Women on the Edge

Ethnicity and Gender in Short Stories by American Women

Corinne H. Dale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317944423
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays explores the intertwining social conditions of ethnicity and gender as they are represented in short stories by contemporary American women. The introduction to the collection explains the theoretical understanding of gender and ethnicity as social constructions that provide a context for individual experience. The collection brings together analyses of short stories that focus on major ethnic cultures in the United States: Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Japanese American, Asian American, African American, Jewish American, white Protestant American, and Native American. Each essay testifies to the struggles of women within patriarchal cultures in America, and each explores how different ethnic identities set the terms of these gender struggles. The essays also reveal the complications of other important social issues, such as class, sexual preference, and religion. Individually, each essay contributes a significant new analysis of a short story or collection by an important contemporary American writer. Together, the essays indicate the complexity and significance of this cultural approach to women's fiction, demonstrate the critical theories that are currently developing in the fields of gender and ethnic studies, and suggest that neither ethnicity nor gender can legitimately be considered alone.

Chapter 1
(Dis)Continuous Narrative

The Articulation of a Chicana Feminist Voice in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

Deborah L. Madsen

We searched through
our own voices
and through
our own minds
We sought with our words . ..

Tomás Rivera, "The Searchers"

Critical commentary on Sandra Cisneros's work has focused, importantly, upon political, ideological, and cultural significances, relating these contexts to her creation of complex individual subjects. This is important and necessary work because the search for personal and cultural identity is central to Mexican-American writing, a body of work that expresses a hybrid cultural identity—neither American nor Spanish/Mexican—which was brought into being by pure historical contingency. This contingency, together with the socioeconomic deprivation of the Chicano community, accounts for the importance of historical context for the reception of Chicano literature. Dramatic events brought about the simultaneous creation of and dispossession of Mexican Americans—the secession of vast areas of the Southwest to the United States, the transformation of the native inhabitants from Mexicans to Americans, and the protection of their rights inscribed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The violation of these treaty rights, especially, contributes to the profound distrust of Anglo-American discourse and language expressed by Mexican-American writers. In a lecture delivered as part of a 1976 Bicentennial symposium organized by Texas Tech, Edmundo García-Girón took this rather ironic opportunity to describe the highly problematical relationship that exists historically between Anglo and Chicano cultures and to relate this divisiveness to the writer's use of language: "... the speech of the Chicano is . . . a new tongue, and as such is one of many forms of his protest. . . . The Chicano's speech, like his character and psyche, is hybrid—neither a complete fusion or [sic] replication of English and Spanish, but rather something new, an amalgamation of English and Spanish, but with a bonding agent which is neither: in short, an alloy, like bronze, the idiom of la raza de bronce" (100).

Anglo-American English articulates a voice of betrayal, duplicity: it is the master's voice. In a poem by Cherríe Moraga, the voice of Anglo literacy which she must resist threatens to transform hers into a monster's voice: "To gain the word / to describe the loss / I risk losing everything. / I may create a monster . . . unintelligible illiterate" (166). The difficulty of negotiating the gaps and fissures of a hybrid culture and the mestizo self produced by that culture is focused most dramatically in the issue of language—the most authentic language to use in artistic production—and also the question of literary form, which is my interest in this essay.

Chicano literature is a literature of protest; like most Mexican-American cultural production, literature articulates Chicano opposition to the mainstream culture and embodies particular kinds of struggle against it. The narrative dialectics of this opposition have been analyzed extensively by Ramón Saldívar in Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990). Dialectics is a very useful term to describe the condition of hybridity, which is not a simple opposition but a condition of profound interdependence. Chicanos write of not belonging in the place where they belong, of having a home that does not feel like home: the eponymous "House on Mango Street" is described by Cisneros's narrator as "the house I belong but do not belong to" (110). Contemporary Chicano writers, especially, describe the sense of violation that comes from a close proximity to Anglo culture and the pervasive, corrupting influence of Anglo-America upon Chicano communities. The title of Ana Castillo's recent novel, So Far from God (1993), alludes to the famous lament by Porfirio Diaz, dictator of Mexico during the Mexican civil war:

"So far from God—So near the United States."

