Summary Of The House On Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

When I was little, there was a toy I often played with. A game with a variety of differently shaped holes, along with a variety of differently shaped pegs. I was only a few years old, so it often left me puzzled, with the discordant jumble of shapes around me to be put into their rightful places. Usually I would match them after some confusion, but sometimes I’d be too stubborn or too foolish to match them correctly. There were often bitter victories, where I’d squeeze the plastic triangle into the circular hole with some amount of pressure and frustration. Enculturation. At the tender age of two, I had just represented the act itself. Throughout history, women have slaughtered and mutilated themselves to fit ‘exquisite’ (by which I mean unreachable
When accepting her masculine traits and acting upon them, it is difficult. In this patriarchal world, many do not want their women to be strong. It is also difficult to abandon the encultured ways that a woman has lived her entire life. But the feeling of truly being her fullest self is reward enough to do so. It is empowering. In the book The House on Mango Street, Writer Sandra Cisneros demonstrates the power she wishes to have (and does have, after accepting her ‘masculine’ desires) and her realization that she did not want to allow her soul to be chained anymore; that she did not want to be a square peg in a circular
Her whole life she has been told to be a certain way. She sees her friends being beaten by their husbands or fathers. She is raped. She is objectified. She attempts to act like the perfect ‘women’. Esperanza is a slab of rotting meat in a butcher shop, hanging from a window with her skin, her soul, stripped from her and disregarded. Reclaiming her ‘masculine’ traits as a woman is when she accepting that she can be powerful, when she understands her own selfishness and realizes that it is okay to be something that society does not want, she is whole again. Finally, she accepts that her power truly is her