Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street:
How your Body Determines the Space you
Occupy
Abstract
Since its publication in 1984, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street has
won a couple of the most prestigious awards for arts in the United States and
gained worldwide attention from readers (it has been translated into different
languages). As the title of the book suggests, “the house” on Mango Street is no
less important than any character in the book. In fact, three strains in criticism of
this book are developed from analyzing this house and its protagonist's
(Esperanza's) dream house. One of the strains reads the book as a continuation,
expansion, or alteration of the feminist discourse started by Virginia Woolf in A
Room of One's Own: the importance of owning one's house (a private space) and its
influence on women's writing. The second interprets Esperanza’s ideal house as a
linguistic sign and a psychological space rather than a geographical space. The
third is a combination of the two.
Though they differ in their interpretations of Esperanza's family and dream
houses, they focus their critical attention on her need for a private space which is
untouched by patriarchal ideology and on what her dream house represents or
symbolize. Therefore, this paper aims to expand this critical discussion by turning
the critical attention to the houses in Esperanza's neighborhood and other
geographical spaces described in the book and by analyzing these houses and
spaces in the light of Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and feminist theory.
What this approach strives to show is how Esperanza intends to use her writing
skills, nourished by obtaining a private space, to open a public space for Latino
immigrants, who are historically discriminated against because of their racialized
bodies, to pursue and fulfill their version of the American Dream.
Key words: Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, room, house, space,
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, body, feminism, and the American
Dream.
I. Introduction
In her discussion of the critical reception of Sandra Cisneros's The House on
Mango Street, Amy Sickels says, 'Before Arte Público Press published Cisneros,
only a few Chicano authors were known in the United States, all of them male.' i
Sickels' statement points out the significance of Cisneros' contribution to the body
of American ethnic literature. Published in 1984, The House on Mango Street
recounts the story of a Latina girl named Esperanza Cordero, growing up in a
ghetto of a major city in the United States. As the title of the book suggests,
Esperanza's family house on Mango Street is no less, if not more, important than
the protagonist in the text because lots of critical attention has been paid to analyze
this house and Esperanza's dream house. One strain of the criticism reads the book
as a continuation, expansion, or alteration of the feminist discourse started by
Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own: the importance of owning one's house (a
private space) and its influence on women's writing ii. The second interprets
Esperanza’s ideal house as a linguistic sign and a psychological space rather than a
geographical spaceiii, and the third is a combination of the two iv. Though critics
may differ in their interpretations of Esperanza's dream house, they agree on how
Esperanza's family house functions as an identity marker for her and how obtaining
a private space untouched by patriarchal ideology is indispensable for her growth
and success as a writer.
Often, Cisneros' autobiographical information is utilized by critics to analyze
Esperanza's family house as well as her dream house and her parents' ideal house.
For instance, Annie Eysturoy states:
In a biographical essay, Sandra Cisneros recalls her encounter
with Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space in college. She
did not understand Bachelard's reveries on the house of the
imagination, yet everyone else was quite comfortable with this
book, and that made her feel “foreign from the others, out of
place, and different.”v
Eysturoy's view is shared by other critics such as Julián Olivares and James Gilesvi.
However, in one of her lectures talking about her writing, Cisneros says:
During a seminar title “On Memory and the Imagination” when
the class was heatedly discussing Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of
Space and the metaphor of house—a house, a house, it hit me.
What did I know except third floor flats. Surely my classmates
knew nothing about that. That's precisely what I chose to write:
about third-floor flats, and fear of rats, and drunk husbands sending
rocks through windows, anything as far from the poetic as possible.
And this is when I discovered the voice I'd been suppressed all
along without realizing it.vii
Cisneros may not be able to relate to the dream house described in Bachelard's
book, but her statement reveals that Bachelard's analysis of the house has inspired
her to write The House on Mango Street. Therefore, this paper aims to expand the
aforementioned critical attention by discussing other geographical spaces in
Esperanza's neighborhood, and because Bachelard's discussion of the house is not
all together irrelevant to the houses described in The House on Mango Street, his
idea of 'taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul,'viii which he
borrows from C. G. Jung, will be employed to analyze the public and private spaces
in this book. What this approach strives to show is how Esperanza intends to use
her writing skills, nourished by obtaining a private space, to open a public space
for Latino/a immigrants—who are historically discriminated against because of
their gendered and racialized bodies—to pursue and fulfill their version of the
American Dream.
