House On Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

In The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, twelve-year-old Esperanza Cordero must navigate through the trials and tribulations that one can associate when encountering young adulthood. Cisneros uses her unique writing style of vignettes to illustrate the narrative voice of Esperanza in her text. A major theme that can be seen as the most prominent thus far, is on the feminist role of Esperanza as a female in her Latin American culture. The House on Mango Street is an overall bildungsroman that can be considered to be a feminist work of literature. The bildungsroman is encompassed by various feminist values throughout the text of written work, regarding the particular subject. Cisneros illustrates these feminist views through the creation

As Esperanza comes into contact with them throughout her journey of self-discovery. Esperanza regards the aspect of beauty to be a source of power in which she admires and hopes to obtain while also at the same time she holds a resentment towards it. Young Esperanza shortly discovers beauty to be a double edge sword when it comes to having advantages and disadvantages encountering male characters in the text. There are two situations where we as readers witness that these women who contain their beauty physically are the ones who seem to endure hardships the most. When Esperanza first encounters her friend Sally, she is right away perceived to be beautiful with a physical description. We see that Sally’s father has placed certain restrictions on his daughter in result of her beauty. Sally is a character that has a considerably rebellious personality and definitely defies her father in his wishes to keep her sheltered and homebound. We see that Sally commits several actions to utilize her feminine power and the end results in a backlash in the form of physical abuse. “One day Sally’s father catches her talking to a boy and the next day she doesn’t come to school…Until the way Sally tells it, he went crazy, he forgot he was her father between the buckle and the belt” (Cisneros 93). We

Rafaela might not suffer from physical abuse, although she suffers from oppression of physical freedom caused by the hand of her own husband. The character is a further example of when a culture is heavily dominated by men, giving women almost to no chance of rising from the long-established responsibility of their culture. “Rafaela who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will away since she is too beautiful to look at” (Cisneros 79). We are guided to believe that Rafaela has been long imprisoned in the confinements of her own her for far too long. Since Esperanza indicates two facts, Rafaela has begun to age from simply witnessing the outside world from her window and that she spends her time daydreaming about a fairy tale of a princess within the same situation. At the end of the vignette the last line expressed by Esperanza, a reader is led to believe and question if she actually pities these female characters for not being strong enough to overcome their situations. “And always there is someone offering sweeter drinks, someone promising to keep them on a silver string” (Cisneros 80). Esperanza may pity these women for not being more and being trapped in an endless cycle, however this encourages her to pursue for her own individualism and