The House on Mango Street

A Parable of Degeneration or a Chicana Rewriting of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies

Bibliographic Data

ID21389936
AuthorsCarme Manuel (0000-0002-2776-7901, Universitat de València, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume69
Issue11
Pages79-98
Publication date2021-12-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRoczniki Humanistyczne (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0035-7707 • E-ISSN: 2544-5200
PublisherTowarzystwo Naukowe KUL (PUBLISHER • PL)
DOI10.18290/rh216911-6
OpenAlexW4200338955
LanguageEN
References cited11

Reading Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) makes it possible for Esperanza Cordero to imagine an idyllic site of empowered identity in The House on Mango Street. Yet, I argue that Esperanza’s transformed identity can only reside outside her original community and that her journey from the sad red house of Mango Street to her reconceived clean house at the end of the text is necessarily a trajectory of desired uprootedness that follows the script presented in The Water-Babies. Like Tom, Kingsley’s protagonist, Esperanza undergoes a metamorphosis to shed off the traits that categorize her as Chicana in order to embrace a remodeled subjectivity and, consequently, become an ontologically deterritorialized Hispanic

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Literature · Order (exchange) · Reading (process) · Rewriting · Sociology · Subjectivity · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Computer Science · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy

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Open DOIOpen Access