Ethnic Studies Review
Orginal Publication Date
2012
Journal Title
Ethnic Studies Review
Volume
35
Issue
esr/vol35/iss1
First Page
53
Last Page
69
Abstract
This article argues that understanding what the house in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street symbolizes is foundational to contextualizing the radical possibilities that Cisneros enacts in her work. Unlike most critics who read "the house" as referencing the title of the text, I argue that the novel is full of houses, notably the house located on Mango Street that narrator Esperanza Cordero longs to escape from, and the house away from Mango Street that she longs to one day have. By reading these two houses through Homi Bhabha's notion of the "unhomely" and Gaston Bachelard's notion of "felicitous space", we can better understand a critique of the house in light of its resonance with the American Dream on the one hand, and a reconfiguration of that symbolism through a feminist intervention on the other. Keywords: Cisneros, Houses, American Dream, Women, Bachelard, Bhabha
Rights
Copyright ©ESR, The National Association for Ethnic Studies, 2012