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4 pages/β‰ˆ1100 words
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MLA
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Literature & Language
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Essay
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English (U.S.)
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Why Esperanza wants her own home in the House on Mango

Essay Instructions:

Why does Esperanza in The House on Mango Street want her own home? At least 1 or 2 citations from each source. Keep to all MLA guidelines, and only use the original story and the sources provided from me as the only sources for this paper.

More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street
California State University, Fresno
"Books continue each other/' Virginia Woolf told an audience of young women some sixty years ago, "in spite of our habit of judging them separately" (Room 84). Books such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination, Tillie Olsen's Silences, and Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens continue Virginia Woolf's own book, A Room of One's Own, extending her fertile meditations on the effects of economic deprivation on women's literature, and her pioneering efforts to reconstruct a female literary tradition. Tillie Olsen has uncovered a rich vein of writing by American working class women, and has offered poignant personal testimony to the obstacles to writing posed by gender and class. Alice Walker has explored the silences created by gender and race in America: "What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood" (233).
While feminists following Woolf's advice to "think back through our mothers" have expanded the literary canon in the past two decades, too many have ignored the questions of race, ethnicity, and class in women's literature. Adrienne Rich laments the "white solipsism" of white feminists—"not the consciously held belief that one race is inherently superior to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant" ("Disloyal" 306). Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison have angrily denounced the canon implicit in early studies of women's literature such as Moers's and Spacks's.1 To Spacks's tepid defense that she preferred to dwell on authors depicting "familiar experience" and a "familiar cultural setting" (5), Walker counters: "Why only these? Because they are white, and middle class, and because to Spacks, female imagination is only that—a limitation that even white women must find restrictive" (372).

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Why Esperanza wants her own home in the House on Mango
Esperanza Cordero is the narrator and protagonist of the story The House on Mango Street. The story starts when Esperanza as a preteen, who wishes to have a better home away from Mango Street. The neighborhood is impoverished, and inhabited by Latin Americans mostly of Mexican extraction where Spanish and English are the languages of communication. Esperanza recounts her life without having a proper home as the family moved a lot each time, having an additional family member each time they moved before settling in Mango Street (Cisneros 1). The family gets a home in the impoverished section, but this is not the way Esperanza had envisioned about a home. Thus, over time the desire to leave the place and own a dream house is a main theme in the story. Esperanza wants her own home to have independence, forge an identity and to bridge cultural differences between the Mexican and American culture.
Cisneros does not provide an idealized version of home, but rather captures the lives of the working class, Latino people living in apartments with minimal public space. This goes against the norm where home was presented as a quiet place where there is stability because this mostly portrayed the middle class (Martin 50). In essence, Esperanza wants her own home to bridge racial, class and gender differences that were common in the society between the mainstream; Anglo American culture and the Latino culture. It is a way to define her identity away from mainstream cultural impositions and the patriarchal nature of Latino culture. In forging an identity, the narrator also has a voice to speak for the marginalized communities by aspiring to own a home that is central to making choices in life. Nonetheless, the house has a communal and solitary meaning in the story where Esperanza can seek refuge and others can also do so, showing an attempt to bridge differences between the dominant American culture and traditional Mexican community (Karafilis 70).
A house represents childhood memory, but Esperanza’s family moved a lot and it is only in Mango Street that there is a link between home and identity. Nonetheless, the nature of the place makes it hard to have independence. In essence, the search and need to find a new home represents the character’s search for identity. Even though, Esperanza appreciates the surroundings and culture of Latino Americans, economic deprivation and lack of marital harmony in most of the homes inspire Esperanza to search for her identity. The identity is at times influenced by fantasies, but it is only by being appreciative of the house that Esperanza can show her identity. Shame of acknowledging the family’s home, made it hard to identify with the place, but the quest for a new home would be a source of power to pursue the passion of writing, and would inadvertently make Esperanza understand impact of neglect...
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