II. Public Space: School and Hospital
According to Bachelard, 'the house's situation in the world [...] gives us, quite
concretely, a variation of the metaphysically summarized situation of man in the
world.'ix In other words, the place in which a house is located reflects its
inhabitant's circumstances in the world. Applying this idea to a reading of The
House on Mango Street reveals the prejudice and hostility that minority people
encounter in the public space. In a vignette titled 'A Rich Sandwich,' Esperanza
wants to eat her lunch in the canteen of her school because she thinks 'canteen' is a
special placex. Though Esperanza's mother has written a letter asking Sister
Superior's permission to let Esperanza eat in the canteen, she acts as if she has
never received the letterxi and scolds Esperanza. Here is Esperanza's account of the
conversation between her and Sister Superior:
You don't live far, she says. […] I bet I can see your
house from my window. Which one? Come here. […]
That one? She said, pointing to a row of ugly three-flats,
the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into.
Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn't my house
and started to cry xii.
The fact is even though Esperanza's home is not far from school, it is not close
eitherxiii. Nevertheless, because Esperanza is a Latina, Sister Superior
automatically assumes that Esperanza must live in one of the run-down houses and
humiliates Esperanza by forcing her to identify one of the poor houses that can be
seen from her office window as her own. Sister Superior's behavior also implies
that the opinion of Esperanza's mother, a Latina, does not count; otherwise, she
will honor her request or at least will explain kindly to Esperanza why she cannot
eat in the canteen.
In fact, Esperanza's mother is not the only person in the public sphere whose
existence and voice are ignored. In a vignette called 'Geraldo No Last Name,'
Esperanza reports how a wetback (an illegal Mexican laborer) named Geraldo is a
victim of a hit-and-run accident after dancing in a dance club in downtown. xiv
According to Esperanza, the police and hospital people have difficulty finding out
his identity because they find 'No address. No name. Nothing in his pockets.' xv She
states:
The hospital emergency room. Nobody but an intern
working alone. And maybe if the surgeon would've
come, maybe if he hadn't lost so much blood, if the
surgeon had only come, they would know who to notify
and where.xvi
The words 'maybe,' 'if,' and 'only' used in this passage suggest Esperanza's
sympathy to the man. How she wishes that the surgeon were willing to sacrifice his
sleep to save this seriously wounded stranger. Near the end of the vignette,
Esperanza says, 'They never saw the kitchenettes. They never knew about the tworoom flats and sleeping rooms he rented, the weekly money orders sent home, the
currency exchange. How could they?'xvii Geraldo's living quarters reveal the
hardships he has endured in order to help his impoverished family. The condition
of his rooms reflects his situation in the United States, the land of opportunity.
Unfortunately, he is dead before he has the opportunity to attain his American
dream.
III. Domestic Space: Houses and Windows
In his discussion of the house, Bachelard states, “the Mother image and the
House image are united.'xviii This statement suggests how the mother is like a
house protecting her children from the storms of life. In a sense, this is true;
however, if the mother is in a poor condition, what will happen to her and her
children? Instead of being safe in the domestic space, many women on Mango
Street are trapped in their houses because their fathers or husbands either act
irresponsibly or are abusive and controlling. Esperanza describes Rosa Vargas and
her children as follows:
They are bad those Vargases, and how can they help
it with only one mother who is tired all the time from
buttoning and bottling and babying, and who cries
every day for the man who left without even leaving
a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come.xix
Because her husband abandons them and provides no financial support, Rosa
Vargas is left to raise their children alone. She is emotionally traumatized,
physically worn out, and has no energy left to discipline them, which causes her
children to act wildly and get hurts all the time. One of them even died from
jumping off a roof top, thinking he is learning to fly.xx Another mother Minerva
faces a similar situation. She 'is always sad like a house on fire—always something
wrong. She has many troubles, but the big one is her husband who left and keeps
leaving.'xxi The house image that Esperanza uses to describe Minerva vividly
depicts her situation: she is supposed to protect her children like a house protect its
inhabitants from the elements, but she is in need of being rescued from destruction.
Both women try to be shelters to their children, but being a single mother, their
socio-economic condition does not permit them to do so.
Ironically, on Mango Street, if there is a constant father in the home, he usually
tries to keep his daughter in the house and take up traditional roles their culture
prescribes for women. For instance, Esperanza's friend Alicia whose mother is
dead and chooses to go to college 'because she doesn't want to spend her whole life
in a factory or behind a rolling pin' is told by her father that 'a woman's place is
sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star.'xxii Alicia's father's
behavior is well accounted by Julián Olivares:
Here we do not see the tortilla as a symbol of cultural
identity but as a symbol of a subjugating ideology, of
sexual domination, of the imposition of a role that the
young woman must assume.xxiii
Esperanza's another friend Sally also has a controlling father. Sally's 'father says to
be this beautiful is trouble. [...] He remembers his sisters and is sad. Then [Sally]
can't go out.'xxiv Sally's father thinks that her beauty is 'dangerous and
provocative; it requires regulation.'xxv Because of their bodies and sexuality, both
women's fathers believe that their place is in the house.
