Function/S of Space in Sandra Cisneros’ the House on Mango Street

Function/s of Space in Sandra Cisneros The digest on mango tree Street Space occupies a central role in Sandra Cisneros coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street. Using the example of the erect shows this very plainly. This can be seen at the very arising of the book, namely the title. Although it is a female Bildungsroman, the novel is not named after its protagonist Esperanza Cordero, and her residence. It shows that Cisneros attached more than importance to the hold on Mango Street and the reader also learns that it is of central significance for the discipline of the young girl.On Mango Street, she develops not only physic al iodiny, but also in margins of her font and her own indistinguishability. That is why I provide concentrate on the function of the planetary brook rather than on other different settings in the novel. Usually, the house is a symbol for warmth and shelter. It represents the place of the family and where bingle belongs to. hardly the first sentence of the initial vignette shows, that this does not apply to the house on Mango Street. Esperanzas family has been constantly on the move and they lived in several apartments in different cities.The feeling of being root therefore never existed, just as little as the feeling of comfort. For Esperanza, the house on Mango Street does not symbolize shelter, but shame. In the first vignette Esperanza depicts the familys house in a very negative appearance, run down and with cramped confines. It is neither the house Papa talked to the highest degree when he held a lottery ticket , nor the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed. (Cisneros 4). The house on Mango Street is at last their own, but not the one Esperanza and her family have longed for.It symbolizes the conflict between the promised land and the harsh humans (Valdes Canadian Review 57). Especially for Esperanza, who is in quest of her own identity, reality and hope (Spanish esperanza) diverge here, which agency of life that Esperanza has not found her personal reality yet. She wishes to have a real house. One I could point to. (Cisneros 5). This desire shows that the house also symbolizes the American aspiration of having a comfortable home of ones own, something the people of Esperanzas residential district will belike never attain.Esperanza experiences that instead, they are often confronted with the fact that the house also functions as a symbol of female restriction. This proves the given traditional role of a Chicana, whose business concentrates on the household and on being wife and mother. In the novel, female restriction is also depicted in a more extreme way Several women like Marin and Rafaela are restricted physically because they are locked indoors by their husbands. Esperanza clearly comes emerge against such a male-dominated home.Although she is not sure who she is and still searches for her own identity, she clearly knows what she wants a house all on her own, nary(prenominal) a mans house. Not a daddys. A house all my own. (Cisneros 108). According to that, having her own house stands for her longing for a self-determined space as an independent woman, in which she can be free to be herself, unconfined by either a husband or a father and without any social expectations. There is something, Esperanza didnt realize yet the fact that the house she seeks is, in reality, her person. (Valdes Canadian Review 58). Thus, the house functions as a metaphor for Esperanzas identity formation. apart(predicate) from its importance for self-identification, the image of the house functions as a synecdoche it is part of the community, a place of ones own amidst the whole community and barrio. By interacting with the community, meaning communication and observation, Esperanza learns that she can only define herself with her relationship to the other people of her community.She orientates herself by some positive role models like Aunt Lupe or Minerva, but she also distances herself from Sally or the women sitting by the window like her great-grandmother or Mamacita. Nevertheless, Esperanza learns by their experience. This shows Esperanzas ability to distinguish between the different role models. She recognizes that she does not want to be a copy of somebody and this is why she sees others just as partial role models. The social interaction with the community actually is of utter importance for Esperanzas identity formation.The fact that she defines herself through people she lives with shows the close interaction between community and Individual. The house stands for the community because it is part of it and thus functions as a synecdoche pars pro toto the term community is replaced by a narrower one, thus the house. This also works vice versa, totum pro parte means here that the house is used to represent the community. For Esperanza, the relationship between individual and community is a vernacular on e. She recognizes that there is a lot she learned and experienced while living in the house on Mango Street and in the ommunity. At the end of the novel, both what the three sisters and Alicia say to her induce Esperanza to spot her indebtedness to the community and her role as mediator and negotiator between worlds. (Rukwied 63). So she decides to give something back, to admirer others with her experience. In the vignette Bums in the Attic she states One day Ill own my own house, but I wont forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? Ill offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. Cisneros 87) Esperanza shows great sympathy for other people who are, by some means or other, preoccupied like she was when wondering who she is. She describes this state with the word homeless (Cisneros 87). Having no home means having no house or apartment. And as I argued before, the house is the central metaphor for self- identification. In the end, Esperanza finally finds her voice by beginning with writing. She now has a clear vision of how her promised house should be Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem. (Cisneros 108). This is another way of contributing something to the community she writes about it. As I argued, the house is of central importance in The House on Mango Street. Esperenza first refuses to accept that she belongs to Mango Street and thus to the whole community. But in the end she recognizes that it was there her identity fully developed because our environment always shapes our identity. I focused on the function of the house, but there are further reasons for the importance of space in general.In my opinion, one of them is highly visible indeed The fact that Sandra Cisneros left a lot of space on the pages of the novel. In chapter 7 for example, there is both recto and verso in a large part unprinted. Works Cited call Cisneros, San dra. The House on Mango Street. New York Vintage Books, 1991. McCracken, Ellen. The House on Mango Street Community-oriented self-examination and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence. In Horno-Delgado, Asuncion et al (eds). Breaking Boundaries Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Amherst University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 7-71. Rukwied, Annette L. The search for identity in two Chicana novels Sandra Cisneros The house on Mango Street & Ana Castillos the mixquiahuala letters. Stuttgart Universitat, Magisterarbeit, 1998. Valdes, Maria Elena de In Search of identicalness in Cisneross The House on Mango Street, Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, Fall 1992. 55-69. Valdes, Maria Elena de. The Critical Reception of Sandra Cisneross The House on Mango Street. Gender, Self, and Society. Ed. Renate von Bardeleben. Frankfurt Peter Lang, 1993. 287-300. (7. 01. 2008) (7. 01. 2008)