The House on Mango Street- Some Thoughts and Ramblings

The first time I read The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, I was a freshman in college taking a women’s lit class.  As an English major in an all-women’s college, I would go on to take many more literature courses, many focusing on gender issues in texts (sort of comes with the territory), but this was the first literature course I took in my undergraduate program.  

Fittingly, the first novel we read in the class was Jane Eyre, followed by Wide Sargasso Sea (a book I’d highly recommend to anyone who thought that the “madwoman in the attic” from Jane Eyre ought to get the chance to tell her side of the story for once). 

When we finally got to The House on Mango Street, I was ecstatic for several reasons.  I’m sure I was glad to read something completely unrelated to Jane Eyre (a novel which I did not appreciate as much then as I do now—and even now it’s not exactly in my top-ten or top-twenty). 

I also remembered having read one of the novel’s vignettes during high school and appreciating it for not only its brevity but its simple eloquence.  The vignette, “A Smart Cookie,” all together takes up about a page, creates a complex backstory for one of the characters, and uses language in a way that makes you double-take for a second after you’ve read it, forcing you to look again at the deeper meaning behind it. 

Naturally, I wanted more, so getting to read the full novel was like a literary treat.  Of course, I was not disappointed upon finally reading it, finding each individual vignette to enhance the reading of the novel yet somehow able to stand alone and create a compelling story.

This semester, my first as a graduate student studying English literature (at the same school where I received my undergrad degree), I was again given the opportunity to revisit not only Jane Eyre (and the significance of fairy tales to the novel—hello, first research paper), but am currently embarking on another journey into The House on Mango Street for my final research paper of the course. 

This weekend I reread the novel for the third time, and once again, I was mesmerized by the imagery, language, and overall brilliance of the work.  I’m always surprised at how much more I find in a work (novel, poem, essay, etc.) the second, third, or fourth time I read it, and though I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, it is a singular joy for me to discover new meaning in something which escaped me the first time. 

This can probably account for the fact that, the deeper I explored the fairy tale tropes and deviations in Jane Eyre, the more I genuinely liked Jane and elements in the rest of the novel—excluding Rochester.  (Sorry, I gotta stick with my girl Bertha--poor, poor crazy lady.)

Anyway, back to my point.  Right now, at least, I’m still in the beginning stages of writing on The House on Mango Street, trying to gather my thoughts and come up with something that really interests me that I’d want to explore further.  The problem, of course, is that everything about this novel interests me, so it’s kind of hard to come up with a proper thesis.

However, since I am currently sorting through my own thoughts on the novel, I thought I would share some here (to spread the love, so to speak).

I’m very intrigued by the dichotomy between sexuality and spirituality explored in the novel, with images associated with the ground and the physical representing sexuality and those associated with the air and sky representing the spiritual (at least, that’s my take). 

From my viewpoint, it seems as though there are many images of feet, legs, or shoes (most notably in the vignette “The Family of Little Feet”) which crop up frequently.  I must be stuck on fairy tales from my Jane Eyre research, because I seem to find some of those images here, as well—take a look at this passage from that same vignette, in which the main character Esperanza and her friends are trying on women’s high heels for the first time:

“Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly, and we laugh at Rachel’s one foot with a girl’s grey sock and a lady’s high heel.  Do you like these shoes? But the truth is it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg” (Cisneros 40).

The amazing part of Cisneros’s writing is how much she can squeeze into so tight a space; in this passage alone, I see gender issues, fairy tales used to explore awakening sexuality, the transition between girlhood and womanhood…and this is just a three-sentence long section! (And I didn’t even get to the part where men are suddenly asking them for kisses when they walk by in those heels…)

I could, quite frankly, go on for quite a bit about this novel and everything I find in it, but I should probably save some of it for my research…and hey, I might just come back to this in a future post.  Wink, wink.

All I can say at this point is that, for anyone who hasn’t read this novel yet, it is truly worth the read.  It’s not long, but it packs a punch, with themes ranging from gender issues to racial and cultural barriers to finding one’s place in the world.  In fact, I think I may just reread it again before the week is out…

Happy writing (and reading!),

Shannon