Domestic Negotiations by Marci R. McMahon

Author:Marci R. McMahon [McMahon, Marci R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Hispanic American Studies, Women's Studies, Literary Criticism, Hispanic & Latino
ISBN: 9780813560960
Google: bQyRAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2013-07-01T04:24:42+00:00

Domestic Confinement: Celebratory Multicultural Readings of Esperanza’s “House of One’s Own”

Celebratory multicultural readings of The House on Mango Street have worked to decontextualize the “contextual lenses [of] ethnicity, race, gender, and class” (Cruz 2001, 922) that frame Esperanza’s claims to national space, overlooking the text’s various critiques of racial and gender marginalization. Cisneros’s text appeals to many audiences due to its relatively “simple” narrative structure and voice, which has led to the text’s accessibility and usage across multiple educational levels. Yet mainstream readings of Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street co-opt the simplicity and accessibility of the text’s youthful narrator by understanding Esperanza’s voice as speaking to readers in a “dispassionate tone” (Poey 1996, 72). That is, instead of having an explicitly critical and disgruntled narrator that criticizes the racial and economic marginalization confronted by Latina/os in the United States, the narrator of The House on Mango Street has a childlike simplicity that appears non-threatening to mainstream audiences (Poey 1996, 211).

Mainstream reception of Cisneros’s text has also tended to celebrate young Esperanza’s desire for home and the American Dream as a right that is equally available to all citizens (Cruz 2001, 921). Scholar Felicia J. Cruz, for instance, found that while teaching The House on Mango Street to her mostly white, middle-class undergraduates, her students “inscribed Esperanza’s dream in a foundational democratic rhetoric and declaration (that the pursuit of freedom, liberty, and happiness is the right of all American citizens)” (2001, 921). The consequence of this reading is that it became very difficult for students to “apprehend, much less feel, the extent to which Esperanza—and, by extension, her community—exists at a far remove from white, middleclass standards and styles of living” (Cruz 2001, 921). Emphasizing a “house of one’s own” as a “natural” right, while it importantly affirms the tenets of democracy, overlooks the many structural inequalities that have made it difficult for various communities to obtain equal access to US citizenship and rights, a situation made evident by young Esperanza’s search for a “house of one’s own.”

Celebratory multicultural readings also emphasize the universality of the narrative, placing the text within the well-established Western literary convention of the bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age novel (Poey 1996, 2002).26 The House on Mango Street shares many traits of the bildungsroman: the depiction of a young person’s development in relationship to and in opposition to others; a protagonist who moves through various stages of maturity; a protagonist who desires physical removal from family and community; and a protagonist who confronts many obstacles, leading to a deeper understanding of the individual self within the social order. Yet the text departs significantly from the genre’s characteristic focus on individualism and male characters because the narrative concentrates on Chicana subjectivity, matriarchal structures, and collective community (Poey 1996, 2002). Cisneros’s narrative inscribes Esperanza’s race, gender, and class as central to understanding the specific social order that she confronts in the novel. Additionally, while the story is narrated predominantly by Esperanza, the text is comprised of forty-six vignettes that

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