The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: The Concept of The House as a Reflector of Esperanza’s Struggle on Finding Her Identity

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very special environment in Mango street.

At first Esperanza feels mainly ashamed for her house. This is related to her difficulties on fully accepting her social environment and her ethnical identity. In the first vignette “The House on Mango Street” it becomes clear how her housing situation makes Esperanza feel ashamed and worthless. She describes not only “the many houses that Esperanza´s family had lived in, which also informs the reader of their constant move and instability” (Frederiksson 11), but also her disappointment about their first private home in Mango street. Esperanza has had the experience to feel ashamed for her housing situation before when she was asked by a nun “You live there?” (5) which “effectively robs Esperanza of her place in the neighborhood by forcing her to envision the urban dwelling as filtered through the lens of the nun's own socioeconomic and aesthetic standards” ( Martin 56). Through this experience, it is engraved to her ...

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urban existence, a nailed, barred, prison like space whose description invokes images of entrapment, danger, and potential violence” (Martin 56) just like the flats Esperanza’s family lived in before. Esperanza describes it in the opening vignette as small and in a bad condition and she still feels ashamed for the house that does not feel like home to her. It gets clear that “the partitioned domestic space of the real Mango Street is framed by tightness, suffocation, and decay.” (Martin 55) which makes it hard for Esperanza to accept it as part of her identity. Frederiksson states in her essay The Hidden Value of House and Home: An Analysis of the Social and Physical Setting in ...

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