The House on Mango Street written by Sandra Cisneros emerges as a piece of literary mastery demonstrated through the multilevel narration and celebration of subjective representation. The author utilizes the unusual practice of thorough weaving of the tapestry containing the main character’s opinions and cognitive processes that exist within the matrix of three levels of narration. Furthermore, the story world level, the level of narration and authorial level appear to execute distinctive functions in explaining the significance of critical thinking for self-identity development.
This is exactly what happens to Esperanza, Mexican American teenage girl living in a rough neighborhood while she transitions from childhood world of innocence to adult world of experience throughout the novel. I want to analyze Cisneros’ process of constructing Esperanza’s identity, Cisneros’ applications of subjectivity on several levels of narration and their functions while employing the postmodernist concept of subjective Truth. Usually, we assume that classical American prose leans towards powerful realism trying to depict the everyday life facts and characters in detail.
Typically, it is done so to build up the strong reader’s understanding of plot and emphasize fabula’s content. Therefore, such literature appeals majorly to the basic feelings and experiences of readers related to the issues people commonly tend to agree on or are in the process of creating a universal answer to those ones. In other words, the vast majority of people admit the rule that “one person’s freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins” (Russell 314). Such rules are called objective Truth and emerge as universal rules which were synthesized from religion, philosophy, policy nd social life.
In turn, Cisneros offers us to take a look at the individual relativist worldview affected by cultural and social background and to understand the importance of its existence and richness. The essential significance of relativist perception and alternative point of view, or subjective Truth, was praised by the postmodernist philosophers. This branch of thought blossomed after WWII in response to active polarization of the world system. Postmodernists critically analyze and examine deeply established concepts and phenomena through giving them alternative contents and interpretations.
Similarly, the author creates a world of opinions and experience inside the mind of a teenage girl who gets trapped in the process of transition from innocence to experience. Probably, the most efficient way to explore and explain the subjective Truth in The House on Mango Street is the postmodern technique of deconstruction. The first philosopher to appraise this method was Jacques Derrida who believed in its “inescapability due to rendering meanings as unstable by their dependence on ultimately arbitrary signifiers” (Derrida 19).
He also said:” “Words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words… o word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic”. As a consequence meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Hence, I am going to deconstruct Cisneros’ narration levels considering and respecting subjective Truth’s role in explaining her standpoint. Subjective truth on three levels allows us to crack the shell of Esperanza’s self-invention and liberationthrough-writing process which grows from the matrix embraced by Cisneros.
On the first level, we find the story world’s subjectivity, which stands for functional symbols and representations explaining narrators’ environment and background. For example, in one of the chapters the reader Esperanza observes four skinny trees from her room which are “growing despite concrete” (Cisneros 74). These trees depict the antagonistic environment, which is Esperanza’s rough neighborhood, and symbolize her survival within it: “Let one forget his reason for being, they’d all droop like tulips in a glass, each with their arms around the other.
Keep, keep, keep, trees say when I sleep. They teach” (75). This example of chapter’s content along with other stories from the book is permeated with symbolic meanings and synthesized definitions and opinions. This fact builds the foundation for subjective Truth on narrator’s level. Esperanza gives specific interpretations and personifications instead of bold realist portrayal to phenomena of the world which are real to her.
She tells stories about the transition period in her life through assessing her standing and analyzing her emotional state what summarizes the procedure of creating her own Subjective truth: “When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be” (74-75). At the same time, girl’s thinking processes might seem to exist in the subjective world of grown Esperanza’s mind post factum.
This assumption comes from the analysis of the thoughts’ depth and the mastery of literary instruments applied for explaining teenage girl’s emotions and attitudes. For instance, in “Those Who Don’t” Esperanza opposes “us” to “them” explaining the racial prejudices about Hispanics she represents: “Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake” (28).
The significant detail about this chapter is that she uses explicitly “we” and “they” in first and second paragraphs, while combining them with the third one as though she wanted to introduce the whole community’s standpoint. Both literal mastery and composition are little likely to be created by a teenager. Furthermore, there are other important details which make the mode of interaction between the reader and the narrator of additional value in relation to subjective Truth author installed. The narration is kept in present tense, and the dialogues have no quotations: “Next week she comes over black and blue and asks what can she do?
