The House on Mango Street: A Parable of Degeneration or a Chicana Rewriting of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies

Carme Manuel

doi:10.18290/rh216911-6

Carme Manuel Universitat de València https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2776-7901

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh216911-6

Keywords: The House on Mango Street, The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley, Darwinism, degeneration, deterritorialized identity

Abstract

Reading Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) makes it possible for Esperanza Cordero to imagine an idyllic site of empowered identity in The House on Mango Street. Yet, I argue that Esperanza’s transformed identity can only reside outside her original community and that her journey from the sad red house of Mango Street to her reconceived clean house at the end of the text is necessarily a trajectory of desired uprootedness that follows the script presented in The Water-Babies. Like Tom, Kingsley’s protagonist, Esperanza undergoes a metamorphosis to shed off the traits that categorize her as Chicana in order to embrace a remodeled subjectivity and, consequently, become an ontologically deterritorialized Hispanic.

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