7 The House on Mango Street Review

Vignette: The House on Mango Street
 One of the major themes, home, is introduced in vignette one, what does the narrator feel about home?

• Home is awesome.
• Home is the place that she escapes from the outside world.
• Home is her dream.
• Home is a place that makes her feel safe, secure, comfortable and sometimes disappointed. 

At what point did the narrator know that she needed to have her a real house?

• One day, while she is playing in front of the apartment on Loomis, a nun from her school passes and asks where she lives. She points to the third floor of the worn, paint-peeled building, and the nun says: "You live there?" (pg.5)
• When the narrator and her family lived on Loomis, “the water pipes broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix them because the house was too old” (pg. 4). 
• Because they moved around so much, the narrator’s parents always told them “that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each year” (pg. 4).

Was the house on Mango Street a place she wanted to call home?

• No. The house on Mango Street reminded her of the homes on Loomis, Keeler, and Paulina.
• Yes. The house on Mango Street 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” (pg. 4). 
•  No. The house on Mango Street was a disappointment because it is not big and fancy at all, and all six family members have to share a bedroom.
•  Yes. The house on Mango Street was theirs. They did not have to “pay rent to anybody, or share a yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise…” (pg.3).

Vignette: Boys and Girls
What does the narrator say about the relationship between boys and girls? What evidence does she provide to support this idea?

• When the narrator says that “the boys and the girls live in separate worlds”(pg.8), she is implying that the girls live on one planet and the boys live on a better planet.
• On page 8, the narrator says, “the boys and the girls live in separate worlds.” She does literally mean two different worlds; she is implying that they live by two sets of rules—rules that give men and boys more freedom and independence than women and girls.
• On page 8, the narrator says that “the boys in their universe and we in ours” which means they do not like to play with her and Nenny because they are different. 

What does the narrator mean when she says, “Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor?

• She is saying that she, unlike her brothers, has a lot of responsibilities. She is not as free and independent to do things like Carlos Kiki. 
• She believes that she is made of rubber and can be filled with helium and float into the sky.
• Here, she is implying that her parents hate her and they won’t let do anything like Carlos and Kiki. 

Vignette: My Name  
What theme is introduced in this vignette, My Name?

• Women are always sad and cannot do things on their own. 
• Esperanza wants to be an individual so she changes her name to Zeze the X. 
• Women are viewed as second-class citizens, meaning they are not equal to men.
• Women are like wild horses.

What does Esperanza's name mean?

• “She is a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse—which is supposed to be bad luck if your born female.”
• Her name is the Spanish word for hope, and tells us it reminds her of a lot of sad things, including the Mexican records her dad plays that sound like sobbing.
• Her name means she is like her great-grandmother.

After whom was she named?

• Esperanza is named after her great-grandmother, a "wild horse of a woman" who refused to get married until the narrator's grandfather carried her off by force. (pg.8).
• She is named after her mother whose hair is like “little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day” (pg.6). 

How did her great-grandmother feel when she was taken by her husband?

• She was happy because like most women, she believed that she needed a man to give her what she needed in life. 
• Angry and depressed because she was a wild horse of a woman and when she married, she could not be free to do what she wanted any more.
• Sad, and unforgiving because she sat and “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.”

What does Esperanza mean by the quote, “she looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.” 

• She means that women are forced to sit and ‘watch’ life go by without living their own dreams. They have to do what is expected of them. 
• She means that her great-grandmother loved to look outside and see her children playing. If one of then got hurt, then she felt really sad. 
• She means that she really wanted to be free, but her family kept her inside all day to look out the window.