The most common theme in Chicano literature is the experience of living in an occupied land (Occupied America is the title of Rudolfo Acuña's 1972 revisionist history of the Chicano). But for Mexican American women, the experience of living under conditions of occupation is most frequently represented as the condition of women's life under patriarchy. Herein lies the greatest difference between Chicana and Chicano writings. As Alvina Quintana has argued at length, much Chicana feminist writing of the 1970s and 1980s was deliberately opposed to the earlier discourse of the Chicano civil rights movement, which addressed racial and class differences while erasing gender differences (2916A). Chicana writers consciously re-place the female subject at the center of a deconstructed Chicano discourse, just as they insist upon the importance of ethnicity in its relation to dominant Anglo-feminist discourses. White feminists and Chicano men mark out the gap that Chicana writers negotiate through their writing.

Given an agenda such as this, Chicana writers confront the complex problem of creating a narrative or literary voice that will articulate an authentic experience of ethnicity, gender, and class, and simultaneously will speak against those cultural determinants of subjective expression: not just mainstream (popular) Anglo-American culture but white feminist and patriarchal Chicano cultures as well. It is therefore not surprising to find in Chicana writing a rich variety of formal and linguistic experimentation. This has been remarked upon by Renato Rosaldo who points particularly to the use of short-story sequences by Alberto Ríos, Denise Chávez, and Sandra Cisneros to argue that the formal marginality of the short-story cycle allows for a significant degree of free experimentation, "political innovation and cultural creativity" (Rosaldo 88). Sandra Cisneros has described her short-story cycle, The House on Mango Street, thus: "I wanted to write a collection which could be read at any random point without having any knowledge of what came before or after. Or that could be read in a series to tell one big story. I wanted stories like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with reverberation" (Cisneros, "Do You Know Me?" 78).

The book should then have unity without sacrificing the integrity of its parts. Cisneros wants the dramatic effect created by the short story but also the ability to unfold a complex story with all its sociocultural significances intact. This enormously ambitious narrative goal is achieved through the daring formal experimentation represented by this text.

The uncertain generic form of Cisneros's The House on Mango Street embodies above all the author's quest for a voice: a tentative and uncertain quest that is reenacted by the adolescent narrator, Esperanza. Only at the end of the sequence does the narrative resolve itself into the historical present, as the schoolgirl narrator is replaced with the mature voice of Esperanza the author, who promises to tell us "a story about a girl who didn't want to belong" (109)—which is, of course, the story we have just finished reading. This narrative voice, that acts as both goal and determinant of the text, is difficult to achieve because it must be adequate to articulate a kind of subjective experience that is so very different from the middle-class white experience commonly represented by continuous linear narrative that conventional means of narrative representation are rejected as inadequate.

Discontinuous narrative, the form that articulates Esperanza's experience, has the power to represent the experience of the self as marginal. This power is doubly significant for the Chicana writer, a writer made marginal both by her gender and her race. Cisneros is able to represent the experience of marginality by creating a narrative form that departs radically from patriarchal forms of representation. Essentially, this means a reliance upon imagistic and symbolic kinds of connectivity at the expense of a reasoned and discursive logical structure. Cisneros's hybrid narrative form, which hovers somewhere between poetry and prose, the novel and autonomous stories, embodies the experience of being Mexican American in an Anglo-dominated society and of being female in a patriarchal ethnic culture.

In what follows I want to explore Sandra Cisneros's use of discontinuous narrative in The House on Mango Street, paying particular attention to the ways in which narrative form is used to recreate the thrice-marginalized Chicana subject (who is oppressed by reason of gender, ethnicity, and class). First, I want to consider the issue of gendered discourse, to ask how language can be subverted and made to speak for rather than against those whom language so often betrays; then I turn to the concept of narrative itself, to consider in what ways narratives serve the patriarchy by defining female subjectivity and how Cisneros is able to subvert this oppressive function by creating discontinuous narratives that liberate instead.

I think an important reason why Chicana writing in general, but the work of Sandra Cisneros in particular, is so compelling is the interest of writers in representing not simply the material facts of deprivation and suffering but, more importantly, the cultural forms that determine the shape of reality for Mexican-American women. In books like The House on Mango Street and the collection Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros does not shrink from the stark reality of Chicana life, but the brutal aspects of this reality are represented within the context of a feminist awareness of how the perpetuation of this stark reality can be transformed through imagination and politically motivated insight in other words, by ideological analysis. Cisneros exposes, with great subtlety, the ways in which a racist, patriarchal culture lies to its children, particularly little girls. Esperanza repeatedly discovers that she has been deceived by (and about) the adult world; ironically, we can sometimes see where she cannot that those who mislead her are themselves misled by a society that promises much but delivers nothing.

The motif of the family house, repeated and elaborated throughout the sequence of stories, provides a shared point of reference for the characters' cultural aspirations and their own self-images, Esperanza believes the bedtime stories her mother tells about the house they will some day own: "Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence" (4). But the only house they know that looks like this is the house where her father works as a gardener, the house the whole family visits on Sundays, his day off. But Esperanza stops believing in the promise, though her parents cling to the possibility that hard work will be rewarded, as America always assures its citizens: "I don't tell them I am ashamed—all of us staring out the window like the hungry. I am tired of looking at what we can't have. When we win the lottery . . . Mama begins, and then I stop listening" (86). At this stage in the story sequence, Esperanza has developed a painful awareness of the discrepancy between culturally determined expectations or assumptions and the reality of life for Mexican Americans. This painful gap between hope and fact begins to close only at the end of the narrative, when the witch woman's prediction that she shall have her own house, mysteriously described as "a home in the heart.... A new house, a house made of heart" (64), is realized as her new sense of belonging to her people, as part of the community, which is experienced as returning home, at last. It is the creative imagination of Esperanza the writer (which has allowed her to see clearly her true situation) that empowers her to bridge the gap between cultural expectation and social reality.

Awareness of the socioeconomic difference between poor Chicanos and affluent Anglos is painful for the young narrator, but far more brutal is her awakening to the difference between the discourse of romantic love and the reality of sexual oppression within Chicano culture. The adolescence of Cisneros's narrator is indicated early in the story sequence by her interest in the difference between boys and girls: "The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. . . . My brothers for example. They've got plenty to say to us inside the house. But outside they can't be seen talking to girls" (8). The house, the family, the domestic world, is increasingly identified as the primary site of women's oppression. Rosa Vargas is trapped by her many children and "the man who left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining why" (29); Minerva is trapped by her children and the husband who comes and goes and beats her when he is around; to her daughter's amazement even Esperanza's mother is trapped in her domesticity: "She can speak two languages. She can sing an opera. She knows how to fix a T.V. But she doesn't know which subway train to take to get downtown" (90).

From the beginning, Esperanza has a suspicion of the misogyny that surrounds her; comparing herself with her great-grandmother with whom she shares her name and the coincidence of being born in the Chinese year of the horse "which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female—but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong" (10). This fiery ancestor, "a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry" (11) is forcibly taken by Esperanza's great-grandfather and lives out her days staring from her window. The narrator remarks, "I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window" (11). However, this is precisely the place in which many of the women of Mango Street find themselves. Marin, the teenager brought from Puerto Rico to care for her young cousins is symbolically trapped in the doorway: "She can't come out - gotta baby-sit with Louie's sisters" (23); Mamacita across the street will not leave her apartment but "sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show" (77); Rafaela is locked indoors "because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at" (79) and she too is left leaning from the window; Sally's father imprisons her in the house because she is too beautiful to be trusted, her father "remembers his sisters and is sad. Then she can't go out" (81); when Sally does marry, she exchanges one form of oppression for another, an abusive father for a husband of whom she is so afraid that she obeys when he forbids her to go out, to use the telephone, to have friends visit: he even forbids her to look out the window.

