Roles Of Women In The House On Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

Women and Their Roles
Stereotypes are ways that people put others into tiny boxes in order to feel like they are in control. In her story, The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros uses women stuck in gender roles to show how trapped many women in the her story are. Cisneros’s stereotypical roles for the women in Esperanza’s community are the homemaker, a man’s plaything, and isolated wife. Cisneros’s use of the characters including Alicia, Sally, and Rafaela emphasize the roles women are forced into.
In The House on Mango Street, Cisneros’s character, Alicia is thrust into the role of a homemaker as a young adult. Her mother dies when she is young, leaving Alicia to take on her role as the homemaker, despite the fact that she is also an

Rafaela is one of many “window women” in the book. She has a husband who controls her and keeps her locked inside because he thinks her beauty is trouble. When Esperanza is imaging Rafaela thinking about freedom from her window, she reminds herself that “…always there is someone offering sweeter drinks, and promising to keep them on a silver string” (Cisneros, 80). Rafaela is trapped by her husband. Many women in her society marry young to escape abuse in their own families, only to be controlled and abused by their husbands. This quote shows how tempting it is to escape home to another man, but they will still be trapped and caged by them, no matter how beautiful the “silver string” is that they are tethered with. In this society, it was common for women to be kidnapped and forced to marry, like Esperanza’s mother. Because of this cultural history, it does not seem that strange for wives to be strictly controlled by their husbands. This leads to people turning a blind eye to the “window wives” trapped in their own houses. Rafaela is a trapped wife who always look out her window, like so many other women in this