Caitlin Liddle March 22, 2017 English, period 6 HOMS essay As young men and women mature, barriers will appear in their everyday lives. Discovering how to move around these obstacles is challenging. In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, various characters realize the struggle of breaking free from a trapped existence to move forward into independence. Using a variety of literary devices, Cisneros brings her readers on an adventure, showing them these hard encounters through motif and imagery.
The House on Mango Street is set in a poor, primarily Hispanic neighborhood. Author Sandra Cisneros creates an atypical, yet easily digestible world for the reader to experience while learning about Esperanza’s childhood. The culture of her environment influences Esperanza’s development as she becomes a young woman, and contributes to the book’s driving theme of self-empowerment.
The House on Mango Street, is a broad interpretation of a Hispanic girl’s life and her coming of age. Throughout the course of the book, Esperanza, the narrator and protagonist, is constantly fighting a war between her autonomous mind and her forever changing sexual body. You, Esperanza, whose name means hope in English, how did you lose your hope? Your innocence? Your purity? Esperanza, after exploring her changing world profoundly and deeply, experienced a series of psychological changes (changes in her maturity, intelligence, and including personal degradation associated with pubescent teenagers) as she encounters men whom loudly express the negative, masculine stereotypes constantly argued for by feminists. Cisneros uses multiple symbols,
The House on Mango Street follows Esperanza Cordero 's transitioning through a progression of pieces about her family, neighborhood, and mystery dreams. In spite of the fact that the novel does not take after a customary sequential example, a story develops by Esperanza’s fortifying toward oneself and will overcomebarriers of poverty, sex, and race. The novel starts when the Cordero family moves into another house, the first they have ever claimed, on Mango Street in the Latino segment of Chicago. The red, unstable house frustrates Esperanza. It is not in the least the fantasy house her guardians had constantly discussed, nor is it the house high on a slope that Esperanza promises to one day own.
Through these women and Esperanza’s reactions to them, Cisneros’ shows not only the hardships women face, but also explores their lack of power to overcome them. Very early on in The House on Mango Street Esperanza encounters multiple women who are living in abusive relationships or are stuck raising and providing for children on their own. One example of these women is Rosa Vargas. She is a mother to one too many children, who often misbehave: “…how can they help it with only one mother who is tired all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying, and who cries every day
Although it is not always clear, women are constantly being treated as lesser than men. Women and men are approaching equality, but many women are still being treated unfairly. White communities usually pretend that everything is perfect and cover up this problem. Hispanics, on the other hand, often make the mistreatment of women perspicuous. This is portrayed in the novella The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros. Cisneros displays the mistreatment of women in the hispanic culture through the women in Esperanza’s life.
The House On Mango Street is written in a series of vignettes to emphasize essential events in Esperanza's life. Each of these contain important literary choices made by Cisneros to emphasize different things of importance in the book. The vignette “Four Skinny Trees” is extremely prominent in the book. Here, the use of symbolism, personification, and diction illustrates Esperanza's growth from a child to a young women, and the strength she has.
Many people are undermined by the drawbacks of belonging to a low socioeconomic status. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is raised in a poor, Latino community, causing her to be introduced to poverty at an early age. This introduction of poverty affects Esperanza in many ways, one including that she is unable to find success. Esperanza struggles to achieve success in life because the cycle of poverty restricts her in a position in which she cannot break free from her socioeconomic status.
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a semi-autobiography shown through the eyes of the story’s narrator, Esperanza Cordero, an adolescent Mexican-American girl who is about thirteen and growing up in an impoverished, mostly Latino neighborhood in Chicago. The novel is a coming of age story, told over the course of about a year in a series of standalone vignettes, written in a non chronological order, that use poetic and figurative language, such as metaphors and similes, to convey its themes.
Beauty is a very powerful and prominent thing. It’s what makes you get out of bed in the mornings and makes the world go round. Despite all that, there are some negatives of it as well. “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros gives a window back in time to a point where a little girl named Esperanza grows up on the streets of Chicago. Through the numerous rapes, abusive relationships, and the absence of respect for women, Cisneros portrays a theme that beauty is a double edged sword through the characters Esperanza and Sally.
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
Esperanza’s Odyssey Esperanza ’s journey of self-identification is apparent in the novel “House on Mango Street”. Her hopes of leaving the barrio were clearly shown in different vignettes: “House on Mango Street”, “Bums in the attic”, “Beautiful and Cruel”, and so on. Her process of self-identification will entail her realizing that she is growing more mature, figuring out her sexuality, and understanding her culture as a Latina.
Many girls desire a female role model from a young age. The way these women are treated, and deal with this treatment can heavily impact the way young girls view themselves, and their future as well. Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street brings attention to issues of sexism and gender roles. This is done through a series of vignettes about the main character Esperanza navigating life by the example of her many role models. Each role model impacts Esperanza in a special way, Sally who is married at 13, Marin who is waiting to be rescued by a man, and Alicia who is balancing school and home responsibilities.
1. I think they find it necessary to move so often because it has been a dream for the family of six to have a piece of property like the houses shown on TV. The story begins when the family buys a new house on Mango Street. This new house is the first the family has owned and does not fulfill their dream. The house is simply not big enough for the family.
Believe it or not, people are not entirely unique. It is certain that no one is truly the same as another person, but it would not be ridiculous to think that everyone does in fact share many similarities. After all, the majority of the population grows and develops opinions or values based on what they see or hear. For Esperanza, the protagonist of Sandra Cisneros’s, The House on Mango Street, the perspective she has is built upon her childhood on Mango Street. This coming-of-age novel illustrates how Esperanza’s experiences on Mango Street play an important role during her period of growth.