Table Of Content
Esperanza eventually enters puberty and changes sexually, physically, and emotionally, beginning to notice and enjoy male attention. She befriends Sally, an attractive girl who wears heavy makeup and provocative clothing, and who is physically abused and forbidden from leaving her home by her strongly religious father. Sally's and Esperanza's friendship is compromised when Sally ditches Esperanza for a boy at a carnival, leaving Esperanza to be sexually assaulted by a group of men. She recounts other instances of assault she has faced, like an older man forcibly kissing her at her first job. Esperanza's traumatic experiences and observations of the women in her neighborhood, many of whom are controlled by the men in their lives, only further cement her desire to leave Mango Street.
Gender
The author moves to San Antonio, returnsto Chicago again, leaves, and returns. Although she no longer lives in Chicago,she still feels that she has Chicago stories left to write. The author begins by describing a photograph of herself taken when she wasliving in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago in 1980, at the time when shewas writing The House on Mango Street. She is in an office which she hasfilled with bookcases, birdcages, wicker baskets, photographs, and numerousother objects which she often buys at a nearby flea market.
Study Guide for House on Mango Street
Esperanza's desire to escape her impoverished communityand the aspiration for a home she can call her own are central motifs,emblematic of her search for identity and a sense of belonging. The House on Mango Street traces Esperanza Cordero's coming-of-age through a series of vignettes about her family, neighborhood, and secret dreams. Although the novel does not follow a traditional chronological pattern, a story emerges, nevertheless, of Esperanza's self-empowerment and will to overcome obstacles of poverty, gender, and race. The novel begins when the Cordero family move into a new house, the first they have ever owned, on Mango Street in the Latino section of Chicago. It is not at all the dream-house her parents had always talked about, nor is it the house high on a hill that Esperanza vows to one day own herself.
Questions
All the time these events are going on, the woman in the photograph iswriting, experimenting with her stories and rearranging elements of real lifeto create complete and satisfying narratives. She borrows events and charactersand phrases but not emotions, since all the emotions in the stories are herown. One of her firstpublishers, Norma Alarcón, brings together an influential group of femaleLatin American writers and introduces her to the work of Sor Juana Inés de laCruz, Elena Poniatowska, and others.
Characters
Sally seems to represent the vicious cycle of domestic violence and repression felt by women on Mango street. She is utterly desperate to find a man to marry her, to escape the beatings and maltreatment she gets from her father at home. This ‘vicious cycle’ is seen when Esperanza goes and tells Sally's mother that her daughter is in a garden with three boys and the mother completely disregards this, her mother doesn't seem surprised or worried. Her mother cares for her cuts and bruises allowing for the violence to perpetuate,[21] both mother and daughter give excuses to the father. The bare fact that Sally marries at such a young age to a man that ends up treating her just like her father, shows how this cycle is so ingrained in the way of life of many women, and passed from generation to generation. The author pities this character, not blaming her for what happened to her, Sally was very young and immature to fully understand her surroundings, to find a way out.
As she grows older and witnesses the lives of the women around her,Esperanza becomes increasingly eager to escape from Mango Street. She knowsthat she will not achieve this through marriage; she is not beautiful, and herearly sexual experiences are painful and distressing. The white Cathy, whose house is full of cats, gossips about her neighborsand complains that the street is getting worse because families likeEsperanza’s are moving in.
She refuses to seek out a man to "escape," because she has seen too many neighbors unhappy in marriage. Ruthie, for example, has run away from her husband and has lost her senses; young Rafaela is so beautiful that her husband locks her indoors when he leaves. Her friend, who, like Esperanza only wanted to dream and share love, is first beaten by her father to prevent Sally ruining the family with her "dangerous" beauty. To escape, Sally, though underage, marries a traveling salesman and the cycle of abuse continues. Enraged and saddened by her friend's tragedy, Esperanza vows to leave Mango street, become a writer, and build her dream home.
