[This semester,
as part of my Ethnic
American Lit course, I’ve taught all or part of three short story cycles: Love Medicine, The Joy Luck Club, and The
House on Mango Street. So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy those three
works, as well as a few other examples of this complex
literary genre.]
On two childhood
experiences that the young adult cycle gets perfectly right.
I taught exceprts
from Sandra
Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street
(1984) in my Ethnic American Lit course for a reason: the identity and
perspective of young Esperanza Cordero, first-person narrator of the book’s
many short short stories, are deeply informed by her cultural heritage as the
daughter of Mexican American immigrants. For evidence, I point you to the book’s
fourth story (and the first in which we meet Esperanza by name), “My Name,” which foregrounds
the cultural, linguistic, and immigrant issues and experiences that will
continue to impact and influence Esperanza’s childhood across the cycle. Yet precisely
because Esperanza is a child and then young adult throughout the book (which
begins when she’s about 9 and ends as she prepares to leave for college),
Cisneros’ stories also engage consistently—and about as well as any American
literary works ever have—with some of the most shared and foundational aspects
of childhood.
One of those is
childhood friends. From Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in their respective Mark Twain
novels to Scout and
Dill in Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird, there have been plenty of childhood friendships in classic
American literature, but to my mind none have captured the rhythms and rituals
of childhood play among peers nearly as well as does Cisneros in stories like “Our
Good Day” (set at a moment when Esperanza and her friends Rachel and Lucy are inseparable)
and “And Some More” (when they and Esperanza’s sister Nenny are in the middle
of an argument and hate each other). Partly what distinguishes Cisneros’
stories and depictions of friendship from those others is her use of
pitch-perfect dialogue, creating the voices and conversations of these young
girls in a way that’s both thoroughly natural yet helps advance her book’s
themes at the same time. But those dialogues, like everything in House on Mango Street, are framed by
Esperanza’s narration and voice, and the closing paragraph of “Our Good Day”
reflects how wonderfully that narration shapes these moments of friendship: “Down,
down Mango Street we go. Rachel, Lucy, me. Our new bicycle. Laughing the
crooked ride back.”
If such moments
of friendship (at its best and at its worst) represent one way to define childhood,
another way would be to see it as a series of small realizations, seemingly
minor epiphanies about the world through which our perspectives gradually
expand and mature. One of the best examples in House on Mango Street is in “Darius & the Clouds,” in which
Darius, “who doesn’t like school, who is something stupid and mostly a fool,
said something wise today.” The kids are looking up at the clouds and naming
their shapes, and Darius, pointing to “that one there,” says, “That’s God. …
God? somebody little asked. God, he said, and made it simple.” Like many of the
characters in individual Cisneros stories, Darius will largely disappear for
the rest of the book—but clearly the character and moment were meaningful for
young Esperanza, and they become one of many such stories in which her
perspective shifts and grows, often directly impacted by those same childhood
peers and neighborhood friends. By the end of Cisneros’ unique and wonderful
short story cycle, Esperanza has been profoundly changed by all those moments
and stories—and so have we.
Next cycle
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other short story cycles you’d highlight?
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