Similarly, if the husband is present in the home, he is often domineering and
forbids his wife to go outside; thus, windows become these women's only access to
the outside world. Here is Esperanza's account of her great grandparents' marriage:
I would've liked to have known her, a wild horse of
a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until my greatgrandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her
off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. […]
And the story goes that she never forgave him. She
looked out the window her whole life.xxvi
The metaphor and simile that Esperanza uses to describe her great grandmother
indicate that she is a strong-willed and beautiful woman who refuses to enter
marriage; unfortunately, Esperanza's great grandfather takes her by force and
makes her stay at home all day. She can only looks out the window and imagines
what she could have become if she is not married or confined to the house.
A similar fate befalls on other women in Esperanza's neighborhood. Esperanza
states:
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 run away
since she is too beautiful to look at.xxvii
Rafaela is another victim of male domination. Her only access to the outside world
is the window, from which she can only see but not come in contact with. Another
example is Mamacita who 'sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio
show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like
a seagull.'xxviii Mamacita is forced by her husband to immigrate to the United
States, so she refuses to learn English as a protest, which in turn limits her
mobility. The simile that Esperanza uses to depict her reveals her longing to fly
back to her home country where she can move freely. These women are forced to
sacrifice their freedom for their husbands' desires and dreams.
IV. Dream Space: a Free-standing House
Because of what Esperanza has experienced and observed on Mango Street,
when she describes her dream house, she uses a lot of negatives to say what she
does not want in the house: 'Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's
house. Not a daddy's. […] Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up
after.'xxix Esperanza's ideal house is a free-standing building that symbolizes her
freedom and independence because she will not live in this house as someone else's
wife, daughter, mother, or caretaker. After listing what she does not want in her
house, she also states what she wants in it:
A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow,
my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories.
My two shoes waiting beside the bed. […] Only a
house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean
as paper before the poem.xxx
This list indicates that she is the owner of her house and that she will have a quiet
and clean space where she can think and write freely. Her dream house is like what
Bachelard points out, it is 'the embodiment of everything that is considered
convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must
therefore satisfy both pride and reason,'xxxi unlike the one Sister Superior forcing
her to identity.
V. Conclusion
In the third to last vignette, Alicia tells Esperanza, 'Like it or not you are Mango
Street, and one day you'll come back too,' but Esperanza says, 'Not me. Not until
somebody makes it better;' however, Alicia asks, 'Who's going to do it? The
mayor?'xxxii Alicia's questions make Esperanza 'laugh out loud' because she realizes
that 'Who's going to do it? Not the mayor.'xxxiii If not, the mayor, then who?
Esperanza gives readers her answer in the last vignette:
I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes.
She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free.
One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. […]
Friends and neighbors will say, 'Where did she go with
all those books and paper?' [...] They will not know I
have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind.
For the ones who cannot out.xxxiv
Esperanza's statement shows that by writing about what she has seen and
experienced on Mango Street, she is able to make the stories of the oppressed
known because '[n]arrative […] is potentially the more influential medium.' xxxv
Moreover, instead of being held back by her negative experiences and
circumstances, Esperanza draws strength from them and refuses to be defined by
and confined because of her body so that she can leave and come back for those
who are trapped in their spaces and to open a space for them to pursue their version
of the American dream.
References
Bachelard, Gaston. 'The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press books, 1994.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.
---, 'Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession.' The Americas Review 15(1987),
69-73.
Crawford-Garrett, Katherine. 'Leaving Mango Street: Speech, Action and the
Construction of
Narrative in Britton's Spectator Stance,' Children's Literature in Education (2009),
95-108.
Doyle, Jacqueline. 'More Room of her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on
Mango Street.' MELUS 19:4 (winter 1994), 5-35.
Eysturoy, Annie O. 'The House on Mango Street: A Space of Her Own.' Daughters
of self-creation: the Contemporary Chicana Novel, 89-112. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
Giles, James. 'Nature Despoiled and Artificial: Sandra Cisneros's The House on
Mango Street.' Violence in the ContemporaryAmerican Novel: an End to
Innocence, 70-83. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.
Kuribayashi, Tomoko. 'The Chicana Girl Writes her Way In and Out: Space and
Bilingualism in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street.' Creating Safe
Space: Violence and Women's Writing, edited by Tomoko Kuribayashi and Julie
Tharp, 165-177. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Mezei, Kathy and Chiara Briganti. 'Reading the House: A Literary Perspective.'
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27:3 (Spring 2002), 837-846.
Olivares, Julian. 'Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, and the Poetic of
Space.' Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontier in American
Literature, edited by Maria Herrera-Sobek and Helena Maria Viramontes, 160-169.
Houston, Texas: Arte Publico Press, 1988.
