Term Paper on "House on Mango Street"

Term Paper 5 pages (2291 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

House on Mango Street is a brief and apparently very simple story, told in the innocent voice of a school-girl who describes the house in which she and her family have recently moved. However, beneath its simple surface the story hides very important meanings about identity and society, and the way in which the self relates to the outer world. The text has no plot and it is, at first sight, merely a little girl's naive report on the basic facts of her life as she understands it, of her family and her house especially, but, precisely because of its form and the point-of-view used, that it manages to get the message through even better.

First of all, the school girl describes the new house on Mango Street which will be the new residence for herself and her rather numerous family, made up of six people. As she informs us, the new house is the first house the family has really owned, after having moved around for a long time from one rented place to another. She talks about the old, dilapidated buildings in which her family lived before and about the new house, which, although their own, is again a disappointment. This is how far the story goes in relating the facts of the girl's life. The main character is of course the little story teller, and the tone and style are appropriate for the age of the narrator: the text is made up of short sentences that a child would use. The setting and the theme can be taken together, since the new house and the older houses are the main issues around which the story revolves. It is precisely through these elements that the writer actually conveys her meaning, especially since the message could not have been directly decoded in the text by the child narrator: the story of the old rented houses and the new, finally owned but still unsatisfactory house becomes relevant when we look at it through the eyes of a child who begins to be aware of the world around her. We discover thus the girl's own world and reality at the same time that she does: the ramshackle houses speak of the poverty of her family, and consequently of their place in society. The central theme of the story is therefore identity or self- awareness in the social world, and more specifically, the interplay between the personal and the public space, or the space occupied by the others which is indicated in the story through the opposition between the rented and the possessed houses.

The story starts out in a simple way, by stating that the family hasn't always resided on Mango Street and the girl enumerates the places she remembers having lived in:

We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before that it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember."

The first sentence, although simple, surprises through its abruptness and thus already introduces the ideas of displacement and instability in the story. While trying to tell us about herself and her life, the girl begins by saying that her family has not been living "always" in the house on Mango Street, and this statement already translates as a rupture behind which the reader senses the previous displacement. From the start therefore, the importance of location and address are emphasized as the girl enumerates the names of the other streets she remembers having lived on. Her memory can not go further than the fourth address, as she must have been too young to recall. This is highly significant for the way in which it affects the main character: at the point, what the girl remembers about her life is "moving a lot," going from one place into the other, and having to almost run off from some of the former places like that on Loomis Street, because of the very bad condition in which their houses were. No doubt, the life of the child narrator has almost resembled that of a caravan which is always on the road, and this is all the more emphasized when the girl observes that each time they moved, the number of the family seemed to increase:

Each time it seemed there'd be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six: Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me."

The girl thus experiences a strong feeling of displacement, although of course, she is not fully aware of it yet. The displacement caused by the moving around is doubled by the girl's intuitive realization that her family is very poor and that it doesn't possess a clear social identity. The identity theme of the story is directly related to the possession of the dream house that the family aspires to. The geographical space occupied is here an equivalent of the place the family occupies in society. The main character the author focuses on though is the girl narrator, whose development is the main issue in the story. Thus, the girl is first tied to her own family, her identity is determined and defined by the social position that her relives hold.

The fact that the girl begins her narrative in the plural, that is by using the first person plural pronoun "we" to designate herself and her family together, indicates that she is not as yet fully aware of her own self, but just of her being a part of the family which moves from one place to another. The sense of displacement is shared by entire family though, and symbolized by their dream of the perfect house that they would not longer rent, but actually possess. The renting vs. The possession of the house becomes the means by which the self is inscribed in the social world:

The house on the Mango Street is ours and we don't have to pay rent to anybody or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it isn't the house we thought we'd get."

Possessing a house is almost the equivalent of having one's own established and recognized identity within society. The house, delimits the personal space that a family or a person occupies, and stands in opposition to the space of the others. The dream house the family imagines is almost a fantasy, as it is supposed to resemble, suggestively, the houses they see on television. Thus, the author emphasizes besides the desire for the material comfort of the family (they want a house that would have running water and functioning pipes, etc.) the aesthetic aspect of the house desired, which indicates that their fantasy aims again at another social position. The stairs that they all dream about, which would have to imitate those of the houses they see on T.V., suggest that the members of the family desire in fact another place in society, they want to be a part of the rich or well-to-do world they see on the screens. The house fantasy is thus rather a social fantasy:

And our house would have running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs not hallway stairs inside like the houses on T.V."

The idealized image of the house they all long for indicates that they do not want the material comfort but rather an identity and a place in the world. The things they desire the house to be furnished with, such as the big stairs and the big yard and "grass growing without a fence," are all symbols of their wish to possess a great, almost unlimited space all for themselves:

Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed."

The fact that the house is part of the stories that their mother invents while putting the children to sleep, or that their father dreams when holding a lottery ticket point to the major significance of this ideal house for them: the 'real' house that they all fantasize is rather a dream-world which could accommodate them and making them feel they belong to it. It is important to keep in mind that all these are recounted through the perspective of the little girl who actually experiences these feelings and shares in the dream of the house all the more since she is too young to do anything else than wait for her expectations to be fulfilled.

Thus, she suddenly seems to become self-aware changes from the "we" in the first paragraph to a "they" when speaking about her parents… READ MORE

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