The House on Mango Street

Directions: Answer each of the following questions based on The House on Mango Street. This assignment is worth 300 points. Be thorough with your answers using textual evidence to support your ideas as well as correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Write a 1-2 paragraph summary of the novel you chose to read. Include all important information and events. Use correct grammar and punctuation (100 points).

Describe the main character (physical traits & personality traits) in the novel or short story and how they changed or developed throughout the story. Cite evidence from the text embedding the evidence appropriately with quotation marks & citation (100 points).

Choose a literary element from the novel or short story you read (characterization, plot, setting, theme, mood, point of view, sound devices, etc.) and analyze its significance in the story in 1-2 paragraphs. Use evidence from the text to support your ideas, making sure to cite the source. Use correct grammar and punctuation in your writing (100 points).

Answer all questions based on The House on Mango Street.

ANSWER

Summary of the Novel

The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age story that covers the titular neighborhood from the point of view of a Mexican American girl known as Esperanza Cordero. The story tells of a young Chicana moving around in the ambiguous area between her childhood and adulthood. The story flows like journal entries that focus on the life of Esperanza and the life experiences of immigrants. It also shows the preordained destinies of women and girls and what it means to belong and hope in the future of masculine restrains of the barrio.

The story is told in small vignettes that act as independent short stories and chapters of the novel. The story entails a year in Esperanza’s life as she moves to a house on Mango Street in the Latino neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois (Priewe, 351). After years of migrating from one apartment to another, her parents decide to purchase a small red house on Mango Street. However, the house is nothing like her family dreams, making her feel she doesn’t fit there. Over the year, Esperanza matures artistically, emotionally, and sexually through her experiences with her classmates and neighbors (Bloom). Esperanza encounters the shame of poverty, beauty of music and poetry, and unfairness of racism. Esperanza is stuck in a cycle that includes male oppression and struggles of independence in the females within the surroundings.

Esperanza continues to mature expressively, both emotionally and sexually during the year. The story tells about her life, how she gets new friends, struggles with self-identification and endures sexual assault. As a way of escaping the neighborhood emotionally as well as expressing herself Esperanza decides to focus on writing. The novel comprises of stories of many of Esperanza’s neighbors, offering a full picture of the neighborhood and shows the potential paths that Esperanza ought to follow in the later (Bloom). Although Esperanza is emotionally prepared to escape Mango Street, she finds that she will hardly escape Mango Street. Esperanza remains in Mango Street but has developed at length and desires to escape at the end of the year. The story shows the dissatisfaction of Esperanza with her lack of identity and place in society. The story also illustrates how society expects women to depend on men, leading to barriers that prevent them from their own identity.

Main Character

The novel’s main character is Esperanza, a twelve-year-old Mexican American girl. The novel narrates a year in the life of Esperanza as she develops sexually and emotionally. Esperanza encounters a sequence of awakenings, with the utmost significant being sexual awakening. Since childhood, she desires to escape Mango Street but, with time, identifies herself as a member of a social setup and moral responsibility towards the community of women around her (Priewe, 351). Esperanza is a writer and a keen observer, which is evident in her powers of observation. Esperanza focuses on physical beauty, which she believes will help her escape her surroundings. She wants to develop and grow into an independent and free woman.

Esperanza shows great independence where she prefers acting on her feelings and thoughts. Esperanza focuses on creating her own identity by maintaining her power and challenging the social and cultural expectations. The novel has made independence a vital part of Esperanza’s personality. Esperanza becomes more independent through observing and living in different situations in the neighborhood. For instance, she watches Alicia being beaten by her father and Sally go very far with boys, which makes her aim at being independent. However, independence is less portrayed in the female role models within the neighborhood.

Conscientiousness is highly evident in Esperanza due to her high levels of thoughtfulness and goal-directed behaviors. Considerably, a highly conscientious person regularly plans and tends to analyze their actions and behaviors to see how they affect others. Esperanza is desperate to change her life and destined to escape the restricted life on Mango Street.

Esperanza is an iron-willed girl whose visions are big in the face of her restrictions and surroundings. Esperanza has represented her impoverished neighborhood who wish to better and change themselves. She is generally kind and concerns with the feelings of other individuals that she doesn’t know. Esperanza discovers that writing will keep her independent and strong. Writing becomes part of her identity, which makes her independent.

Theme of Self-definition

The struggle for self-definition is the main theme in the House on Mango Street. Self-definition entails determination and understanding one’s basic qualities and nature. Considerably, the struggle for self-definition entails the struggle of defining oneself within their world and even breaking away from their world. Throughout the novel, Esperanza is seen struggling to define herself through all her encounters and actions. She wants to define herself and become an independent woman as both an artist and a woman (Sultana). Esperanza wants to separate herself from her family to be independent and create her own life. At some point, she becomes more sexually alert, wants to be cruel and beautiful so that men will get attracted. After being assaulted, she stops defining herself as cruel and beautiful and once again is unsure of what she wants to be.

The restrained life on Mango Street teaches her to shape her identity through art and self-awareness due to self-determination struggles. Eventually, Esperanza decides to be part of the neighborhood and stops forcing herself to develop sexually. She admits her position in the society and agrees that the most vital way is defining herself as a writer (Sultana). She interacts, expresses, and observes the world so that she gains a new identity that she has been in search of. Therefore, the novel has clearly shown how Esperanza defines herself both as an artist and a woman and how her identity has changed throughout the novel.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, ed. Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Infobase Publishing, 2010.

Priewe, Marc. “23. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984).” Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. De Gruyter, 2017. 351-360.

Sultana, Rajia. In Search of “Self” in The House on Mango Street. Diss. East West University, 2012.

Sultana, Rajia. “The House on Mango Street: Searching for Identity.” (2015).