House on Mango Street

Esperanza is torn between deciding whether she wants to escape Mango

Street. She is embarrassed by the superficial appearance of her identity, but appreciates her roots. Her house is a wreck and the neighborhood, probably not much better off. However, she has loving family and friends.

Although marriage has caused the suffering of many of the women in her neighborhood, she realizes that she needs men to fulfill the new desires she attains as she hits adolescence.

Through the novel, Esperanza matures both physically and mentally. The first thing that struck me about this novel was that the chapters were very short. I realized that the narrator is young and has a short attention span, judging from her fragmented observations. However,

Esperanza begins to mature and to develop a desire for men. While she senses that many women are caged by men, they cannot be truly free without them.

Most of the women Esperanza knows on Mango Street are either trapped in their marriages or tied down by their children. For example,

Esperanza’s grandmother. Esperanza does not want to “inherit her place by the window.” She neither likes what she has already inherited from her grandmother – her name. Esperanza plays with words when she first expresses her dissatisfaction with her name. She says that in Spanish, her name means “too many letters. It means sadness [from the opposite of esperar, which is desesperarse], it means waiting [from the verb esperar].” She settles on changing her name to “Zez...