Hard Life When Growing Up

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In Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street, Esperanza faces conflict of being a child and growing up. Cisneros gives a poetic feeling in her writing, and connects her readers using a variety of writing techniques, most notably with indirect characterization, metaphors, dialect, etc. Her maturity develops with every vignette, giving the audience insight to her growth through the author’s use and change of symbolism, syntax, and writing style.

From the very first vignette, Esperanza dreams of one day owning a house all to herself.

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“I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to.

” (page 5) She strives to find definition of herself, and believes that a house is her only means to that end. A recurring theme of self-definition follows Esperanza as she faces new experiences and grows up. In the vignette Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water, Esperanza is told that her fortune is a home in the heart. She is immediately disappointed at these results because it doesn’t match the reality she’s created in her head of Mango Street not being a house she could point to. By the end of the novel, she has shifted her perspective on her residence and realizes that the house on Mango Street is her “home in the heart”. This is symbolic of her transition from childhood to young adulthood because she accepts that Mango Street is where she was meant to be. She finds a place in her heart for the house on Mango Street and says, “They will not know I have gone away to come back.

For the ones I left behind.”(page 110) She struggles to find the confidence needed in herself to grow up. As she matures, rather than feeling embarrassed of her background she uses her relationships and experiences on Mango Street to empower herself.

In The Monkey Garden, she says “I looked at my feet… they didn’t seem to be my feet anymore.” (page 98) This is an example of Cisneros's use of metaphors and indirect characterization to advance her development of Esperanza’s character. Esperanza is comparing her feet/shoes to growing up, and she indirectly states that she’s uncomfortable with maturing. Esperanza frequently distinguishes herself as childlike by giving focus to her shoes. For her a girl’s shoes are a major part of a woman’s image. When she is at the baptism party, she is embarrassed that her shoes are not as fancy as her dress to the extent that she hides them under her chair. The shoes symbolize youth to Esperanza, and she feels she cannot be a woman as long as she’s wearing her boots. When Esperanza, Lucy, and Rachel play in the heels their neighbor had given them, she feels genuinely confident in herself, and allows herself to see what she could feel like when she is older. Yet, at the end of her night she says she doesn’t complain when the shoes get put away. A part of her doesn’t want to grow up because it means leaving her own world and coming out of her comfort zone to face the reality of adulthood.