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The house on mango street setting analysis
The house on mango street setting analysis
The house on mango street literary elements
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Marching for days without water, soldiers lost morale and the energy to reach their destination. To solve this situation, their general told them that a forest of plum trees was steps away. His words not only caused his soldiers to salivate and quench the thirst to some degree, but also motivated some to keep marching to a place that had water. The plums and the water abundant region associated with them were the soldiers’ hope—a belief that something good would happen in the near future. This hope facilitated the materialization of positive things by incentivizing the soldiers to proceed. However, this folktale also entails a negative influence of hope. The hope made the soldiers less thirsty at first, and some soldiers thought this mechanism would continue to work; they took no actions to turn the hope into the reality and were doomed to death. Like the soldiers in the Chinese folktale, the women figures in The House on Mango Street are in a plight. Their condition is horrifying, filled with “restrictive gender roles, and domestic …show more content…
violence” (Doyle). Most of the women accept the situation and live under such condition, while some such as the protagonist of the book, Esperanza, challenge it. Many scholars have argued that it is the Latino culture that has confined those women, and seem to imply that confronting the culture has pushed for changes in the condition. Nonetheless, I want to contend that although the Latino culture may have created the condition in the first place, but what have happened after—the acceptance to the condition or the resistance to the condition—can hardly be accounted by the Latino culture alone; rather, something more universal is responsible for the exacerbation and the improvement of the women’s condition, the same thing that is central in the Chinese folktale—hope. Actually, hope plays an important role not just in Latino women-Latino men relationship, but in almost all kinds of the oppressed-the oppressing relationships. Numerous scholars have asserted that the Latino culture restricts the women figures and the Latino women they represent. Wissman argues the “social constrictions” of “gender, culture, and ethnicity touch upon her[Esperanza’s] life and those around her;” Busch argues “Esperanza encounters gendered ‘worlds’ and forced separation with the ability of men of color to define women within their respective culture;” Leslie Petty argues that in Mexican culture, those females are labeled as la Malinche, the bad woman, or la Virgen de Guadalupe, the good woman, and this labeling “entails confinement, sacrifice, and violation.” Those scholars view the appalling women’s condition through the lens of the Latino culture, and imply that feminists like Esperanza are trying to ameliorate the condition through changing the culture. Even Cisneros, the author, indicates that the Latino culture has shaped the women’s condition, those who accept the culture are suffering and maintaining the condition, and those who challenge the culture are looking for ways to improve the condition. Those two forces counterbalances each other and defines the Latino women’s situation. In an interview, she said, the protagonist “was looking for another way to be” and wanted “a space for her to invent herself, another way to be other than what you inherit from our culture [the Latino culture] that is very male dominated.” Those scholars have put a spotlight on the Latino culture in shaping the women’s situation into the way it is. Nonetheless, what is the Latino culture? Is it the same thing as it was when Cisneros grew up and formed her observations and opinions of the culture, or as it was in 1984 when Cisneros first published the book, or as it was in the 1990s and 2000s when a large number of scholars shared their opinions of this book? The Latino culture has been modified so much during those decades by the new things in the world—globalization, increasing interactions between cultures, flooding information, rising feminism, et cetera. It is hardly the thing it was before. Actually, it should be very different in all those time periods as the larger environments were different, yet most readers and scholars are still able to relate to the book and find the women’s dreadful condition and women’s reactions that has shaped this condition(either reinforcing or changing) applicable to their lives. If the Latino culture is the central axis around which all things revolve, why don’t women’s situation change when the axis is changing? How can we explain the persistence of women’s situation and responses? Something bigger, something across time, must be responsible for this persistence, and this thing, I argue, is hope. Hope, like the plums, fuels some people to pursue changes and lead to a positive change in the women’s condition, while fooling some to accept the current situation and contributing to nonresistance and the perpetuation of the injustice the women are suffering from. Alicia and Esperanza exemplify how hope leads to a better outcome. Alicia, “who inherited her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness” and “is afraid of nothing except…fathers,” believes that she can get out of the situation through attaining education. She “studies all night” because she believes it can get rid of a “life in a factory or behind a rolling pin.” The