visible, and the interpretations become increasingly powerful.
The House on Mango Street is set in a poor, primarily Hispanic neighborhood. Author Sandra Cisneros creates an atypical, yet easily digestible world for the reader to experience while learning about Esperanza’s childhood. The culture of her environment influences Esperanza’s development as she becomes a young woman, and contributes to the book’s driving theme of self-empowerment. Mango Street is the source of Esperanza’s growth through her childhood, and it hides sadness and longing underneath stereotypes of Hispanic people. The characters that live in the broken-down neighborhood all seem to represent pigeonholed views of Latino individuals.
These qualities of the trees lead esperanza to idolize them, “When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees.” (pg. 75) she looks up to the trees and by comparing herself to them, is reminded that she too can grow tall and mighty like the trees before her. Later in the passage, she writes “Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach.”
In the book, The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is portrayed as a young innocent girl that drastically changes over the course of the book. Esperanza is new to mango street and encounters many challenges but also positive experiences that she is able to take away from mango street. In order for Esperanza to transform as a human it was inevitable for her to face the struggles on mango street. As Esperanza matures throughout the novel she experiences three major developments that shape her future through the awakening of maturity, responsibility and her awakening of her interest in poetry.
The House on Mango Street creates an interesting point of view of tragic experiences involving Esperanza and her life. This story expresses interesting thoughts about Esperanza as a normal teenage girl. Esperanza wants to experience new things and she is trying to define herself. She thinks about many things and can't keep focused on what she wants. Like most teenagers, Esperanza is lost and makes stupid decisions sometimes.
Many people are undermined by the drawbacks of belonging to a low socioeconomic status. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is raised in a poor, Latino community, causing her to be introduced to poverty at an early age. This introduction of poverty affects Esperanza in many ways, one including that she is unable to find success. Esperanza struggles to achieve success in life because the cycle of poverty restricts her in a position in which she cannot break free from her socioeconomic status.
The main protagonist Esperanza, matures from a childish girl to a young confident woman through many critical and life changing events in the story. Ultimately, the author, Sandra Cisneros implements the symbols of confidence, the house on mango street and the metaphor of shoes to show how Esperanza develops into a more mature state. Sandra Cisneros
The House on Mango Street, is a series of vignettes about a girl named Esperanza who is around the age of twelve at the beginning of the book it goes through Esperanza’s struggles with her identity, as she grows older and matures the struggles are focused on finding a connection with someone, and close to the end of the book Esperanza struggles with the idea of staying on Mango Street and live a life like other people in the community. Maturing into an adulthood, Esperanza accepts herself and has her own house just like how she wanted throughout the book. In the book she also talks about the house she lives in, her name, heritage, even detailed information about the neighborhood she lives in and the residents in the neighborhood. You learn and read how much Esperanza observed her community and how important to her the house she lived in and reaching the goal of living in a house on her own. Through my creative piece I wanted to emulate the figurative language Cisneros uses and also tries to write about a well-observed community that is out of the box.
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)
She refers to her Mexican identity in a negative way. Cisneros uses repetition in another vignette called “Four Skinny Trees” “Keep, Keep, Keep, trees say when I sleep. They Teach. When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees” (Cisneros 75). She is identifying with the skinny trees who hold and keep their strength even though they are blocked by the concrete.
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