Chicanas’ Pursuit Of Identity In The House On Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street is written in the manner of a young girl’s memoirs. It is a loosely-knit series of lyrical reflections of Chicanas’struggle with self-identity in an alienating and hostile American mainstream world.This thesis investigates Chicanas’pursuit of identity in Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street by placing the protagonist Esperanza as focus of its analysis. It is divided into three chapters. Chapter1firstly analyzes Chicanas’ethnic dilemma as people being neither Americans nor Mexicans,"hybrid" as Homi Bhabha defines, by presenting Mamacita and Esperanza’s examples. It further explores how Esperanza begins her quest for ethnic identity and living space for her own and her community. Chapter2reveals Chicanas’pursuit of gender identity under patriarchal context. Never transcending the Guadalupe/Malinche dichotomy in patriarchal Mexican culture, some Chicanas are only to be reduced to tragic Guadalupes and Malinches. Esperanza, by drawing lessons from their failure, steps on her journey to construct autonomous gender identity for her own and all Chicanas of her community. Chapter3discusses the construction of identity for Chicanas on the basis of Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial concepts of hybridity and the Third Space. By making full use of hybridity and the Third Space, Esperanza discovers that Chicanas can build a bridge between Mexican and American cultures and thus achieve the construction of identity.To sum up, by comparing Esperanza’s successful experience in pursuit of self-defined and autonomous ethnic and gender identity with other Chicanas’failed struggle for identity on Mango Street, this thesis points out that hybridity and the Third Space could be two possible approaches for Chicanas to construct identity in the mainstream and patriarchal context.