Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street"

English patters like spoons on tin. Dop, dop, dop. It is an ugly language with a few beautiful words, but it's also my favorite. That's how I approach The House on Mango Street--an interesting book, if you can call it that. There is a lot of dop, dop, dop in the story line, rain drops hitting the earth and forming into a puddle, but with this format also comes danger. Some of the tales are not as good as others. We get this large portrait of a community. We are shown bits and pieces of different people's lives. We have a man who beats his kid, a young girl discovering her sexuality, a dying aunt lying in bed, and a man who flees from the cops in a stolen car. "O brave new world! That has such people in it!" Thankfully, like the Beatles’ album, Abbey Road, they are short little images. You don't have time to hate anything or poke holes in her dialogue (which is downright confusing sometimes) because you move on to the next story quickly. It reminded me of a television sitcom with each vignette being an episode, a day in the life of Esperanza, her family, her friends, and her neighbors, and it is also set up in much the same way as Grimm's Fairy Tales or Ovid's Metamorphosis--many lessons with ambiguity written in.

Cisneros does a good job of showing each person's interesting characteristic, a tragic flaw which might prevent him/her from moving on--the only beacon of hope being Esperanza, the author's avatar, who may have the greatest ability of all, one which may allow her to escape from the hell of the ghetto. There are some very interesting things going on inside this text. Cisneros, who was burgeoning on the mythological throughout "Mango", keeps tragically realistic, the fairy tale aspects only flowing under the surface like a current. But in the end, the author overtly puts in the Fates, the Moerae of Greek lore. One sister makes the yarn. One sister measures it. The other cuts it. Like Wikipedia says, "They controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal from birth to death." In a way, we can see Esperanza's journey from Mango Street (either a paradise or a hell, depending how you look at it) as a retelling of the Hero's journey. But I like to delve in deeper, grab a hold and shake until the apples fall from the trees.

Esperanza, or Cisneros, is yet another representation of Prospero, stuck on an island with the only escape being through the stories he/she tells. Julie Taymor reinterpreted Shakespeare's The Tempest with a female Prospero, and so did Cisneros--the island in this case being Mango Street. It is the place Esperanza still looks to as an adult. It is where she grew up and became who she is today. But it is also terrible. The biblical story of the fall is repeated in the short, The Monkey Garden, with Sally, a Cleopatra-esque character, with her Egyptian eyes. She is an incarnation of the Mother Goddess, Isis, the original, the wholeness of existence, Venus, Cybele, Mary, and Eve. The Monkey, on the other hand, is Saturn who is defeated by Apollo, the son god, leaving a world of vegetables. The garden is a representation of this residual paradise—Eden, in the biblical context. It is peaceful, a place full of stories and myth but also of initiation and loss of innocence. Sally learns to play the game of love in this garden, to act her gender role around the boys, and to use her sex as a tool of gaining what she wants. It is a retelling of the ancient myths of the vegetable consciousness morphing into animal (Lucifer). The old games lose their appeal, and the only one who seems to care is Esperanza. When she sees Sally falling from grace, she runs to a hidden corner of the garden and cries. Cisneros writes, "I don't know why but I had to run away. I had to hide myself at the other end of the garden, in the jungle part, under a tree that wouldn't mind if I lay down and cried a long time. I closed my eyes like tight stars so that I wouldn't, but I did. My face felt hot. Everything inside hiccupped" (98). Finally, she stands, after trying to force herself to die, "and the garden that had been such a good place to play didn't seem mine either" (98). Yep, you got it right boys and girls, Esperanza can never go back. Paradise is lost to her forever. In this way, the Monkey Garden itself is a representation of the whole book.

The fates, who appear later, tell Esperanza not to forget where she came from, that when she leaves, she "must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are" (105). It reminds me of Mufasa telling Simba to remember. The Lion King is a retelling of Hamlet, but in Esperanza's case, she is not coming back to kill her uncle. She is coming back to save the others who can't tell stories as well as her (Minerva) or who never tried (Esperanza's aunt), who can't use their talents to elevate themselves, who are trapped in their own cycles of defeat and misery. Esperanza is the hero restoring her community to balance. She is the knight riding out to save the Fisher King. I find in life, it is not only desire which causes people to suffer (we can see this represented in "Mango" when the family drives to the hills to see the nice houses), but also people denying themselves of who they really are. We find Sally moving into a boring ol' house, not reaching for the stars. We see people full of regrets because they didn't do what they had to do in life to be happy. They denied themselves.

