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Gender Roles In The House On Mango Street

1854 Words8 Pages

Showing itself in sexism, misogyny, and overall oppression expressed to women, enabled through the patriarchy, gender inequality has long been part of the history of the world. Several instances of gender inequality towards women are presented in Sandra Cisneros’ novella, The House on Mango Street; a bildungsroman conveyed through a series of vignettes and told by the character of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl. Throughout the novella, Esperanza is struggling to form her identity while living in an impoverished neighborhood and surrounded by unfortunate cases. In the novella, Cisneros depicts how women are denied freedom due to the damaging effects of both traditional gender roles and societal expectations because the roles they are forced …show more content…

Esperanza mentions the fact that “[Minerva] already has two kids and a husband who left” (Cisneros 84-85), despite her young age. A few years older than Esperanza, Minerva has the responsibility to provide for herself and two children, as a result of exchanging her freedom for the love of someone who “left and keeps leaving”. However, her husband only continues to return because Minerva is enabling his actions after being given poor apologies. She falls further into entrapment due to her lack of wisdom, ironic since her name refers to the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena. Ultimately, the cycle of abuse will continue unless she reclaims her freedom before devoting more of her time to receive the temporary attention he feeds her. In the vignette, “The Monkey Garden'', Cisneros presents a set of foil characters by comparing the differences in the sexual maturity of the adolescents, Esperanza and Sally. In recounting her day, …show more content…

Unlike Esperanza, Sally does not play childish games and instead finds entertainment through objectifying herself and allowing the boys to take advantage of her in exchange for their attention and validation. Through the contrast of their actions throughout the vignette, the author emphasizes how deep Esperanza really is in this prelapsarian state and how far Sally is from it. After confronting Sally and the boys, Esperanza feels that society has made a fool out of her once more for believing such treatment towards women is taken seriously in a corrupt society. While Esperanza’s lack of sexual maturity aids her in clearly seeing the damage being done to Sally, Sally is blinded by her overwhelming sexual maturity and is unable to see the consequences of participating in such games. Sally and the boys confirm they are no longer in the prelapsarian state Esperanza remains in but rather in the corrupt society that normalizes sexually mature behavior in adolescents through their refusal to play childish games with the other kids. Furthermore, in the vignette,

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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

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The House On Mango Street Sacrifice Essay

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Although there are a variety of characters throughout literature that have made sacrifices that expose their values, none of them come close in comparison to the sacrifices of Esperanza in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. The consistent sacrifices displayed through Esperanza’s self-image, innocence, and cynicism express the struggles and desire for feminine individuality and respect that begin for many in childhood and dissolve into adulthood. Not only does Esperanza display these sacrifices constantly throughout the novel, the author’s use of her character as a beacon of catharsis to the reader symbolically represents the majority of women. Much like other women, Esperanza constantly tries to find herself throughout her own sacrifices,

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Influential Characters In The House On Mango Street

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She is also one of the strongest women in the plot of the story. This makes Esperanza look up to her mom and make herself want to be a strong woman when she grows up. Esperanza's mom helps influence the way Esperanza wants to live her life in the future. The last of the three most influential characters is Marin.

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The House on Mango Street: Facing Realities In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, many characters struggle with facing the realities of their lives and economical situations. Two prominent examples of this struggle are houses and trapped women. One girl, named Esperanza, is raped while she is visiting the carnival with her friend Sally. Esperanza said, "Sally, you lied.

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In the novella The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, women in Esperanza’s life motivate her to live her life with purpose. The protagonist, Esperanza Cordero, is a young Mexican-American girl living in Chicago. The novella follows Esperanza as she changes from a young girl to a young woman. Esperanza lives on Mango Street, which is filled with family, friends, and stories. On Mango Street, a woman named Rafaela lives with her husband.

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Most of Esperanza’s female neighbors are abused or oppressed by their fathers and husbands, so Esperanza knows that she wants to escape the male dominated society, but at the same time she has to deal with her own sexuality and her desire to be loved by men. She meets Sally who is around the same age as her but is more sexually mature than other girls and she also has an abusive father. Being a Sally’s friend, Esperanza experiences “the loss of innocence” as she describes it in the book. Esperanza’s friendship with Sally also leads her to the most traumatic experience in the book, for example, as Sally leaves her alone at a carnival Esperanza is raped. This is the moment that Esperanza’s experiences a massive impact in her life.

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The House On Mango Street Gender Roles

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Throughout the story, Esperanza witnesses the prevalence of gender roles in her community and the domestic responsibilities that fall on women's shoulders. Sandra Cisneros presents insights into women's actualities by showing the emotional and physical

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In Mexican American society , women are deemed inferior to men, evident in traditional family roles, the male is the head of the family who provides for the family , while the woman stays at home to look after the children she is expected to provide for her husband . In the third vignette of ‘The House on Mango Street’ titled ‘Boys and Girls’ the reader is informed of the division between men and women when Esperanza refers to herself and her sister Nenny , and her brothers, “They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls”. The male dominance begins at a very young age.

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Sexism In The House On Mango Street

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These problems coming to light through the many women Esperanza looks up to, drive her to rise above her obstacles, and become more than just another poorly treated woman. Despite the variety of girls in the neighborhood, one of Esperanza’s closest friends ends up being Sally, who has moved from one abusive home to the next. Sally’s father was a very strict man and she constantly disobeyed him once out of his sight. Whenever Sally is caught dressing “provocative” or acting “too old” her father decides to teach her a lesson.

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Poverty In The House On Mango Street

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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

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Female Role Models In Mango Street

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Growing up as a young female teen came be hard due to the stress and peer pressure of appearance. For teenage girls from immigrant families, it came be very challenging to fit in with the “American way”. Esperanza struggles throughout the book with finding her place in society. She looks to other female role models in her community for guidance, where she finds different results. Most of Esperanza’s female role models on Mango Street have unique stories to tell of their experiences with men on Mango Street.

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The House On Mango Street: Isolation, Limitation, Expectation

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Prajwal Agrawal Ms. Banack English 1A, Period 5 21 MAR 2023 Isolation, Limitation, Expectation Throughout history, women have been continuously bound by the expectations of society. In socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, such as the one presented in Sandra Cisneros’s novella The House on Mango Street, women are further confined to their monotonous futures in the household to which they have been chained. Cisneros uses the abuse cycle, objectification, and gender expectations to display the patriarchy's limits on the potential of women on Mango Street.

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Reoccurring Themes

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However, upon entering a laundromat, they receive sexual comments from men who call them names like "pretty girl" and offer them money in exchange for a kiss. This behavior deeply disturbs Esperanza and her cousins, highlighting the idea that some men view themselves as superior to women and feel entitled to degrade and harass them. Another example of this behavior can be seen in “Red Clowns.” Esperanza gets raped by a boy who insists on her kissing him and refers to her as “Spanish girl.” We can see that this situation incredibly troubles Esperanza to the point where she doesn’t even want to address it.

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House On Mango Street Culture

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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.

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