Why does Esperanza in The House on Mango Street want her own home? At least 1 or 2 citations from each source. Keep to all MLA guidelines, and only use the original story and the sources provided from me as the only sources for this paper.

More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros`s The House on Mango Street


California State University, Fresno

"Books continue each other/` Virginia Woolf told an audience of young women some sixty years ago, "in spite of our habit of judging them separately" (Room 84). Books such as Ellen Moers`s Literary Women, Elaine Showalter`s A Literature of Their Own, Patricia Meyer Spacks`s The Female Imagination, Tillie Olsen`s Silences, and Alice Walker`s In Search of Our Mothers` Gardens continue Virginia Woolf`s own book, A Room of One`s Own, extending her fertile meditations on the effects of economic deprivation on women`s literature, and her pioneering efforts to reconstruct a female literary tradition. Tillie Olsen has uncovered a rich vein of writing by American working class women, and has offered poignant personal testimony to the obstacles to writing posed by gender and class. Alice Walker has explored the silences created by gender and race in America: "What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers` time? In our great-grandmothers` day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood" (233).

While feminists following Woolf`s advice to "think back through our mothers" have expanded the literary canon in the past two decades, too many have ignored the questions of race, ethnicity, and class in women`s literature. Adrienne Rich laments the "white solipsism" of white feminists—"not the consciously held belief that one race is inherently superior to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant" ("Disloyal" 306). Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison have angrily denounced the canon implicit in early studies of women`s literature such as Moers`s and Spacks`s.1 To Spacks`s tepid defense that she preferred to dwell on authors depicting "familiar experience" and a "familiar cultural setting" (5), Walker counters: "Why only these? Because they are white, and middle class, and because to Spacks, female imagination is only that—a limitation that even white women must find restrictive" (372).