...Comparative Essay: gender roles in The House on Mango Street and Annie John Question 3: To what extent do male and female literary characters accurately reflect the role of men and women in society? In this essay I will analyse to what extent the characters in the novels The House on Mango Street (text A), by Sandra Cisneros, and Annie John (text B), by Jamaica Kincaid, reflect the role of men and women in society. These two novels criticise patriarchal societies, where “women are taught to think as men, identify with a male point of view and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values…” . In both of them, there are clear examples of chauvinism, which conditions the lives of Esperanza Cordero, a “Chicana” who lives in a Latin neighbourhood in the USA called Mango Street; and Annie John, who passes her childhood and part of her adolescence in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean which until 1981 was a British colony. In the following paragraphs, I will describe and analyse diverse illustrations of patriarchal society seen in both novels. These examples will be used to explain male and female roles in this kind of society. Firstly, both societies are more permissive with men than with women. In this way, males are allowed to act freely, while women are constantly being judged for their actions. In text A, we can notice Rosa Vargas’s situation. As the text says, “she is the only one against so many […] [and] cries everyday for the man who left without even...
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...“She looked out the window her whole life, the way so 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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...Tiffany Scott English 1020 Dr. Hall 5/10/2015 The House on Mango Street The house on Mango Street was based on the life of a little girl named Sandra Cisneros. She wrote the book based on her life growing up. She was born in Chicago in 1954 where she had six brothers and was the only daughter. Growing up, her mother and father moved Cisneros and her brother around a lot. “Because we moved so much, and always in neighborhoods that appeared like France after World War II, empty lots and burned out buildings, I retreated inside myself” Cisneros said when explaining all her moves as painful experiences. She found a way to deal with her life by writing. This led her to writing the book, The House on Mango Street. As the story began the writer explained why she had her name. That girl’s name was Esperanza. She was named after her great-grandma. She never knew her great-grandma but she would have really like to have known her. She never liked her named but it did have some meaning to it. Other than it being the name of her great-grandma it also means hope in English and sadness in Spanish. She then explained how they didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that they lived on Loomis and before that they lived on Keeler Street. But even before that they lived on Paulina Street and that’s all she can remember. This book is written in a very different manner, it seems a lot like a personal diary. The technique of the book is according to a story told from a girl's point of view...
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...Herrera-Sobek, María. "On the House on Mango Street." Critical Insights: The House on Mango Street, Salem Press, Oct. 2010, pp. 3-8. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=57353698&site=lrc-live. Maria Herrera- Sobek received a Ph.D. in hispanic language and taught at Harvard and Stanford University. She is a associate vice chancellor for diversity, equality, and academic policy and a professor of Chicana/o studies at University of California. The House on Mango Street was published in 1984. The book blew up literature for Chicana/ Latina authors in the 1980s, acknowledging other writers such as Ana Castillo, Helena Maria Viramontes, Julia Alvarez, and many more. The triumph of The House on Mango Street stayed relevant...
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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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...Simon Adelle UCOR 102 Paper 3 Professor Marcum Making It in A Man’s World April 29, 2013 “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros exposes the life of the main character, Esperanza, for one year as she struggles with trying to find her place in America as a Chicana young girl while also coming of age. The novel starts the day Esperanza and her family of six move into a house on Mango Street, and immediately she expresses her antipathy for not only the house, but also for the area in which they move into and the people around who judge them because of their ethnicity. The story is not told in the traditional format of a continuous story divided into chapters, but rather Cisneros uses forty-four vignettes to allow for the reader to fully understand why Esperanza has the struggles that she has. Along with Cisneros’ illustrating Esperanza’s looking for her identity through images of Esperanza’s thoughts and female obedience, symbolism of violence, legs, the Statue for Liberty, and Nenny, and diction of Spanish words, not using quotation marks, and a maturing tone, she also uses these them to permeate Esperanza’s desperation to leave Mango Street throughout the whole novel. Cisneros’ use of vignettes highlights important moments in Esperanza’s life that emphasize how she develops over the course of a year. Cisneros uses the brevity of the vignettes to enhance the imagery to give the most vivid image through her limited amount of words for each...
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...from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.” • The except “The Three Sisters” is chapter 41 from the novel The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros published in 1984. • The chapter starts of by talking about three sisters, aunts, and they are las comadres and that is a Spanish term given to Godmother, ‘one with laughter like tin and on with eyes of a cat and one with hands like porcelain’. This gave a thought of maybe witches and further research of the novel/chapter reveals that they are representations of the “three fates” of ancient mythology and these are women who decide, death, birth and lengths of lives. • Lucy and Rachel’s baby sister died, and there was wake or a viewing that happened in their home, ‘anybody who had ever wondered what color the walls were came and came to look at that little thumb of a human in a box like candy’. • Esperanza then makes a wishes and the sister who had ‘marble hands’ called her over to tell her something. o “When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are. … You must remember to come back. For the ones who cannot leave as easily as you.” • “The story approaches the fantastical here (in Esperanza’s point of view), as the sisters seem to read Esperanza’s mind and predict her future. They recognize that Esperanza is already strong enough to leave Mango Street, but...
