Women In The House On Mango Street

When taking a deeper look into the messages of The House on Mango Street, it’s clear to see that Sandra Cisneros portrayed the women in this story as confined to their patriarchal culture. You see time and time again the female characters in the story being held up in homes, trying to find a way to escape from their marriages or wishing they could. Some characters even try to escape from their problems by marrying but then end up with just more problems. It seems that many female characters are troubled with abusive relationships and many are wanting it to change, either by other people’s actions or their own. One example of a character who has this problem is Rafaela, the woman who leans out her window all day and asks the kids sometimes

One character, Sally, has a abusive relationship with her father who beats her frequently because he thinks she will run away like his sisters. To escape from this, she flirts with boys to try to get married and flee into a household of her own. She often hangs around with boys and when she and Esperanza were in the Monkey Garden, some boys steal her keys and say she can get them back only if she kisses them. She tries to act angry but is really happy about this and goes behind a blue car to kiss them. This makes Esperanza angry and she states “I don’t know why, but something inside me wanted to throw a stick. Something in me wanted to say no when I watched Sally and all of Tito’s buddies all grinning (Cisneros pg. 97).” After this event, Sally invites Esperanza to a carnival where Sally abandons her and she is then raped by two random guys. Later in the story, she marries some marshmallow salesman and moves to a state where she is able to marry in the 8th grade. She does this to escape her abusive father but in the end, she is trapped by a marriage that she says she wanted, but instead instead she truly wants to leave the tightening grip of her husband’s