House on Mango Street: Symbolism

¶ … House on Mango Street: Symbolism

Symbol 1: Shoes

Finding the right shoes are an important part of becoming a woman in the House on Mango Street. Shoes can determine an individual's entire identity, whether one is beautiful, rich, or sexually desirable -- particularly if one is a female. For example, because her family is poor, the narrator Esperanza must wear old brown shoes with a new dress at her cousin's baptismal party and feels shame as a result of the contrast between her pretty clothes and ugly shoes. However, when asked to dance, she loses her self-consciousness, implicitly because her sexuality is affirmed. Rather than feeling weighted down by ugly brown shoes that in her imagination grow larger and larger as she sits on a folding chair in the reception hall, Esperanza feels lighter than air as she dances. This also shows the subjective nature of female sexuality, internally and externally. Objects relating to female sexuality like shoes have power because the culture gives them power, not because of inherent properties of the things themselves.

Sexuality and wearing shoes are also linked when Esperanza and her friends Lucy, and Rachel are given their first pair of adult shoes from an adult, female neighbor with very small feet. The heels change the seventh grade girls, literally, from the ground up. The way that they walk initially empowers them, as they swagger about, but then they draw comments from men because of the way the shoes change their carriage and bearing. Author Sandra Cisneros chooses shoes as a symbolic metaphor because they tie into female social roles and also economic power -- like the ability to buy appropriate shoes. Also, although shoes can help people walk far, far away from Mango Street, which is where Esperanza mainly desires to go, they can also inhibit individuals' movement, depending on how they are constructed. Embodying female sexuality on high heels slows the girls down as they must, and unintentionally emphasizes their hips as they walk, as if they have been hobbled. The smallness of the neighbors feet also suggests a certain permanently childishness and limits to the expression of female sexuality, despite the apparent linkage with empowerment.

Ultimately, the attention the girls receive is not positive. Men treat them like prostitutes, threatening to call the cops, or offer them five dollars for a kiss. The commodity of the shoe essentially creates female identity -- although the girls are the same, men only see the shoes. In contrast, when dancing with her cousin, even in ordinary shoes, Esperanza changes from within. When Esperanza dances, she forgets her shoes, while sitting on the chair in school shoes her feet feel ugly. Shoes, as in Cinderella, have the potential to transform a woman, but also to lead to sexuality and marriage.

Symbol 1: Hair woman's crowing glory is her hair" -- given this cultural expression, it is unsurprising that Cisneros devotes the second chapter of her book to hair, describing the residents of the 'House on Mango Street' of the title in terms of their hair, and the quality of their hair. The young narrator Esperanza is still exploring her personal sense of beauty and style, so hair is something she notices, as she compares her hair to the hair of other women. Like shoes, hair is a physical extension of the individual. The narrator rationalizes that the physical attribute of hair is also a natural manifestation and outgrowth of a person's character. Hair unlike shoes can appear natural and wild, and hair is natural, like skin or teeth. But society and culture can also do a great deal to change the nature of hair, to make it come into line. The ways in which hair is wild and tame reflects another theme of the novel, namely the influence of often patriarchal Latino culture on Esperanza's upbringing.

Esperanza's hair is uncontrollable unlike her mothers, which is carefully controlled and curled. Unlike her daughter, Mama is more acclimated to social constructions of femininity. Mama's hair smells like bread, like a made bed, and like the good aspects of a home, which indicates that Mama's place is in the home. In contrast, Papa's hair sticks straight up, as Papa is a man and does not need to have his hair sculpted into rosettes like Mama. Carlos, the boy, also doesn't need to have his hair combed, reflecting the lack of primping that a boy is viewed to need in the culture, while Nenny (Magdalena) the sister is said to have lazy hair that is difficult to keep in line (just like Nenny does not conform to conventional expectations). Hair is both natural and carefully tended, like female sexuality itself. It can be hidden, like under a nun's veil, or it can be hard to pin down.

Symbol 3: Hips

Hips are a universal symbol of female fertility and maturity. This is evident even in iconographic images from primitive cultures, where fertile women are shown as having rounded hips. Yet the girls of the novel the House on Mango Street only-half desire to acquire hips, because they fear it will mean that they will suffer the negative consequences of femininity and maturity, like pregnancy. They view hips with a mix of fascination and horror. In the novel, the girls talk about hips as they jump rope. Their current freedom and lightness is contrasted with the heavy, weighty responsibility of bearing, holding, and balancing a child on one's hips. The acquisition of hips lies in wait for the girls, even though they are now free.

Although the culture of the girls possesses many negative associations of femininity and having hips, the girls scan see some positive things about hips, which they affirm through the motions of their bodies. They shake their hips as they jump rope showing that it is possible to be active and enjoy their female bodies, without feeling burdened by hips. The functions of hips besides childbearing and attractiveness to men are listed: dancing as well as holding a baby, for example.

Symbol 4: Names

Esperanza means hope. Esperanza speculates on how the meaning of her name reflects her hopes for so many things in life, like to move away from Mango Street. But while Esperanza says that while in English her name means hope, in Spanish it means too many things: including sadness. Esperanza's name also conveys fullness, of unmet expectations, and waiting. Esperanza's discomfort with her name is perhaps first made manifest by her reluctance to give it until several vignettes into the book, although she volunteers the other names of her family. Esperanza is haunted by the source of her name. She was named for her great-grandmother, and that they share the Chinese birth year of the horse. She expresses a desire to have known her great-grandmother, who, according to family stories, was a wild woman until she married. Esperanza's fears about female sexuality are encoded into her name.

Naming is a powerful metaphor because it reflects societies' expectations about the 'named' individual, as well as the 'named' person herself. Esperanza decides to give herself a nickname, to name herself as a result of the history of her name. She is jealous that her sister has an affectionate nickname at home, even though she thinks the sound of 'Magdalena' sounds ugly, especially when the teachers who cannot pronounce Spanish say it in school. The nuns' inability to truly say either girl's names really properly reflects their inability to understand them, just like Esperanza feels imposed upon by being given the name of a woman whose fate she does not want to reenact. The family gives Esperanza a family name, reflecting the importance of tradition in the culture, but Esperanza does not embrace all aspects of that tradition, only some of them.