“Writing Will Keep You Free”: Allusions to and Recreations of the Fairy Tale Heroine in The House on Mango Street

Abstract

This article explores how Sandra Cisneros alludes to and recasts popular fairy tales in The House on Mango Street to reveal their troubled legacy in the lives of many women in the novel. Drawing upon Latina feminist theory and Cisneros's autobiographical writing, this article posits that the main character Esperanza's alternative ''happily ever after'' comes through locating the vocation of writing as the fulcrum for self-definition and social change. It is suggested that feminist literary criticism can be enhanced through analysis of heroines from diverse cultural backgrounds and theoretical frameworks attuned to racial and ethnic diversity.

Making Interpretation Visible With an Affect-Based Strategy

“…The texts were also compared in terms of their capacity to support literary interpretation, including the extent to which they supported multiple interpretations. In the intervention group, Richard Wright's Black Boy , Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street , and Junot Díaz's short stories have been the subject of much scholarly literary interpretation, and presented many opportunities for students to consider literary choices and themes (Bloom, ; Gaskill, ; Hakutani, ; Wissman, ). In the comparison group, the poems by Langston Hughes and Robert Herrick are widely anthologized (e.g., Ferguson, Salter, & Stallworthy, ; Lehman, ) and have also been the subject of academic study and literary interpretation (Davis, ; Ingram, ; Schultz, ), as has Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (de Valdés, ; Dobrian, ).…”