Houses and homes: The novel opens by depicting the
titular house, which fails to live up to Esperanza's high, ideal expectations.
With its poor condition and cramped quarters, the house on Mango Street is not
"the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket. [or] the house Mama
dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed." At this point,
therefore, the house symbolizes the gap between dreams and reality, between
hope (Spanish, esperanza) and experience. Esperanza will spend the novel
longing for, as she says, a "real house"-in other words, a home, a place
where she is free to be herself. Her visions of a home do not necessarily
include the rest of her family; rather than being an indication of some
selfishness on Esperanza's part, however, readers can interpret the family's
absence as a natural expression of Esperanza's normal, healthy, adolescent need
to discover herself as an individual. As opposed to a mere "house," a "real
home" functions as symbolic shorthand for a fully developed identity.
Feet: In "And Some More," we hear the comment "Your
ugly mama's toes" hurled as an insult. The passing line is but one of many
references to feet in The House on Mango Street. Someone from an ethnic
and cultural background quite different from Esperanza's, white male American
novelist and minister Frederick Buechner, has written: "If you want to know who
you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you
are." Nevertheless, despite their difference, Esperanza might agree with
Buechner. Esperanza is aware of her feet: at times, as in "Chanclas,"
painfully: "My feet swell big and heavy like plungers." At other times,
however, her feet are symbols of who she is in her innermost self. In fact,
within that same vignette, "Chanclas," as Uncle Nacho pulls Esperanza onto the
dance floor at the baptismal celebration, Esperanza reports that she and her
uncle dance like a couple in the movies, "until I forget that I am wearing only
ordinary shoes, brown and white." She is not heavy and burdened down, as she
sees her feet; she is free, as her dancing feet really are. Another vignette in
which feet feature prominently is "The Family of Little Feet." In that section
of the book, the feet of the girls, clad in hand-me down, "dress up" shoes,
serve as symbols of the girls' incipient sexuality, in both its initial
innocence-"Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly."-but also in
its potentially threatening aspects: "[T]he truth is it is scary to look down
at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg." Through
the course of the novel, then, Esperanza's feet take her on a journey from
childhood to maturity, from innocence to wisdom. Her feet take her to her
destination of individual identity.
Names: No reader of Cisneros' novel can fail to be
impressed by the attention the author pays to names. Esperanza's name, of
course, encapsulates one of the book's dominant themes, but other names-or, as
in the case of such tragic characters as Geraldo, the lack of names-also carry
great symbolic import. From Esperanza's initial wish to rename herself as,
basically, an almost-algebraic unknown variable ("Yes. Something like Zeze the
X will do") to Meme Ortiz' daring act of renaming himself and thus shaping his
own identity to "Mamacita's" lack of a proper name indicating her inability to
adapt to a hostile dominant culture, names are an important metaphor for
identity in The House on Mango Street-as, indeed, they are in much
literature.
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