Question

Describe In 1000 words The House on Mango Street. ARGUMENT AND CRITICAL THINKING,THEROY AND CONCLUSION PLEASE TYPE

Answer 1

Answer-

Cisneros is best known for her young adult prose volume The House on Mango Street (1984), a collection of vignettes based on her experiences growing up in a working-class Latin-American neighborhood in Chicago.

Cisneros received the American Book Award and the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award in 1985, both for The House on Mango Street, which was a best-seller and has become a mainstay on grade school, high school, and college reading lists. Through the character of Esperanza, a twelve-year-old Chicana girl and the narrator of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros examines issues of Chicana identity in the bi-cultural context of the Latin-American community.

The House on Mango Street is also considered a coming-of-age story, highlighting Esperanza's quest for self-definition and self-empowerment through the creative act of writing. Cisneros has been widely recognized for her groundbreaking work, which utilizes experimental forms of prose narrative and challenges traditional gender roles.

As a result, Cisneros was awarded the McArthur Foundation "genius" award in 1995.

In The House on Mango Street, Cisneros draws upon the image of the house as a symbol for a variety of thematic concerns: the house symbolizes the "American Dream" of middle-class comfort that the people of Esperanza's community fantasize about but will likely never achieve, and also symbolizes the realm of literature, expressing Esperanza's desire to become a writer. At other times, the house functions as a symbol of female confinement within the traditional, prescribed gender roles as wife and mother. Esperanza's childhood home also represents a family history and cultural heritage which are both enriching and confining to an adolescent girl with high aspirations.

Through this complex symbolism and the variety of characters and stories Esperanza reveals in her narrative, Cisneros explores themes of economic oppression, ethnic identity, female sexuality, and the power of storytelling to reconcile the past with the present and future. In the course of her development as a young writer, Esperanza struggles to negotiate conflicts between individual self-determination and community identity, between the private space of the home and the public sphere of the streets, between her Mexican heritage and her participation in American culture. Additionally, she experiences a battle between the comforts of the familiar neighborhood and the urge to break free from its limitations, as well as between traditional gender roles and her emergent feminist consciousness.

Cisneros's feminist reclaiming of the Chicana experience is indicated by her dedication in The House on Mango Street "a las mujeres" ("to the women"). Witnessing the experiences of other women in her neighborhood, particularly Marin and Ruthie, Esperanza ultimately realizes that her femininity places her within a secondary role in the culture of the barrio, forced to pine for a man to rescue her. These gender roles, instilled by the masculine dominance of husbands, fathers, and brothers, prompt Esperanza to recognize that Mexican men "don't like their women strong." Even as they love their wives and daughters, they force them into submission. As Thomas Matchie has noted, "Esperanza comes to see that the pressure on women in Chicana families comes from a system she simply, though painfully, has to leave."