...Many young girls are confused about who they should become. When society comes into play, girls are forced to conform to society’s norms and become a person they despise. This happens to the main character, Esperanza, in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Esperanza goes through a series of changes as the novel progresses. She gets caught up in society’s view of young women. Esperanza starts off as being reluctant towards becoming the woman in the window but grows to understand that she doesn’t have to rely on men to get the future she desires. Esperanza’s identity changes over the course of the story according to the different experiences she goes through, as she grows into a young woman she finds herself and accepts who she has become. In Sandra Cisneros’s, The House on Mango Street, readers see how Esperanza’s character develops through the entirety of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, she begins to question who she is, based on her name. She analyzes her name, and how she inherited it from her grandmother. “I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window”(Cisneros 11)....
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...The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, centers on Esperanza struggling to define herself in a way that will differentiate others she observes on Mango Street. Esperanza’s observations of the women of Mango Street, as they are all trapped in some way or another, is what drives Esperanza to want to be independent. Throughout the book Esperanza struggles with the idea of self-identification and differentiating herself from those in her family and neighborhood. Esperanza's first defining moment is when she decides to rename herself. She claims the name ZeZe the X and wishes she could shed her name which belonged to her great-grandmother. She believes her name carries too much baggage due to her great-grandmother being forced to marry...
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...The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a fictional novel about a twelve year old girl, Esperanza Cordero, growing up in a poor Latino neighborhood in Illinois, on Mango Street. Esperanza dislikes and is ashamed of her house on Mango Street because it represents her family’s poverty. During this time, in the 1980s, all women’s freedoms are restricted and controlled by the men. In her neighborhood, most women are restrained by their fathers or husbands, leading them to wait for someone to change the present society and let women be free. However, Esperanza is different from all of the women and strives to be independent of her poverty and men. Esperanza tells the story about her struggling to live in her neighborhood on Mango Street...
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...In “The House on Mango Street”, Esperanza reveals personal experiences through which the reader is able to determine what kind of person she is and how she views herself. Esperanza is a young courageous, strong willed, Mexican- American girl that lives on Mango Street. Esperanza describes her sexual identity through her coming of age and how poverty affects her place in the world. She begins to feel the limitations imposed by her environment. She possesses the courage and initiative to reach beyond her neighborhood to achieve better things. Esperanza is similar but different from the other major female characters throughout the novella. The vignettes show different aspects of Esperanza’s life as it evolves and changes throughout “The House on Mango Street.” In the novella, Sally is a young girl who Esperanza befriends when she moved to Mango Street. Esperanza and Sally are the same age but Sally is more sexually bold. Sally opens up a new world to Esperanza who finds newfound sexual awareness in her friendship with the sexually adventurous Sally. From the novella it quotes “She does not like to get her stockings dirty, and she plays a more grown-up game by talking to the boys.” Esperanza’s awareness of her...
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...Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, covers a year in the life of a 12 year old girl named Esperanza. This novel, a series of vignettes, explores the life of a young girl in a poor Latino neighborhood in Chicago. Esperanza is destined to escape the run down, crowded home on Mango Street one day. She yearns for freedom, money, safety, friendships, boyfriends, and most importantly a nice home of her own. This is a story of a young girl’s struggle to find her own identity, conveyed through a vast array of complex themes. How do you express yourself as a native Spanish speaker in an English speaking world? “No speak English,” “No habla Español.” How do you eat, how do you get directions, make friends, succeed in school, or scream for help? In The House on Mango Street, the characters feel suffocated at times from their powerlessness over an alien language. They are lowered into the pit of society. They become prisoners...
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...many women sit their sadness on an elbow” (Cisneros 10). This quote is a very compelling line from the novella The House On Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros. Sandra Cisneros writes about a young girl, Esperanza, who is a typical young girl, at some moments an adult and at some a child. Except,this child can exhibit adult perception. Throughout the story, Esperanza meets all kinds of women who in the end change her perspective of the world. Esperanza is determined not to become a women sitting by a window, like the rest of her neighborhood. However, Esperanza understands that when she departs from Mango Street, she will continue to protect the women in her neighborhood. Sandra Cisneros...
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...The House on Mango Street-- Defying the Injustice Facing Women Women have been objectified by men and each other for as long as humanity itself. This is the systematic sexism that still goes on today, and it was certainly present in Sandra Cisneros’ novel. The House on Mango Street uses characters like Esperanza and Sally to clearly illustrate the terrors of misogyny and female oppression, showing that injustice against women can only be stopped if the women themselves stand up to it. Sally, Esperanza’s friend, is a good example of what happens when women accept their ‘places’ in society. She is abused by her father but defends him, saying he doesn’t hit her hard. There are times where she briefly has freedom, but when her dad ‘apologizes’,...
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...English 102 3rd November 2014 How Far the Fruit Will Fall The Novel “The House on Mango Street,” takes the one on a journey through the eyes of a young girl named Esperanza. Initially, Esperanza appears to be an unreliable narrator because of the characters oblivious actions and the authors writing style and use of vignettes. However, the concise and brief approach gives the story more depth and allows one to become immersed in the story. The novel becomes animated with Cisneros less is more approach; the imagination springs alive with the minimal details. Cisneros emphasis is the fact that Esperanza’s perception changes throughout the story. Esperanza is on a pursuit to find herself and her true identity as she becomes a woman. In the story, the author explains how Esperanza feels that she is being held back by her social standing. Cisneros shows that Esperanza’s families’ social status is at a disadvantage and that she fits the stereotypical Chicana profile. Cisneros highlighted this by Esperanza’s family and their poverty. Patriarchal standards are also present in the story and tells how women in her community are held back because of this. The story expresses how Esperanza develops and overcomes her identity issues; Esperanza achieves this by learning about the community she belongs to. Moreover, by Esperanza focusing on the bigger picture, which is how to overcome the expectations that have been assumed to her. The narrator feels as if she does not belong to the community...
