The House on Mango Street

Fiction | Novella | YA | Published in 1984

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-13

Chapters 14-21

Chapters 22-29

Chapters 30-38

Chapters 39-44

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Trees and Sky

Esperanza’s family lives in an urban, impoverished part of Chicago. The buildings are cramped together, and they have almost no access to nature. Esperanza longs to be able to see wide open sky: “you can never have too much sky […] sky can keep you safe when you are sad” (33). A neighborhood boy describes the clouds in the sky as “God” (33), and Esperanza agrees with that comparison. She feels spiritually connected to nature. In “Four Skinny Trees,” she compares herself to the trees growing out of the cement in front of her house: “Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here” (74). Like a tree, Esperanza imagines herself growing up and out of her neighborhood, while maintaining strong roots in her community. Esperanza comes to believe that in order to have access to nature and freedom of spirituality, she needs to become an upper-class American. However, she doesn’t want to become classist: “People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth” (86). She uses proximity to sky and earth as a metaphor for class; here, the people who “live too much on earth” are immigrants and members of her community.

Houses

Esperanza begins the novel by describing her family’s excitement about finally owning their own home, rather than moving from inner-city rental to rental. They had all hoped for a nice big house “like the houses on T.V….our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence […] but the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all” (4). The only house they can afford is tiny, crumbling, and crowded by neighbors. Esperanza repeatedly expresses a desire for a house of her own, away from the noise of her siblings and parents on Mango Street. She wishes to be independent, free to live alone without a husband or father. Her frequent longing for a house alludes to Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in which Woolf examines the way that domestic life hampers a woman’s ability to create. Woolf, like Esperanza, is a poetic writer. Woolf argued that in order to really focus on writing, a woman must have a room of one’s own in which she can act as the master of her domain. The room, much like Esperanza’s oft-desired house, is symbolic of freedom—the kind of freedom that male authors and artists can expect and demand, rather than pine for. This was a remarkable and controversial position in Woolf’s era. For Esperanza, it is similarly unthinkable that she would break family and cultural tradition to strive for independence separate from the patriarchy. Her insistence on a house of her own is her commitment to do just that.

Trapped Women

Recurring throughout the text are scenes and images of women trapped inside of houses and apartments. Marin “can’t come out – gotta baby-sit with Louie’s sisters – but she stands in the doorway a lot, all the time singing, clicking her fingers” (23). Esperanza’s aunt is housebound due to illness: “My aunt, a little oyster, a little piece of meat on an open shell for us to look at. Hello, hello. As if she had fallen into a well” (60). Mamacita never leaves her apartment, but “sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country” (77). Rafaela, like Rapunzel, is trapped in her upstairs apartment looking out at life passing by: “…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” (79).

Finally, Sally ends up married and trapped sitting “at home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission” (101). All of these women are trapped because of men who do not want them to experience freedom or independence. These women are portrayed as possessions who must be protected, and their femininity is dangerous to their male owners. Cisneros contrasts these images of trapped women with Esperanza, who is “leaning out my window, imagining what I can’t see” (73). Rather than gaze out a window longingly, Esperanza has agency and control over her future through her imaginative powers and creative writing abilities.