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...For a writer with quite a small oeuvre--a novella, a volume of poems, and a book of short fiction--Chicana feminist Sandra Cisneros has become widely read and known. Cisneros blurs lines between genres, calling her fiction, often vignettes rather than structured narratives, "lazy poems" ("Do You Know Me?" 79). Her Bildungsroman, The House on Mango Street, is read both as a young adult novel and as a work of adult fiction, and her most recent book of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), includes prose poems similar to those in Mango Street [The House on Mango Street], and longer works. Most of her fiction is composed as first-person narratives told to us by the central protagonist. She speaks for people like herself or whom she has known--Mexican and Chicana girls and women who grew up "on the borderlands." According to Cisneros, "If I were asked what it is I write about, I would have to say I write about those ghosts inside that haunt me" ("Ghosts and Voices" 73). Part of those ghosts are the myths and legends of the borderlands, which can hold women back in their quests for self-identity, or, when creatively adapted, can offer possibilities for constructing new cultural motifs. In The House on Mango Street, like Cisneros's childhood home, located in Chicago's barrio, the protagonist Esperanza says, "Mexicans don't like their women strong" (10). One could say that all of Cisneros's female characters either struggle to be strong and succeed, thus transcending...
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...The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is full of excellent literary techniques, a prime example of this is the chapter My Name. The first example of this is Cisneros use of juxtaposition. While discussing her great-grandmother’s attitude and their similarities, which include their Chinese zodiac sign, Esperanza compares Chinese and Mexican culture, “the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong.” The author does this to make the passage more interesting and easier for the reader to understand. This is highly effective because it shows the negative attitude towards women that Esperanza relates to. The second instance of the use of literary techniques is the use of symbolism. Esperanza’s great-grandmother was stuck in an unhappy marriage and “She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.” This use of symbolism makes the work much more interesting than if she had just that her...
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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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...coming of age story by Sandra 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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... 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, and she dreams of leaving Mango Street. However, the experiences...
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...Reading Response: The House on Mango Street The various allusions to children’s stories and popular culture in Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street portray a shift in the feminist paradigm toward publicly rejecting the societal conformations to gender roles, specifically those of women, and also function well in providing a connection between the characters of the stories and the readers. Esperanza, the main character, seems to be invested in a fantastical view of the world that she alludes to in describing her experiences and telling her stories. In the course of the development of Esperanza’s character, it can be seen that while she first admires and aspires to be the Cinderella that she feels like when the shoes given to her fit, she grows into a person that uses stories as a means of escape—her recital of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” to Ruthie—and finally, in her allusion to Rapunzel when she describes Rafaela’s marriage, it seems that Esperanza comprehends the clichéd gender roles and realizes women accept their lives as helpless objects in need of rescue. Besides these instances, various other women, such as Marin, “Waiting for a car to stop, a start to fall, someone to change her life” (27). Also, any reader who has experienced Western culture in her upbringing would either relate to and be affected by Esperanza’s changing attitude toward fairy-tales and children’s stories. Although Esperanza’s connection to such tales might be naïve and not a transformation at...
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...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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...Innocence in “Monkey Garden” In the chapter, “Monkey Garden,” from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, the garden symbolizes the archetypal Garden of Eden from Genesis. Similar to Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden tree, Esperanza loses her innocence in this mystical backyard. As an under-privileged child on Mango Street, Esperanza witnessed adult problems that most children her age would never dream of, especially the maltreatment of women. In this fantastical children’s garden, the kids escaped their real-life problems in search of the lost treasures the garden holds. The rich imagery Esperanza weaves into her description shows the evasion of her problems: “There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theatre curtains.” The images of Mars and the theatre imply entering a fictional or distant world without everyday challenges. In addition, the kids on Mango fabricate rumors that align the Monkey Garden with the Garden of Eden, “Somebody started the lie that the monkey garden had been there before anything.” Through her escape into fantasy, Esperanza kept her innocence. Through it, she stayed a child until the next day. Despite the seemingly irrevocable purity of the Monkey Garden, Sally’s kissing game with the boys not only defiles the image of the Monkey Garden but also substantiates the gender inequalities suffered by the women of Mango. Esperanza’s love for Sally drives her to protect Sally against mistreatment...
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