Symbolism in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street

The House as Symbol of Identity and the American Dream

Perhaps the most important symbol in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street is that of the house itself — and houses in general. Houses carry a profound symbolic value in American culture. Expressions such as "as safe as houses," "a man's home is his castle," and "the American Dream of home ownership" all reflect the deep cultural association between houses and selfhood. Houses are viewed as extensions of the self. Yet in The House on Mango Street, the narrator Esperanza does not live in a house she feels is truly her own, even though her family has recently bought the crumbling, peeling structure on Mango Street.

The family has lived in many rented homes and apartments before, but never a place of their own. This past, chronicled in the novel's first chapter, symbolizes the transient nature of their lives and the instability of the American Dream for this Chicano family. At the beginning of the story, Papa and Mama have acquired a new house on Mango Street after telling their children many stories about the glories of home ownership. After the landlord at their old apartment drove them out, the family decided to realize their dream — an American Dream — but Esperanza says the new house is not like houses on television. It is still not beautiful and perfect, as she was promised in her parents' stories. The class differences on Mango Street are evident in one chapter about a girl named Cathy, whose family has just inherited a second house and is moving away — further down Mango Street — just as families like Esperanza's are moving in. The prejudices motivating this decision to leave are obvious.

The narrator's unstable and unrepaired house on Mango Street thus represents a work in progress — like the adolescent narrator's character, and like the American Dream itself for Latinos. Like the family, the house does not look like what is seen on television: it is not white, and it is not inhabited by a white family. The house has peeling paint, no yard, and not enough bathrooms for all six family members; it is old and it smells. For Esperanza, this makes it not quite a "real" house, just as her family does not quite feel like "real" Americans. Her parents promise that one day they will move somewhere better, but Esperanza is not so sure. Still, she hopes to own her own home one day. When she encounters women who have their own homes — such as the mentally ill Ruthie, who has come back to live with her mother, or the fortune-telling woman later in the novel — she observes them with awe and fascination, aware that they inhabit their own special spaces.

Houses symbolize economic security and social acceptance, and the sense of having a "place" in the world. Esperanza is not alone in feeling this way. Her cousin Marin also dreams of being carried off to a big house, far from Mango Street. But instead of working to change her own life, Marin is always waiting, and her dreams are never fulfilled.

The Waiting Woman: Female Characters and Unfulfilled Dreams

The theme of the "waiting woman" is a symbolic motif that runs throughout the book. Esperanza is named for a great-grandmother who was always waiting for her great-grandfather, and Marin is always waiting for a man to change her life. The frustrations of waiting to be transported by someone else, rather than transporting oneself, are embodied in this recurring figure of the waiting woman.

Waiting and abandoned women — whether because husbands have gone off to war or simply left — are common figures in literature, but Esperanza refuses to become one of them. She has contempt for Marin and fears embodying her grandmother's fate, or the fate of Rafaela, who is locked inside her home by her husband every Tuesday night while he gambles. Initially, Esperanza admires Marin's apparent worldliness — her knowledge of men, her short skirts, her smoking — but she gradually comes to see that these things offer no real escape from Mango Street. Later, she mourns the fate of Minerva, a woman who writes poems but is beaten and abandoned by a cruel husband, and who is weighed down by the burdens of a conventional feminine existence.

These female characters collectively illustrate the novel's concern with the ways in which women's ambitions are constrained by gender roles, domestic expectation, and economic dependence. Esperanza watches each of them closely, learning from their fates what she hopes to avoid in her own life. The novel uses these figures not merely as background characters but as cautionary mirrors for Esperanza's developing sense of self.