Minerva. I don’t know which way she’ll go. There is nothing I can do” (85). This technique is employed to foster the uninterrupted mind flow allegedly walking you inside of the narrator’s head instead of trying to build the objective decorations. If we move to an exploration of subjectivity on the authorial level it occurs that Cisneros stays almost completely outside of the novel world so the only way she can choose to nourish her subjective Truth is to actualize Esperanza’s selfidentity birth through writing this novel.
In order to accomplish this task, she applies numerous literary instruments which assist the reader in following the teenage girl’s conscience genesis. One of those is the structure that operates through a conceptual back and forth slideshow of images similarly to the action of the handle of the mechanic meat grinder. Cisneros crafts images pushing the reader through and following the Esperanza’s guidance through the perturbations of the referential world, but as soon as the image takes shape it is handed back toward the narrator: “One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition.
Ready to take you where? ” (49). The process is repeated again and again slowly constructing the Lego pattern of Esperanza’s Mango Street. Hence, Cisneros generates the structure of this text as a framework for self-invention and while the writing progresses Esperanza keeps up. In this sense, author’s form of Esperanza’s subjective world’s materialization is inherited by the latter as the instrument of self-identity creation: “I like to tell stories. I make a story of my life... I put it down on the paper and the ghost does not ache so much” (109). As it turns up, telling stories appears as the perfect way to explore herself for Esperanza.
While she learns information about the severe world of experience Esperanza tries to embrace it within the told story world. For her, it is nothing more but convenient way to systemize her reasoning about the world which is necessary for self-invention and entering the world of experience. According to Descartes, the main evidence of human existence is Cogito ergo sum; the same way it is “I write, therefore I am”. She understands the world the same way she writes or tell stories about it, therefore creating her own subjective world in which she perceives herself only relatively to her own emotions, experiences and background.
At this point, the role of her neighborhood emerges as the essential element of understanding the mode of Esperanza’s self-identification. Esperanza, the narrator, captures specific emotions and impressions from her experiences what directs her relations with Mango Street and its community. Mango Street becomes a metaphor for identity in this literary context. The evidence of this is that the reader is pushed less toward the objective world of the places, events and persons of Mango Street than toward the narrator writing about them.
It is not a coincidence that three sisters prophesy Esperanza obtaining her talents in writing but only in the case of coming back to Mango Street for her people (105). Therefore, she cannot create her identity without her cultural and social background or, in other words, her subjectivity. Furthermore, the understanding of her own self is metaphorically tied to the motif of living in a nice house. Esperanza observes the lifespans of women around her, which include domestic violence, disenfranchisement, and even literal incarceration, and she completely regrets such assignment.
In order to avoid that, she assumes that the only way is to break the ties with the community and the environment encouraging such practices and behaviors, to go away from it to the better neighborhood symbolizing liberation and empowerment. But, throughout the novel she comes to an understanding of her own self. In “Bums in the Attic” chapter she finally realizes that reaching the desired house is impossible without being honest to herself and admitting who she actually is and what she is a art of: “One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who | am or where I came from” (87). So, Cisneros tries to tell us that in order to become free and belonged you have to understand and appreciate who you are and what is the world around you. In conclusion, I would like to give Sandra Cisneros a credit for creating such a powerful work of literary art which celebrates the value of relative standpoint and subjectivity through the set of complicated narration mode.
She demonstrated the quintessential role of written subjective Truth for self-invention, exploration of one’s individuality and acknowledgment of his own relative conscience. Not only she managed to illustrate the process of identity birth and its entering of adult world employing several levels of narration, but also pointed to the phenomena of Mexican American life through examining and developing the motifs of feminism, liberation through writing, being outsider and others.
This novel reminded me of Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” which is structured in the similar fashion: paranoiac literature professor creates the subjective world within the poem written by another poet while creating symbolic system which might be affected by Russian history and reflect the world system transformation occurred after WWI at the same time according to some of the postmodern philosophers. Therefore, I highly appreciate this mode of writing which cherishes alternative points of view, introduces various angles of world perception and cultivates the dialogue between the reader and the writer at the same time.