What Is The Relationship Between The House On Mango Street Flowers And Trees

Wangari Maathai once said, “A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky.”. Trees are a common lifeform outside, simply nature: green, growing, thriving, and dying. Most people don’t pay trees much attention, but in Sandra Cisneros’s novella, Esperanza progressed through life facing many challenges and blockades, ultimately persevering. As Esperanza starts to mature and the novella progresses, the motif of nature repeats and thus becomes symbolic of beauty and growth. Through flowers and trees, Cisneros argues that beauty is a double-sided thing because it can allow you to grow and thrive, but it can also trap you and prevent growth. Early in the novella Esperanza associates nature throughout the novella with beauty and growth.

Esperanza describes how girls grow into women using an unusual metaphor: “Bloom like roses” (50). She describes how hips are a scientific identifier between a man and a woman because women’s hips “Bloom like roses” (50) and widen to be able to give birth. She is essentially using these flowers to describe when a girl grows into a woman by blooming. However, in “Linoleum Roses”, when Sally gets married there are fake flowers on the floor, which may represent that Sally didn’t really get a chance to bloom, Esperanza even said, “Sally got married like we knew she would, young and not ready but married the same.” (101). So even though there are flowers present, she hasn’t bloomed all the way. It may also represent fact that Sally may have been beautiful but her life around her wasn’t. Sally was enduring things like a horrible relationship where she wasn’t allowed out, and the fake roses may have been an attempt by Sally to make her home a place that has flowers since she wasn’t allowed outside, but these flowers are only a pattern. Because they are artificial/fake, Sally hasn’t achieved the free, beautiful life associated with