Petty, Leslie. 'The “Dual”-ing Images of la Malinche and la Virgen de Guadaplupe
in Cisneros's The House on Mango Street.' MELUS 25:2 (summer 2000): 119-132.
Rivera, Tomás. 'Chicano Literature: Fiesta of the Living.' Books Abroad 49:3
(Summer 1975): 439-452.
Sickels, Amy. 'The Critical Reception of The House on Mango Street.' Critical
Insights: The House on Mango Street,36-55. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2010.
Wissman, Kelly. '“Writing Will Keep You Free”: Allusions to and Recreations of
the Fairy Tale
Heroine in The House on Mango Street.' Children's Literature in Education 38
(2007): 17-34.
Ya-hui Irenna Chang is an assistant professor at Tunghai University. Her research
interests include American ethnic literature, cultural studies, and film studies.
Notes
i
Amy Sickels, 'The Critical Reception of The House on Mango Street,'
Critical Insights: The House on Mango Street (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2010),
38.
ii
For instance, Jacqueline Doyle claims, 'Cisneros has acknowledged the
importance of Woolf’s belief that a room of one’s own is a necessary precondition
for writing' (26). Tomoko Kuribayashi concurs, 'Just as Woolf wrote to create space
for women to write in, Esperanza creates space through writing. She was keenly
aware of the constraints economic and spatial deprivation could impose on a
woman writer’s imagination' (172).
iii
While the critics in the second group also affirms the importance of this
private space for Esperanza’s writing, to counter negative criticism generated by
critics such as Ramon Saldivar and Juan Rodriguez who interpret Esperanza’s
desire for a nice house and a private space outside the barrio as a betrayal of her
ethnic heritage (Petty 128), some critics argue that Esperanza’s ideal house is not a
building, but a metaphor for her writing or herself. For instance, Maria Elena de
Valdés declares that 'the house [Esperanza] seeks is in reality her own person' (128,
qtd. in Petty), and Julián Olivares believes that Esperanza’s house is a 'metaphor
for the house of storytelling' (168).
iv
For example, James Giles states, 'The “real house” of which Esperanza
dreams functions in the novel both as a concrete place of refuge and as a metaphor
for her repressed, but emerging identity' (72) and that 'The volume's penultimate
sketch, “A House of My Own,” echoes and thereby pays tribute to Virginia Woolf.'
Mezei and Briganti in their analysis of houses in literature also observes, 'The
proliferation of novels and tales named after houses, from Northanger Abbey
(Austen [1817] 1975] to The House on Mango Street (Cisneros [1983]1991),
indicates an insistent historical reciprocity. In both canonical and popular novels,
the house goes beyond providing a mere setting to constitute 'a unifying symbolic
structure that represents and defines the relationship of the central characters to one
another, to themselves, to the world' (Chandler 1991, 1)' (840).
v
Annie O. Eysturoy, 'The House on Mango Street: A Space of Her Own,'
Daughters of Self-creation: the Contemporary Chicana Novel (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 110-111.
vi
James Giles says, 'In her essay, Olivares argues convincingly that Cisneros
“reverses” Bachelard's privileged, male view of a house […]'; Giles then says,
'As an “impoverished woman raised in a ghetto,” Cisneros can hardly share
Bachelard's conception of a house as a “felicitous space”'(73).
vii
Sandra Cisneros, 'Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession,' The
Americas Review 15 (1987), 72-73.
viii
Gaston Bachelard, 'Introduction,' The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press
books, 1994), xxxvii.
ix
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 27-28.
x
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (New York: Vintage Books,
2009), 43.
xi
Ibid., 45.
xii
Ibid., 45.
xiii
Ibid., 43.
xiv
Ibid., 65.
xv
Ibid., 66.
xvi
Ibid., 66.
xvii
Ibid., 66.
xviii
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 45.
xix
Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 29.
xx
Ibid., 30.
xxi
Ibid., 84-85.
xxii
Ibid., 31-32.
xxiii
Olivares, 'Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, and the Poetics of
Space,' 164.
xxiv
Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 81.
xxv
Kelly Wissman, '“Writing Will Keep You Free”: Allusions to and Recreations
of the Fairy Tale Heroine in The House on Mango Street,' Children's Literature
in Education 38 (2007), 22.
xxvi
Cisneros, The House on Mango Street,11.
xxvii
Ibid., 79.
xxviii
Ibid., 77.
xxix
Ibid., 108.
xxx
Ibid., 108.
xxxi
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 61.
xxxii
Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 107.
xxxiii
Ibid., 107.
xxxiv
Ibid., 110.
xxxv
Katherine Crawford-Garrett, 'Leaving Mango Street: Speech, Action and the
Construction of Narrative in Britton's Spectator Stance,' Children's Literature in
Education (2009), 107.