Female Bildungsroman in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi.
by – R. Shobia & Dr. Marie Josephine Aruna, Vol.II, Issue.XIX, August 2016
Introduction to the Author(s):
Ms. R. Shobia is an MA and also an M. Phil. She is currently a research scholar at Bharathiar University, Coimbatore.
Dr. Marie Josephine Aruna is an assistant professor of English at Bharathidasan Government College for Women in Puducherry.
Abstract
“Bildungsroman” is a kind of novel that follows the development of the hero from childhood or adolescence into adulthood, through a troubled quest for identity. In a Bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. The term Female Bildungsroman is to defend the representation of women’s experience in writing a necessary means to fulfil the goal of finding a new female Bildung. The central theme of contemporary women’s fiction is the quest for authentic female self-development. It starts from the adolescent protagonist’s coming-of-age or as the mature woman’s awakening to reality of her social and cultural role as a woman and her subsequent attempts to re-examine her life and shape it in accordance with her new feminist consciousness. Sandra Cisneros is one of the first Hispanic-American writers, wrote for Chicana (Mexican-American) women. The House on Mango Street (1983) Cisneros writes in the voice of adolescent Esperanza who longs for a room of her own and house which she can be proud. She shows the development of the protagonist Esperanza from her childhood to adulthood. Melina Marchetta is an Australian writer, portrays the genre of female Bildungsroman in her novel Looking for Alibrandi (1992). The development of the heroine, Josephine Alibrandi is clearly presented in this coming of age novel. At the beginning, she is innocent to understand the facts and finally she becomes a matured one. The paper focuses on the search for self-identity by employing the genre Female Bildungsroman in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi.
Key words: Female Bildungsroman, self-identity, self-education.
Female Bildungsroman in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi.
“Bildungsroman” is a kind of novel that follows the development of the hero from childhood or adolescence into adulthood, through a troubled quest for identity. In a Bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. The term Female Bildungsroman is to defend the representation of women’s experience in writing a necessary means to fulfil the goal of finding a new female Bildung. The central theme of contemporary women’s fiction is the quest for authentic female self-development. It starts from the adolescent protagonist’s coming-of-age or as the mature woman’s awakening to reality of her social and cultural role as a woman and her subsequent attempts to re-examine her life and shape it in accordance with her new feminist consciousness.
Sandra Cisneros is one of the first Hispanic- American woman novelists. Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1983), is a novel that deals with a poor Hispanic adolescent protagonist, Esperanza. She longs for a room of her own and a house which she can be proud. She wants to create her own identity by achieving her desire. Cisneros shows the development of the protagonist from her childhood to adulthood – as female bildungsroman. Melina Marchetta is an Australian writer, portrays the genre of female Bildungsroman in her novel Looking for Alibrandi (1992). The development of the heroine, Josephine Alibrandi is clearly presented in this coming of age novel. At the beginning, she is innocent to understand the facts and finally she becomes a matured one. The paper focuses on the search for self-identity by employing the genre Female Bildungsroman in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi.
The House on Mango Street covers the life of Esperanza, a Chicana (Mexican-American girl), who is about twelve years old when the novel begins. In Looking for Alibrandi, Josephine Alibrand is seventeen years old girl when the novel begins. She is young adolescent girl experiencing her final year at St.Martha’s. She is also called as Josie in her family and friends circle. Esperanza feels the house is a huge improvement from the family’s previous apartment, and it is the first home her parents actually own. But she is not satisfied with the house because it is too small and it is not the dream house which she expected. The house is in the centre of a crowded Latino neighbourhood in Chicago, a city where many of the poor areas are racially segregated. Esperanza does not have any privacy, because “Everybody has to share a bedroom-Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny” (HMS4). She resolves that she will someday leave Mango Street and have a house all her own in her future.
Josie is different Esperanza because she wants to see her father and achieve her identity. Not only this, she has to overcome her racial comments in school, family troubles and complicated relationships. She eventually accepts her family background and becomes a proud Italian-Australian. Josie thinks worst that “My mother was born here, so far as the Italians were concerned… Yet my grandparents were born in Italy we weren’t completely Australian” (LA8). Josephine longs to see her father and later she learns that her father is a lawyer. They live in Glebe, a suburb just outside the city centre of Sydney. Esperanza and Josie wanted to break the racial barrier and create their own identity.