possibility of moving up and moving out is her hope, and she is fighting for it to change her own hideous condition. Alicia has a bigger dream than only changing her own condition—she wants to improve the women’s condition as a whole. In “Alicia and I Talking on Edna’s Steps,” Esperanza says Alicia once gave her “a little leather purse” stitched with GUADALAJARA, which is “home for Alicia, and one day she will go back there.” In the same story, Alicia also asks Esperanza “Who’s going to do it [making Mango Street better]?” and implies that she feels it is her responsibility to move up herself and come back to help the rest. She believes in her power of changing her own situation, changing the women’s condition. This hope gives her motivation to study hard and one day may really become the reality and the women’s situation would become better. Esperanza, subject to sexual harassments, is also incentivized by her hopes to create a better world for herself and all women. She has many hopes: she wants to be a woman “with red lips who s beautiful and cruel,” “who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away” and has her own “power.” She wants to be the four skinny trees—“Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be.” She wants a house, “Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own.” Those hopes drive her to move up. As we can imply from “What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away?”, Esperanza is trying to improve her condition through education and writing. Her endgame is to “come back. For the ones I[she] left behind. For the ones who cannot out.” Her hopes fuel her to move up herself and increase the chance for her to improve all women’s condition. Alicia and Esperanza have hopes that things can become better and they take actions to get closer to bring the hopes to reality. Eventually, those hopes can improve the women’s condition—giving them more freedom, more space, more power, more rights, more self less male domination, less oppression, less suffering. If they didn’t have such hopes, they would mourn that there’s no way out and would be stuck in the situation, which would make all women stuck in the situation, since there was no resistance even from the ones who recognize something is wrong. I guess, this hope is what Barack Obama meant by the audacity of hope—hope in the face of difficulty, hope to make the impossible possible. Hope, nevertheless, has a different impact on other women in the barrio. Marin, babysitting her cousins all day and confined in her aunt’s house, has hope that there would be a prince to rescue her and make life good and beautiful, as can be deduced from “Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I[Esperanza] know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.” This is a dying dance. Her life is not going to be any better. She will be sent back to “her mother with a letter saying she’s too much trouble” next year. But her hope makes her satisfied with her current situation and keeps in her current situation. “The same song” implies this is how her life is going to be: the same hope to fool to keep her suffering the same, permanently stuck in the horrible situation. Rafaela, “locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at,” wishes one day she could go to the bar and dance like what the free senior women do: Rafaela who drinks and drinks coconut and papaya juice on Tuesdays and wishes there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet sweet like the island, like the dance hall down the street where women much older than her throw green eyes easily like dice and open homes with keys. She has this hope that she could become free and she has this hope that her life could become sweet like the coconut and papaya juice, maybe because her husband could become less abusive. This hope keeps her in this locked situation, because it prevents her from breaking the door and fighting for her rights and power. Sally is a very obvious example of how hope can reinforce women’s suffering. When abused by her father, she has hope that there is inner goodness in him: “He never hits me hard.” She thinks one day he could turn around and become a good father again. When her suffering is too much to support this hope, she turns yet to another one. She got married and hope this man could save her life, make her life great again. “Sally says she likes being married because now she gets to buy her own things when her husband gives her money. She is happy, except sometimes her husband gets angry and once he broke the door where his foot went through, though most days he is okay. Except he won’t let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn’t let her look out the window. And he doesn’t like her friends, so nobody gets to visit her unless he is working.” She has this hope and she still holds this hope even the reality is not nearly beautiful as she thought it would be. She considers those sufferings and harsh realities in her marriage as “exceptions”, showing that she still believes this relationship is good, or it would become good if it is not now. She is content with the money her husband gives her, rather than tries to earn her own, not even a plan to do such thing. This hope makes her stuck in her life, “looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake.” Those hopes take away women’s resistance and contribute to total acceptance. By in large, they hurt the women’s condition in general and perpetuate their sufferings. Hope plays an important role in both improving and exacerbating women’s condition.
