The Quest for Feminine Identity in Sandra Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street 1984

Abstract

Abstract This dissertation tends to capture the struggles of the protagonist Esperanza Cordero and other women in Mango Street, who failed to shape their identities in Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street. This examination aims to analyze the issue of The Quest for Feminine Identity, through the feminist point of view by Simone de Beauvoir in her famous book The Second Sex, in addition to the psychosocial approach through Erik Erikson’s development stages theory, with the help of other tenets such as Psycho-Feminism, Gender Roles, Patriarchal Oppression, and Ethnic Identity. The first chapter is about historical backgrounds and theoretical framework. The second chapter is for the analysis of the issue of identity formation and its boundaries. As a result, we discover that Esperanza changes the traditional patterns of male domination through challenging her community beliefs, by breaking the boundaries and creating her own identity through writing that allows her to leave Mango Street mentally despite she failed to escape it physically