Domestic and sexual abuse
It's by knowing where she doesn't fit that she knows to where she might fit.[58] It is similar to the concept of light and dark. We know that darkness is the absence of light, in this case her identity exists outside of this house on mango street. Because the novel deals with sensitive subject matters, such as domestic violence, puberty, sexual harassment, and racism, it has faced challenges and threats of censorship. In spite of this, it remains an influential coming-of-age novel and is a staple piece of literature for many young adults. Esperanza makes friends with Sally, a beautiful, sophisticated girl who ispopular with the boys and is the subject of a great deal of gossip.
Study Tools
House on Mango Street Close Reading - "Cathy Queen of Cats" Teaching Resources - Tes
House on Mango Street Close Reading - "Cathy Queen of Cats" Teaching Resources.
Posted: Sun, 30 May 2021 19:52:37 GMT [source]
As she grows older, Esperanza has troubling glimpses of the adult world.When they are playing with the shoes, a vagrant approaches Rachel and asks herfor a kiss. Later, when Esperanza has her first job, an older man makes thesame request of her, claiming that it is his birthday. When she is about tokiss his cheek, he twists her face around and kisses her hard on the mouth.Esperanza also sees the pain and drudgery in her parents’ lives. When hergrandfather dies, her father breaks down in tears, and she thinks for the firsttime about what it would be like to lose him. The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age novel by SandraCisneros that follows the life of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl, asshe navigates her life in a low-income Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. The House on Mango Street is a collection of vignettes by Sandra Cisneros that explores Esperanza’s perspectives on the residents of Mango Street, a predominately Latino neighborhood.
The House on Mango Street covers the formative years of Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl living in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood with her parents and three siblings. Before settling into their new home, a small and run-down building with crumbling red bricks, the family moved frequently, always dreaming of having a house of their own. Pining for a white, wooden house with a big yard and many trees, Esperanza finds her life on Mango Street suffocating and yearns to escape. Esperanza begins the novel with detailed descriptions of the minute behaviors and characteristics of her family members and unusual neighbors, providing a picture of the neighborhood and examples of the many influential people surrounding her. She describes time spent with her younger sister, Nenny, and two older girls she befriends in the neighborhood; Alicia, a promising young college student with a dead mother, and Marin, who spends her days babysitting her younger cousins.
Sally’sfather is very strict, and Esperanza later discovers that he beats her.Minerva, who is only slightly older than Esperanza but is already married withtwo children, is similarly abused by her husband, who keeps leaving her butalways returns. Esperanza focuses on finding a best friend of her own, as she’s unsatisfied with her little sister, Nenny. She meets two sisters named Rachel and Lucy, and they become fast friends after pooling their money together to buy a bicycle. At a carnival with Sally, Esperanza is forced into losing her virginity to a boy that she wants to escape from.
Esperanza highlights significant or telling moments both in her own life and those in her community, mostly explaining the hardships they face, such as her neighbor being arrested for stealing a car or the death of her Aunt Lupe. The House on Mango Street is a 1984 novel by Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros. Structured as a series of vignettes, it tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Based in part on Cisneros's own experience, the novel follows Esperanza over the span of one year in her life, as she enters adolescence and begins to face the realities of life as a young woman in a poor and patriarchal community. Elements of the Mexican-American culture and themes of social class, race, sexuality, identity, and gender are interwoven throughout the novel. As the vignettes progress, Esperanza matures and develops her own perspective of the world around her.
It is only when she meets Rachel and Lucy's aunts, who tell her fortune, that she realizes her experiences on Mango Street have shaped her identity and will remain with her even if she leaves. As the novel ends, Esperanza vows that after she leaves, she will return to help the people she has left behind. She is excited when boys on the street or at a dance look at her; however, two instances of sexual violence destroy Esperanza's illusions of true love and her first kiss. So too, her promiscuous friend Sally's behavior also contributes to Esperanza's cynicism and caution when dealing with the opposite sex. Nevertheless, Esperanza still dreams of sitting outside at night with her boyfriend, but she has set her standards higher than most of the women around her.
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