Hope is something that exists across time, so it can account for why people can still relate to the story and women’s suffering and struggles even though the Latino culture has changed so much. Actually, hope can also account for why people outside the Latino culture can relate to the book, because hope is also across space, and no matter where people are, they can understand why women react to the oppression in the two ways: acceptance or resistance. Hope is across boundaries, and that explains why not just females find their interest in this book. Minorities suppressed by the majority, third world suppressed by the industrialized countries, people suppressed by the dictators, victims suppressed by terrorists, and almost all suppressed groups find their resemblance to the women figures in the book, their hope, their stagnation and their
changes. Some might wonder whether the positive and negative effects of hope will cancel out and what the eventual social outcome is. It is true for the female characters in the House on Mango Street, as it is true for suppressed women and other groups in the real world, that the negative effect is stronger as prevalent suppression is detectable. This situation needs immediate attention, because although the suppression is as bad as, if not worse than before, people think society has become more equal and more liberal. This thought is a hope, a one that can fuel people to fight for changes, or the one that can perpetuate all kinds of suppression and social injustice, leading everyone to devastation. Realizing the role of hope in creating and reinforcing women’s condition and in creating and reinforcing other forms of injustice can help people determine what to do next. It’s appropriate and strategic to use hope as a survival strategy and forget about problems, but in the long run, people need to use hope as a fuel for making concrete changes, or the problems would become unfixable and society would be destroyed.
Throughout life, many hardships will be encountered, however, despite the several obstacles life may present, the best way to overcome these hardships is with determination, perseverance, and optimism. In The House on Mango Street, this theme is represented on various occasions in many of the vignettes. For this reason, this theme is one of the major themes in The House on Mango Street. In many of the vignettes, the women of Mango Street do not make any attempts to overcome the hardships oppressive men have placed upon them. In opposition, Alicia (“Alicia Who Sees Mice”) and Esperanza are made aware that the hardships presented as a result of living on Mango Street can be overcome by working hard and endless dedication to reach personal hopes
The author of The House on Mango Street and the producer of The Color Purple are able to integrate numerous important thematic ideas. Many of these ideas still apply to our current world, teaching various important lessons to many adolescents and adults. The House on Mango Street is a collection of vignettes written by Sandra Cisneros, a Mexican-American writer. The novel depicts many aspects of Sandra Cisneros’ life including racism, and sexism that she and the main character face. The novel revolves around Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl, who is growing up in Chicago as she faces the various struggles of living in America. The various vignettes reveal many experiences Esperanza has with reality and her navie responses to such harsh
Who does not want a home? A shelter to sleep and a roof to dine under. Of course no one wanted to stay home forever, but once in awhile and even when far away, they will long to return to that sacred place, the place where they grew up and the place they have left behind, home. The desire for a home (or house to be precise, though there was not much of a different for this case) was realistically reflected through a fiction work of Sandra Cisneros, a Mexican American write, a story called The House on Mango Street, where we shall discuss about its setting, plot and character.
Sandra Cisneros born on December 20, 1954 grew up in Chicago settling with a neighborhood known with Hispanic immigrants. Until then her migrating with her six brothers, from different communities in Chicago, and visiting her grandmother in Mexico, she has never really make ones home in. Being the only girl with no sisters, Cisneros only way that would deprive her from loneliness, is by reading books where she found her talents in writing. Fast forwarding to college Sandra Cisneros worked on her master’s degree at University of Iowa Writers Workshop where found her interest as Mexican-American woman with a self-reliant passion and how being a Hispanic were different in the American culture.