The reason for such widespread feminine submission to patriarchal oppression is not hard to find: poverty, illiteracy, inability to speak English, and, most fundamentally, violence against women, which is seen as inevitable. Sally is beaten and raped by her father; Minerva and other wives are beaten and abandoned. But violence against women is not just domestic; the outside world is also represented as threatening to women: when Esperanza begins her first job, she is sexually harassed by the only coworker who is friendly to her, "he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and doesn't let go" (55); when the girls dress up in women's shoes and parade up the street enjoying the attention they attract, the dangers of feminine sexuality become all too apparent in the frightening figure of the "bum man" who tries to buy a kiss for a dollar and yells after them when they refuse. The adult world is enticing and frightening; it is romantic and glamorous yet threatening. Esperanza both resists and wants to be part of the adult world: "Everything is holding its breath inside me. . . . I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can't see" (73). But her vision of the world is conditioned by her culture, and the romantic story of love and sex that is told in songs and magazines and on television and by her friends contrasts horrifyingly with Esperanza's reality.

In the story that has attracted much critical comment, "Red Clowns," Esperanza describes her violent sexual initiation. Though exactly what happens to her is not clear, in her monologue Esperanza impressionistically describes waiting for Sally to return from her liaison and her violent assault by a group of Anglos: "Sally Sally a hundred times. Why didn't you hear me when I called? Why didn't you tell them to leave me alone? The one who grabbed me by the arm, he wouldn't let me go. He said I love you Spanish girl, I love you, and pressed his sour mouth to mine" (100).

Here the rhetoric of love and sex is revealed in the harsh light of racial and gender oppression. As a "Spanish girl," Esperanza is most vulnerable to sexual attack; in the carnival grounds, she discovers why the world is such a threatening place for women, and colored women especially. Esperanza does not have the words to describe mimetically what has happened to her—the only words she has been taught are the romantic words of love, and these do not encompass the experience of sex as an expression of racial and gender hatred. Consequently, Esperanza directs her anger and shame not at Anglos and not at men but instead against women; not just Sally, who should have saved her, but all women, as Maria Hererra-Sobek explains: "The diatribe is directed not only at Sally the silent interlocutor but at the community of women who keep the truth from the younger generation of women in a conspiracy of silence. The protagonist discovers a conspiracy of two forms of silence: silence in not denouncing the "real" facts of life about sex and its negative aspects in violent sexual encounters, and complicity in embroidering a fairy-tale-like mist around sex, and romanticizing and idealizing unrealistic sexual relations" (Hererra-Sobek 178).

The dominant discourse of Esperanza's culture is gendered in such a way that it speaks for men and articulates only a patriarchal interpretation of the world. Most of the women of Mango Street are trapped inside the masculine constructs of Chicano culture; the possibility that women can subvert a masculine language and make it speak for feminine experience is enacted by Cisneros's use of a discontinuous narrative form that undermines the false coherence of patriarchal language. P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• General Editor’s Preface
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: (Dis)Continuous Narrative: The Articulation of a Chicana Feminist Voice in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street
• Chapter 2: Beyond Otherness: Negotiated Identities and Viramontes' "The Cariboo Cafe"
• Chapter 3: Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing: Making More Room for Puerto Rican Womanhood
• Chapter 4: Flight and Arrival: A Study of Padma Hejmadi's Short Story, "Weather Report"
• Chapter 5: Subversive Extravagance: Women in Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables" and "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara"
• Chapter 6: Afrekete Rising: Two Coming-out Stories by African-American Lesbians: Pat Suncircle's "A Day's Growth" and Audre Lorde's "The Beginning"
• Chapter 7: Race/[Gender]: Toni Morrison's "Recitatif"
• Chapter 8: Playing in the Light: White Girls Dreaming in Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake"
• Chapter 9: Ruth's Journey into the Fields: Feminism in Ozick's "The Pagan Rabbi"
• Chapter 10 Reconstructing the Native-American Woman: Louise Erdrich's "Fleur"
• Contributors' Notes
• Index