SOURCE: Herrera, Andrea O'Reilly. “‘Chambers of Consciousness’: Sandra Cisneros and the Development of the Self in the BIG House on Mango Street.” Bucknell Review 39, no. 1 (1995): 191-204.

In the following essay, Herrera examines the idea of the house as a metaphor for personal identity in The House on Mango Street, asserting that Cisneros appropriates the traditional novelistic form of the bildungsroman in representing a young Chicana's struggle for female, communal, and literary identity.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper.

—Alfred Kazin

Before we even open her book, the very first image that we encounter in Sandra Cisneros's novel The House on Mango Street (1984) is the house. With it, Cisneros enters a tradition, adding to a wide array of houses that throughout literary history have provided writers with rich, protean metaphors. As the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard reminds us, the house “constitutes a body of images that...