Cisneros was, perhaps, experimenting with retelling these lessons in a modern setting, but the story format and lead character also make "Mango" easy to connect to, especially for Cisneros' target audience. The author was clearly aiming for the dispossessed people who she worked with as a teacher. These are their stories, and by writing at a level which many of them would be capable of reading (English as their second language), she was setting up a novel which she hoped they could get into: the short bits could be read out of order and in one sitting, there is no fear of the massiveness of a typical book. And by writing from a child's perspective, it makes it simpler for people with limited reading skills to understand. Because we are not given much background or many of the darker elements of what probably is going on, we, as readers, fill in the lacuna. Each person makes the text alive in their own way because it is the gaps which allow us to make the story personal. By using a minimalist style, the author was working towards connecting to an even greater audience than the people she worked with.

Her themes are also universal, going beyond cultural borders. The Esperanza Cisneros portrays is at war with herself. To move on, she has to abandon the ones she loves, her own people and culture. If she stays behind, she will never be able to rise out of this shanty. There is a tension between remaining with the ones you love and moving on--and it's a tension we all have to grapple with, even a pale white guy from suburban Billings, Montana. To succeed in the American Dream, do you have to give up part of yourself? Do you have to sacrifice the ones you care for? I think so. Even this semester I have figuratively lost my friends I grew up after they graduated. The American Dream is a nomadic one. You have to displace your initial tribe and go through superficial ones (granfalloons if you will) before arriving at success. I am reminded of Alan Watts speech about life as music:

"In music, one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord because that's the end. But we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We got a system of schools which give us a pretty different impression. It's all graded, and what we do is we put the child into the order of this grade system with a sort of come on kitty kitty kitty. And now you go to kindergarten, and that's a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade. And then come on, first grade leads to second grade and so on, and then you get out of grade school, you got high school, and its revving up, the thing is coming. And then you got to go to college, and by Jove, then you get into graduate school, and when you are through with graduate school, you go out and join the world. And then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance. And they've got that quota to make, and you got to make that. And the whole the time, the thing is coming, it's coming, it's coming, that great thing, that success you're working for. Then you wake up one day when you are about 40 years old, you say, my God, I'm arrived. I'm there. And you don't feel very different from what you always felt. And there is a slight let down because you feel there was a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end. Success, whatever that is, or Heaven, after your dead. But we missed the point the whole way along, it was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played."

The American dream is one of progression. A man or woman starts out low and then rises upward, towards a goal, be it success, riches, or power. Alan Watts would say this is an unhealthy dream, and will only lead to dissatisfaction in the end. In today's world (yes, I am about to make a huge generalization), there is so much pressure put on kids to be something. To get an amazing job, to be the head of the company, to be a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, to be famous like Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington. It is this system which causes kids like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to shoot up a school, for young Muslim men to ram planes into buildings, and for Timothy Treadwell to get eaten by bears in Alaska. It also leads to people rejecting society, who can't stand the pressure. I think of Chris McCandless as portrayed in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer or the hikikomori sufferers in Japan. Some people would rather commit suicide then live in this high demand culture. People forget to enjoy life and "dance to the music of the spheres" because they are distracted by the bait-and-switch. That's why I think atheism is growing so quickly--it reflects people's world view. In the end, they realize all this work was in Ecclesiastical vanity. The Buddha would say to be happy, you must free yourself of this desire to be something more than you are. This is impossible. You realize the desire to be free of desires is itself a desire (ha!). Your will breaks down. You start to see the universe as it really is.

Cisneros' definition of culture would be the place where you came from. It would be that street in Chicago where you grew up, where you were initiated into the ways of the world. It would be the place you lost your innocence, and the people you lost your innocence with. In the end, culture is people. They propagate it, they continue it. When Esperanza stares back at her past, she remembers this family she left behind. She had to if she wanted to go on her "journey". She dreams she could take them along with her. But it's impossible. Her friends, her family, her neighbors, they continue living in the ghetto, while she moves on without them. The American Dream is one of regret, loss, and suffering. It is repeated again and again in our cinemas: Spiderman, Superman, the Lord of the Rings, Thor. They all begin with a hero who is demoralized in some way. They all try to fight and beat their way to some great victory over a villain. They all lose friends along the way. But in the end, when it's all over and they can rest, the movie finishes. We never see the Tennyson's Ulysses, Shakespeare's King Lear, or even Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Just "The End", and the credits role.