AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
![]() She will live in a clean, simple house, all by herself. She will wear red lipstick and be beautiful and cruel. Throughout the novel, Esperanza dreams about the woman she will be once she leaves Mango Street. I read and reread until the water got cold. In the author biography at the end of the book, Cisneros describes herself as “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” When I read those words, I was soaking in the bathtub at my mother’s house. If I concentrate, I can recite entire passages from Mango Street, but the phrase always at the tip of my tongue when I talk about this novel isn’t from the narrative at all. It’s the story of Esperanza, a young Latina growing up in Chicago and dreaming of a life of creativity, independence, and self-defined femininity. For the next several years, I’d sleep with Mango Street on my bedside table.Ĭisneros began writing this collection of vignettes as a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and published it in 1984. I started journaling, trained to be a GED teacher, and read over 60 books, one of which was Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. In that first year after college, I became a better student than I’d ever been. And this faith in my abilities as a student got me through the roughest patch of my post-grad funk. I had trouble choosing good friends and coping with my emotions and styling my hair, but I could take a test. School was something I could count on, something I knew I could do well. I’d never enjoyed school, but I’d understood it. ![]() But my life as a student did, and my life as a student was the only life I knew. What a waste of the last four years of my life. Disappointed in my college experience and prone to existential crises, I found myself thinking, What a waste. I was an English major graduating from a Methodist college, and the symbolism of the locusts, the heat, and the prophecy was too much for me to resist and almost too much for me to bear. When I finished college, it was a cicada year, temperatures were in the high eighties, and a radio evangelist had predicted the world would end on the very day of my graduation. ![]() This time, we asked : What book was your feminist awakening? Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. Through her vividly drawn characters and lyrical prose, Cisneros paints a powerful portrait of a community struggling to find its place in a world that often seems to be against them.Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. The use of symbols such as the old house serve to drive home the point that the nature of one's physical surroundings can have a major impact on one's sense of personal identity and self-worth. Esperanza longs for a sense of belonging and a home of her own, but is constantly struggling against poverty and discrimination. Overall, the author makes the book sound negative in certain ways because of the many obstacles the characters face in their lives. "I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain." "Each night as I sit on the front steps sketching in my notebook, I stare at it, thinking how maybe it's a secret hiding in the bones of this family," she says. In the chapter titled "Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin," Esperanza describes a dilapidated old house on their block that serves as a symbol for the poverty and hopelessness that many of the residents feel. This longing for a sense of belonging is a common theme throughout the book and is further illustrated through the use of symbolism. "I don't want to look out the window and see the yard where the kids play, where the trees are too tall, too close, too green." "I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window," she says. She longs for a home of her own, one that she can decorate and personalize to her liking. In the chapter titled "My Name," Esperanza explains that her family has moved from house to house frequently, never truly feeling settled in any one place. One of the recurring themes in the novel is the idea of home, and the ways in which physical space can shape our sense of self and identity. The book is comprised of a series of vignettes, each painting a portrait of a particular character or moment in the life of the protagonist. The House on Mango Street is a novel written by Sandra Cisneros that tells the story of a young Latina girl named Esperanza as she navigates her way through the challenges of growing up in a poor, predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |