Themes of Maturation and Escape in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

Maturation

Theme is one of the most important components of any story. A story’s theme is its center, its main idea, the cohesive being the piecemeal plot takes on in a reader’s mind. More often than not, a story will have multiple themes, multiple main ideas that the author wants to present to the readers for contemplation. Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street is made up of many different short but significant events within the main character’s life. Thus, The House on Mango Street has a myriad of themes and main ideas, almost one for each story. Arguably, the most prominent theme of those throughout the book is that painful experiences can and will lead to maturity. Maturity is growing up, learning through one’s own experiences how to get by in the real world, as harsh and cruel and painful as it is. To illustrate, in the chapter titled “Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark”, Esperanza saw her father cry for the first time, when he delivered the news that his father had died. Before Esperanza, her brave Papa “[crumpled] like a coat and [cried]... and [she didn’t] know what to do” (56). Seeing a parent cry for the first time is usually a very painful experience, and there is no doubt that Esperanza must have matured exponentially in this short span of time. A teenage girl, just barely a woman yet, was told that her grandfather had died, stood before her crying father, and was burdened with the task of staying calm and explaining to her siblings the grief of a life lost. She had to stand strong for the first time while her father was crumpled and weak, she had to metaphysically grow up and learned to act as the strong figure her father usually was. Later in the book, this theme of pain leading to maturity was demonstrated again in the chapter “Red Clowns”, in which Esperanza experienced sexual abuse. Abuse of any sort is painful and degrading, but sexual abuse, especially for a young woman like Esperanza, is traumatizing. She heard his voice in her ear again and again, “I love you, I love you, Spanish girl,” and she couldn’t forget “his sour smell” and “his sour mouth” pressed to hers. She tried to forget and told herself, “I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Please don’t make me tell it all” (100). Esperanza was quite clearly traumatized, scarred by this moment as she would likely be for a lifetime. But she learned from it. The pain and the trauma taught her that Sally wasn’t always going to be there for her, a trustworthy guide through her life. Esperanza learned that she’d need to take care of herself, defend herself, because there wasn’t anyone else who would be there for her more than herself. This realization is one of the first and most important steps to becoming an adult in the cruel adult world. Finally, this recurring theme appeared once more in the twenty-third chapter, “Born Bad”. Esperanza had a game she played with her friends every afternoon, in which they’d imitate other people they saw, some they knew, some they didn’t. On one such lazy afternoon, they decided it’d be fun to imitate Esperanza’s Aunt Lupe who was sick with an unknown disease. They acted sick, “with [their] heads thrown back, [their] arms limp and useless, dangling like the dead.” When Aunt Lupe died that day, Esperanza felt ashamed for being so disrespectful to an old, sick, dying person and for forgetting that Aunt Lupe had been on the edge of her life for so long. But she didn’t quite know how to handle her guilt. “We didn’t know,” she excused herself, “it was a game, that’s all… I don’t know why we picked her. Maybe we were bored” (59-61). From this incident, Esperanza learned a very important lesson about life: people make mistakes, they do bad things. By accident or on purpose, it’s difficult not to shame oneself or feel guilty, and it is even more difficult to apologize for the mistake. As well, when Esperanza didn’t get the chance to apologize to Aunt Lupe for what she’d done, she learned that mistakes she’d made could haunt her for a long, long time. The main idea that pain leads to maturity is one used in multiple chapters in The House on Mango Street, many more than the aforementioned. It was quite obviously a main theme in Esperanza’s coming-of-age experience, which the book documents. Therefore it is one of the strongest, one with which Sandra Cisneros would like to really impact her readers and their views on life.

Escape

Human nature is a complex and, at times, an inexplicable phenomenon. Instincts and evolutionary lessons make up most of the generalized, moral human nature. Escaping from pain is likely one of the most fundamental and deep-set instincts that we have; any being with the ability to feel would want to escape from pain. More than a few characters in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros display this human instinct. For one, Minerva in the chapter titled “Minerva Writes Poems” escapes her pain through poetry and through sharing her poems with Esperanza. Minerva has children and a husband who causes her grief, he causes her emotional pain by leaving and physical pain by hitting. As Esperanza notes, “Minerva cries because her luck is unlucky… she has many troubles but the big one his her husband who left and keeps leaving.” As a young wife and mother in her community, Minerva must stay at home. She cannot physically leave her home with her children and her husband who comes back saying he’s sorry but leaves her to bruise black and blue. Minerva’s only escape is through her poetry, in which she can feel “sad like a house on fire” (84-85) and in which she can deposit the emotional pain inflicted by her husband. She can escape the emotional pain but not the physical pain. Another significant example of the human inclination to flee from pain can be found in chapter thirty-one, “Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays”. Rafaela is a beautiful girl whom her husband hides from the world because he fears she is so beautiful that she will run away. Rafaela is trapped by her husband’s insecurities and she is so pained by it- she wants to explore their world and dance and live before she’s too old. Through flavor, Rafaela can almost escape the dreary, confining, empty room of her pain. She “drinks coconut and papaya juice on Tuesdays and wishes there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet sweet like the island” (80) to which she escapes. She can close her eyes with the sweet taste of her juice and her world is almost as flavorful as she wishes it could be. So she must have it, she pays every Tuesday to have it, her way to escape her pain of confinement. A few chapters later, just like Minerva and Rafaela, Sally must escape in “Linoleum Roses.” Sally’s pain was her father. Her father who yelled and hit her at his whim. The pain from one’s family tends to hurt more, doesn’t it? To escape, Sally did the only thing she could, as a woman: she married. Before eighth grade, she did. She did what she needed to in order to escape from her father, though she doesn’t say it, she can’t. Even Esperanza sees it: “[Sally] says she is in love, but I think she did it to escape.” Though her husband doesn’t “let her talk on the telephone [or] look out the window”, (101-102) she lives with it and smiles because anything is better than the physical hurt she felt from her own father. Though now she has emotional pain, she’s successfully escaped from the physical pain. The three women exemplified each take a step to better their lives by escaping their pain, they take back just a small piece of their respective lives. They act because they are hurting, and an instinctive need to flee from the hurt guides them away. The instinctive evasion of pain that Sandra Cisneros so beautifully conveyed through her characters translates so directly to the nature and instincts of real human people, and she showed how very important it is to listen to those instincts.

Work Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Bloomsbury, 2004.