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...HE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET BY SANDRA CISNEROS SHORT PLOT / CHAPTER SUMMARY (Synopsis) The story is told by Esperanza, and begins when she first moves to Mango Street, a poor, Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Esperanza says that she has lived in many different places. She implies that she is close to her family, and describes their interactions and even their hair. She tells us she does not like her name, because it is too long and because it was her grandmother’s name. Her grandmother did not want to get married, but was forced to by Esperanza’s grandfather. Slowly, Esperanza begins to meet people in the neighborhood. She meets Cathy, a stuck-up girl, and Lucy and Rachel, who live across the street. Sisters, these two will become Esperanza’s best friends on Mango Street. They are loud and sassy, just the opposite of Esperanza, but this is what she likes about them. Esperanza talks about her younger sister, Nenny, to whom she feels close in a strange way, even though sometimes they annoy each other. For example, when they visit a used furniture store and the owner plays a music box with music so beautiful Esperanza begins to cry, Nenny naively tries to buy the box. The man says it is not for sale, and Esperanza is embarrassed by her sister. Esperanza describes other people from the neighborhood. Meme Ortiz has a dog that is big and clumsy, just like him. Louie’s cousin got arrested for stealing a car. Marin is waiting for some rich man to find her and take her away from...
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...Racism and Women in society in the House on Mango Street and The Help Acceptance, typically the idea of fitting into a certain group of people. Many people want acceptance from others, it’s what drives us to do the things that we do. On multiple occasions we find that some of our actions that we engage in are wrong or against our self-morals, but we do them anyways to fit in with the crowd. Most people become followers and forget their own morals, instead of thinking from their own perspective, they think in a way that will make them accepted by others. But not all people are like that, fortunately, people such as Skeeter in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, faces peer pressure everyday about getting married or how she should treat certain...
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...The novella The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros describes the life of Esperanza via vignettes. The vignettes are used to show Esperanza’s personal experience shortly and the vignettes help show Esperanza’s thoughts during these events or on people. Gender roles are very prevalent in Esperanza’s society. Men/ boys and Women/ girls have separate ideas for the future. “The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They've got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can't be seen talking to girls.” (Cisneros 8). This quotation shows the changes that the boys go through because of how they’ll be judged. They will be judged by family and members of the community. Another gender role is that men are very forceful and like their way in Esperanza’s society and slightly in society today also. Sally’s husband is a strong example of this. “But Sally doesn't tell about the time he hit her with his hands just like a dog, she said, like if I was an animal. He thinks I'm going to run away like his sisters who made the family ashamed. Just because I'm a daughter, and then she doesn't say.” (Cisneros 92) This quotation shows that the way Sally’s husband treat her and Esperanza uses simile ‘like a dog’. The simile implies that animals that misbehave are usually hit because pain is punishment and causes the animal to not do the wrong action the animal has already done. Another gender role is that...
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...build a barricade between ourselves and the ambition within us leading to a sense of detachment from our environment. This interpretation of fear is portrayed all throughout The House on Mango Street by Sandra C and demonstrated through the innumerable symbols and settings which Esperanza faces throughout her journey such as the trees and houses. Through those settings and symbols, Sandra shows us that when we begin to let our fears of being misconceived for our flaws and phobias take over, we begin seeing...
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...In this book, The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros tells the story of a girl, Esperanza, who comes from a poor family living in a raggedy neighborhood taking challenges against herself along with her friends. Throughout this book, Esperanza has quite a few of female role-models who are stuck in abusive relationships which are currently trying to get out of them. This shows what women has to face and if they are able to overcome them. Esperanza talks about one of her older friends Ruthie who is stuck at her mother’s house. When Esperanza and her sisters ask Ruthie if she wants to go and play, she says no because her so-called husband is going to pick her up. Ruthie is a person who has been abandoned by her current husband, but she...
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...SIOP® LESSON PLANS Grade 9/SIFE Reading/Language Arts/Writing Unit/Theme: Emotions and The House on Mango Street *Content Objective(s): *Students will describe Cisneros’ voice and style, listing some of her creative uses of language as characteristic of this author’s craft*Students will explore the physical and emotional prisons in which people live. *Students will discover and evaluate different methods of escape from these prisons. *Students will practice writing in the persuasive mode, using evidence from the text and from their own lives to construct effective arguments proposing the best way to escape the troubles of life*Students will peer edit and revise for content, for sentence structure, and for use of figurative language. *Language Objective(s): *Students will continue to build vocabulary resources for discussing emotions. *Students will identify fragmentary sentence structure, voice, and effective use of figurative language in Cisneros’ style and use knowledge of style to develop originality in their own writing style. *Student will be able to participate in and contribute to collaborative learning, such as “think, pair, share” and “expert groups.” Key Vocabulary: prison, escape, safe haven, voice, style, figurative language, persuasive mode, context, concept map, anticipatory set, peer editing, rubric, tapping prior knowledge, description, sensory detail, quotation, five senses, , sentence fragments, “unacceptable in academic writing,” punctuation,...
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...affect how someone thinks and acts as they get older. The people around you can affect what type of dreams and goals you set for yourself. Also, living in a poor household can be very demoralizing as people continue to grow up and get older. A good example of this is Sandra Cisneros’, House on Mango Street. Esperanza grows up in a low income neighborhood with many bad influences around her. However, it is up to the individual on how they want to live and act. Esperanza has goals and she is very determined to reach them because she does not want to end up like the people she grows up around. Cisneros’ novella has taught me that a person’s identity can be shaped by their environment that they grow up in....
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