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Michael Miller

A Major Revolution: What is Actually New in Cisneross Novel

In her article A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of

Genre, Margot Kelley asserts four major premises concerning how The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros may fit into and even update the genre of the composite novel. In the essay,

Kelley first asserts that Cisneross work is a bildungsroman story about Esperanza Cordero

because Chicano/a authors often chose this form to help emphasize characters caught between

collective, or major, and individual identities (87-88). Although the work may be viewed as a

bildungsroman story, there are two main focuses that differentiate The House on Mango Street.

First, not all of the action of the novel focuses on Esperanzas development consider Nenny

whom the reader sees grow up alongside Esperanza or Sally from whom the reader can trace

the outcome of the married life Esperanza avoided. Second, the major point of the novel, unlike a

bildungsroman story, is not about how Esperanza helped herself, but rather how Esperanza

becomes empowered to help other minorities of all kinds by helping herself through education.

Kellys second point in her article is that the childlike voice of the narrator is actually

just Spanish deterritorialized in relation to majority structures of the English language (87-

88). Although this could be true, I am not familiar enough the Spanish language to make an

accurate judgment, I am more inclined to believe the narrative was written with intentional

poetic diction, form, irony, and succinctness. Take, for instance, the beginning of the vignette

The Family of Little Feet, where Cisneros begins, There was a family. All were little. Their

arms were little, and their hands were little, and their height was not tall, and their feet very

small (39). The meter and rhyme of these sentences gives it a limerick-like effect, shockingly

ironic compared to the weight of the storys sexist action towards young women. After reading
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Cisneross introduction to The House on Mango Street, it becomes difficult to ignore the

influence her years of study of poetry had on her prose, and I think this conscious poetic

inclusion is, perhaps, more important than the, admittedly, subconscious orientation towards

ones native language.

This leads to Kelleys third argument about Cisneross reliance on parataxis to create

cause and effect markers, similar to many other writers in the composite novel genre including

Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Louise Erdrich. Cisneros, Kelly argues, updates this

effect by using brief vignettes that could be read entirely independently to challenge the typical

idea of the bildungsroman story while creating a feeling a continuity throughout the novel by

focusing on Esperanzas development (88). Although it is easy to agree with the major premise

of this point, it is still impossible to deny that the brevity not only of each vignette in The House

on Mango Street, but each paragraph without strict form, each sentence without the punctuation

of the majority structures, each word carefully picked and placed for strongest impact lends

itself to a close-reading worthy of American modernist poet Emily Dickinson. Perhaps

Cisneross novel achieves fluidity more through its consistent, condensed form, used with a

Dickinsonian urgency and attention to detail, than it does through a main character or the novels

parataxis, as Kelley suggests.

Kelleys final point in her essay is that Cisneros updates the composite novel genre by

focusing on houses as a major repeating theme which not only helps connect the novel

thematically, but also serves as a stage around which all the action of the novel takes place (89).

Kelley states that, by creating a sense of the neighborhood as world, Cisneros uses her short

stories as an apartment or style of writing that the author can try out without fully

committing to any major genre, or house (89). Although it is true that the symbol of a house is
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thematically important to Cisneros in The House on Mango Street, she is not alone is using a

common setting important to both the content and the context of the novel. In his novel Go

Down, Moses, William Faulkner set all the action against the backdrop of fictional

Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, a state with a long history of slavery and racism. Even

though the setting doesnt act as a symbol for Faulkner as it does with Cisneros, it is impossible

to disregard the importance of the setting to the characters and the action within the novel.

Likewise, in Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich uses the common setting of the Indian reservation as

a place of both thematic and contextual importance. In her novel, each of Erdrichs characters are

attempting to either run away from, come back to, or preserve the Indian reservation shared by

multiple factions of the family. It would seem, in fact, that Ernest Hemingway, through In Our

Time, is the only author in this course that has achieved a novel with thematic fluidity without

the use of a common setting for the characters.

Although she makes some valid, though arguably obvious, points in her essay, I believe

Margot Kelley has missed the major factor in Cisneross novel that makes it stand out from her

peers in the composite novel genre her incorporation of poetic diction and brevity of form. It is

this effect, stunningly hidden within the confines of a novel, that gives Cisneros ultimate

singularity as a writer.
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Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 2009. Print.

Kelley, Margot. A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre.

Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997.

Print.