On Remaking The Voiceless Voice In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street And Caramelo

Sandra Cisneros (1954- ) is one of the most influential Hispanic-American female writers who write as a Chicana feminist describing the predicament of physical and psychological aspects of Mexican American women. Well-known for her stylistic innovation of imagistic episodic vignettes, much of her work can be defined as Latina bildungsroman in that it portrays protagonists'attempt to come of age within their communities and families. The House on Mango Street and Caramelo are her two acclaimed representative works of her ethnic/racial novels. Both of these two novels are narrated in the eyes of an adolescent girl who witnesses and experiences in her life the dilemma of identities sliding between the borders, or as"New Americans".This thesis tries to analyze The House on Mango Street and Caramelo in the perspective of Post-colonial Feminist Theory. It blends the post-colonialism and feminism with the link of women as"colonized"and"object"relative to"colonizer"and"subject". Disapproval of First World or white ideology, feminists in the Third World peripheral cultures advocated Womanism for the minority ethnic women, which are embraced by such oppressed or subaltern group as the Black, Chicana, and Asian. Its main purpose aims to give voice to the voiceless and make some contributions to changing the inequality of the world. Four chapters are included in this thesis. Chapter One is a brief introduction of Sandra Cisneros's life and works, and then a simple description of the two novels and some critical studies, and finally the concise illustration of the significance and purpose of the papers.The explanations of theoretical framework fill in Chapter Two. Derived from her early and academic lives, Sandra Cisneros's Chicana feminism/Womanism is a crucial key to the understanding of her novels, which, together with post-colonialism, founds the theoretical basis for the whole thesis.Chapter Three witnesses a detailed analysis of the complex"voiceless"statuses of the"Other"against the Anglo America. Besides, by deeply probing into the archetypal image of women in religion or tradition, the second part of the chapter draws light on the plight of American-Mexican women. This chapter later mainly focuses on how to establish the place of self of women in a postmodern context, embodied in Sandra Cisneros's works.Chapter Four draws conclusion on the key implications of Sandra Cisneros to the development of Chicana Feminism, which enriches the post-colonialist theory.