Women In The House On Mango Street

In “The House on Mango Street” Sandra Cisneros implies that Esperanza's cultural and physical surroundings are what shapes her psychological and moral traits. Esperanza's great-grandmother is the first of many women in The House on Mango Street who spend their lives looking out the window and longing for escape. Esperanza resolves to not end up like her great-grandmother before she even meets the other trapped women on Mango Street: Mamacita, Sally, Minerva, and Rafaela. They sit by their windows and look down onto the street all day. The group makes up a kind of community, but these women cannot communicate, and each keeps to her place without much complaint, these women give Esperanza a vivid picture of what it is like to be trapped, hardening her resolve not to be like her great-grandmother. The trapped women on Mango Street, Cisneros depict a row of third-floor apartments as jail cells. Some of the women are stuck because of their husbands, but Esperanza implies that some of them could do more to change their situations. Her capacity for both empathy and pity grows as she understands their particular stories better than the story of her great-grandmother, whom she never met. Esperanza’s long-dead

As a child, Esperanza wants only to escape Mango Street, and doesn’t understand that she has responsibility to her family or to the people in her neighborhood, and she wishes to leave them all behind. However, as she grows older, she begins to feel responsible for them. She recognizes herself as a member of a network who must give back to her community in order to break the cycle of poverty that plagues the neighborhood, but it is not until she talks with the three sisters and Alicia, however, that Esperanza understands that helping the neighborhood women will be a lifelong