“Home is where the heart is.” In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops this famous statement to depict what a “home” really represents. What is a home? Is it a house with four walls and a roof, the neighborhood of kids while growing up, or a unique Cleaver household where everything is perfect and no problems arise? According to Cisneros, we all have our own home with which we identify; however, we cannot always go back to the environment we once considered our dwelling place. The home, which is characterized by who we are, and determined by how we view ourselves, is what makes every individual unique. A home is a personality, a depiction of who we are inside and how we grow through our life experiences. In her personal, Cisneros depicts Esperanza Cordero’s coming-of-age through a series of vignettes about her family, neighborhood, and personalized dreams. Although the novel does not follow a traditional chronological pattern, a story emerges, nevertheless, of Esperanza’s search to discover the meaning of her life and her personal identity. The novel begins when the Cordero family moves into a new house, the first they have ever owned, on Mango Street in the Latino section of Chicago. Esperanza is disappointed by the “small and red” house “with tight steps in front and bricks crumbling in places” (5). It is not at all the dream-house her parents had always talked about, nor is it the house on a hill that Esperanza vows to one day own for herself. Despite its location in a rough neighborhood and difficult lifestyle, Mango Street is the place with which she identifies at this time in her life.
1. Why do many people feel bad bringing up a disease in the same room with someone having the disease? How did Esperanza feel when she did that?
Disturbing Themes of House on Mango Street, and The Bluest Eye. Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago and grew up in Illinois, the only girl in a family of seven. Cisneros is noted for her collection of poems and books that concentrate on the Chicana experience in the United States. In her writing, Cisneros explores and transcends borders of location, ethnicity, gender and language. Cisneros writes in lyrical yet deceptively simple language, she makes the invisible visible by centering on the lives of Chicanas, their relationships with their families, their religion, their art, and their politics.
Throughout the novel, we see various unique themes, conflicts and symbols. In the House on Mango Street, we realize that Esperanza's goals are clear, she wants to escape her bad neighborhood and live in a house of her own. These desires change over the course of the novel, and as she matures, we begin to notice her desire for men.
Sandra Cisneros' strong cultural values greatly influence The House on Mango Street. Esperanza's life is the medium that Cisneros uses to bring the Latin community to her audience. The novel deals with the Catholic Church and its position in the Latin community. The deep family connection within the barrio also plays an important role in the novel. Esperanza's struggle to become a part of the world outside of Mango Street represents the desire many Chicanos have to grow beyond their neighborhoods.
In the Book women are looked upon as objects by men whether they are boyfriends, friends fathers or husbands. The girls in the novel grow up with the mentality that looks and appearance are the most important things to a woman. Cisneros also shows how Latino women are expected to be loyal to their husbands, and that a husband should have complete control of the relationship. Yet on the other hand, Cisneros describes the character Esperanza as being different. Even though she is born and raised in the same culture as the women around her, she is not happy with it, and knows that someday she will break free from its ties, because she is mentally strong and has a talent for telling stories. She comes back through her stories by showing the women that they can be independent and live their own lives. In a way this is Cinceros' way of coming back and giving back to the women in her community.
“We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember.” (Pg. 3)
Society set a standard many years ago that in a relationship, the woman depends on the man. In The House on Mango Street, woman tend to trust and not have power in relationships. Sandra Cisneros develops the theme that women are inferior to men. This is based on men’s view on power and women accepting their role through the motif of gender roles throughout the novella The House on Mango Street.
Cisneros concentrates on the familiar childhood activity of seeing shapes in clouds, since she connects the different shapes of the clouds as the distinct ways each person has to live in this planet.Cisneros chose to write this vignette as a back and forth response since this chapter had lots of outbreaks, bickering, and abuses against Esperanza. She chose this narrative technique to accentuate the conversation considerably than just writing it out like a story as long as it served the aim better.
Imagine a little girl, dreaming of the endless possibilities that she could be when she is older, then being rejected of her imagination because of her gender. In House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, the reader is forced to consider personal dreams for the future, which is seen when Esperanza is left to choose what she wants her future to look like after seeing how the women in her neighborhood live, and when Marjane starts to think about what she wants to be when she grows up; this demonstrates that gender may impact your future it does not limit what you can be.
I was the first girl in the family since my aunt who is 10 years older than me. I live in a small river tourist town with beautiful country roads and views of endless corn fields. My environment and experiences have shaped me into who I am in very different ways than Esperanza, in (The House on Mango Street) and Marji, in (Persepolis). Both characters reflect on their difficult life with Esperanza living in a male dominant Latino environment, and Marji living under new rulers and a war torn country.