The novel “The House on Mango Street” was written in 1984 by Sandra Cisneros. The book narrates the story of a young girl named Esperanza Cordero while she is growing up in a ghetto in Chicago. The book is known to be a reflection of the author’s experiences in regard to the problems faced by young Latinos. It was written in keeping with her observations while she was teaching drop outs from high school in a Chicano ghetto of Chicago.
The lifestyle of the author, Sandra Cisneros, and her loneliness, which resulted from the fact that she did not have any sisters or friends, made her develop an immense interest in books and writing. Most of her childhood was also spent in Mexico City and Chicago, where she got the feel of the appalling conditions that Latinos lived in. Such circumstances prompted her to write this novel to narrate the experiences and life of a young Latino girl. The setting of the story is the same Chicano barrio in Chicago, where she taught high school dropouts. The novel depicts Esperanza, the Latino girl, as being fed up with the ghetto lifestyle where every member of her large family sleeps in a single room, men ill-treat the women and children in the family, and girls are always in danger of being made a prey by hooligans in the locality. Esperanza wants to leave this dirty lifestyle for better pastures where she can lead a happy life in keeping with her aspirations. The plot of the story concerns Esperanza Cordero and the struggles that she has to go through while growing up on Mango Street. The title of the book is in the context of the house that Esperanza lives in, which her family had shifted into at the beginning of the novel.
The main character of the novel is Esperanza Cordero, a Mexican American girl aged about twelve years, who is also the narrator. In her innocence, Esperanza always desires to leave Mango Street to live in a home that she can call her own. She grows up and matures emotionally and sexually in the one year that is made up of the entire book. Upon reaching puberty, Esperanza starts enjoying when she dances and sees the boys admiring her. She also revels in her new friendship with Sally, who is a girl of her age and who uses the escape route of mixing with boys in order to be away from her ill-treating father. However, Esperanza gets emotionally disturbed when Sally ditches her for a boy while they are visiting a carnival. She also gets sexually assaulted by some boys at the same carnival and later, has a bad experience in being tricked by an elderly man who forcefully kisses her. Such traumatic experiences and the way women were treated in her area make her desire very strong in leaving Mango Street. Her strong character is revealed when she realizes that she will not be able to leave the area in view of her strong bond with the place, and she decides that after she leaves Mango Street, she will, at different times, come back to take care of the people she left behind. In essence, Esperanza is able to escape from her Mango Street home by the time the novel reaches its end, not by physically moving to another place but by retreating into her own world of writing, which has, during this one year, given her a constructive way of being creative in her writings.
Esperanza’s character is depicted in a way that shows her ability in sensing what is behind the minds of other characters in the novel, and she is particularly adapt in reading the minds of the females in her locality. In fact she found her own identity amongst these girls which was evident from the way she looked in awe at the way older girls used make up and wore black clothes. She experimented herself with womanhood a number of times but felt pangs of pain upon the way men would glare at her. In her writings she records all the impressions that she carried of the world that existed around her. Esperanza writes in a way that expresses her inner feelings and desires in escaping from the suffocation of her locality. The novel also narrates the entire circumstances that are faced by Esperanza in regard to her neighbors and gives a detailed description of the locality and the influences that affect her life. The main character along with her sister, Nenny, and friends, Rachael and Lucy, go through several adventurous experiences in the neighborhood which are not in keeping with her value systems and expectations from life. Such circumstances make Esperanza to decide in leaving the area in view of her inability to cope and adapt with the given lifestyle.
Throughout the book Esperanza’s sense of self identity is interspersed with the house that she lives in with her family. The house always emerges as a vital metaphor of her conditions and she always longs for the house that would be her own. In having her own house she felt she would be able to have the required financial stability and a strong sense of belonging that she just could not have in the present surroundings: “a house all my own — Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem” (Sandra Cisneros, 1991)
As we go through the novel Esperanza is also maturing and she starts to look outward at her world through a view point of introspection which discloses innumerable sides of her character. She is a girl with lot of courage and understands that there is a much larger world which exists beyond her own precincts and constrained locality. Towards the end of the book she is compelled to leave her locality on her own strengths. Esperanza demonstrates high levels of empathy for people around her and is particularly soft towards those who are unable to look beyond their immediate surroundings and situations.
The novel conclusively proves the immense tensions Esperanza experiences between the emotional ties with her community and her inherent desire to rise above it which clearly demonstrate the sense of magnetism and repugnance that is characterized in this work. Her high confidence level is clearly evident when she says that one day she would bid farewell to Mango Street because she is much stronger than the circumstances that are presently compelling her to be there and that she cannot be tied down to the place forever. She would often say that she would surely leave the place. But she had the good heart in conveying that she would return to take care of all those she would leave behind since they were incapable in taking initiatives themselves.
References
Christina Frank, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales and Rescue in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, 2008, VDM Verlag.
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 1991, Vintage.