Esperanza develops her first crush on Sire. She likes to see Sire and she boldly looks at him to show that she never fears for anything. On knowing this her father says that “He is a punk and Mama says not to talk to him” (HMS73). Later she learns that he has got a girlfriend Lois. Josephine Alibrand falls in love with Jacob Coote, an Australian boy from Red Fern. She learns that he lost his mother at his young age and it affects him a lot. He is very interested in Josie and so she is much attracted to him. They go for dating for many times with the permission of her mother. Josie learns that Jacob Coote approaches her for having ‘sex’, she avoids him. On knowing the secret of Josephine family, he rejects Josie and she finds that she is very safe from Jacob Coote. This way she escapes from Jacob and his love. In both the cases parent guides their daughter and with the help of self-education they are very safe.
Esperanza befriends Sally from her school days, a girl of her age, who is more sexually mature than Esperanza and her friends Lucy or Rachel. Sally is very beautiful and uses boys and men as an escape route from her abusive father. Meanwhile, she has her own agenda. Esperanza is not comfortable with Sally’s sexual experience with group of boys. Esperanza saves Sally from the mischievous happening by creating violence to her. When Sally’s father knows about Sally’s behaviour he uttered “You’re not my daughter, you’re not my daughter”(HMS93). Josie friend, John Barton is very intelligent who is a son of great Politician. John usually expresses his feelings of depression and confusion to Josephine. Josie is surprised over these actions as she sees in a happy person. John Barton commits suicide at his home to the sadness of Josie. First Josie is extremely enraged over John how he has left his friends and family terribly unhappy and becomes stronger to bear it. Her friends Sera and Anna console her in every respect. This creates to face her life as bold as she can accept the reality of the society. Esperanza and Josie are very close to their friends and helped them.
Esperanza shares her traumatic experiences with the older women in her neighbourhood. She also informs her desire to escape from Mango Street to have her own house. While she finds herself emotionally ready to leave her neighbourhood; she discovers that she will never fully be able to leave Mango Street behind and after she leaves she’ll have to return to help the women she has left. At the end, Esperanza remains on Mango Street, but she has matured extensively and achieves her house of her own. Stating that “Mango says goodbye sometimes… Friends and neighbours will say, what happened to that Esperanza?… They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind” (HMS110). Josie learns the fact of her father from her grandmother. Josie is the main character who is constantly trying to find her identity and how she fits into the society with the genre female bildungsroman.
Esperanza has a stronger desire to leave and understands that writing will help her put distance between herself and her situation. She thinks writing helps her to escape only emotionally, in the future it may help her to escape physically as well. As the female Bildungsroman develops the young protagonist to learn and become mature in the adulthood stage. First she makes friends, grows good in dancing and singing, develops her crush, endures sexual assault, and begins to write as a way of expressing herself and as a way to escape the neighbourhood. Josie finds terrible and cries for her break up with Jacob Coote in her age. But this decision really gives respect for her. Josie successfully completes her HSC (High School Certificate) exams which she feels like a weight off her shoulders as she has met her father. She states that “I’m Josephine Andretti who was never an Alibrandi… It matters who I feel like I am –and I feel like Michael and Christina’s daughter and Katia’s granddaughter…Because finally I understood” (LA313). She created wonderful relations between friends and family and understands to love and treasure her cultural background.
In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros creates an innocent young Latin girl, Esperanza to face problems directly, gain experience and at the end she becomes an experienced adulthood with her identity of her own house-female bildungsroman. It relates to her upbringing, including divided cultural loyalties, feelings of alienation and degradation associated with poverty. Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi finally fits into the genre of female bildungsroman. Her journey starts from the age of seventeen. She learns herself from her family member and creates her own identity. She also wins the love of her father and follows the culture, tradition and identity in the society where she lives. She escapes all the problems and succeeds in the development of her matured character. Sandra Cisneros and Melina Marchetta archive the female Bildungsroman issues like family, friendship, ordeals of love, alienation, self-identity, oppression, race, and culture, gender and society. Thus, The House on Mango Street and Looking for Alibrandi clearly fit into the concept of Female Bildungsroman.
References:
- M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New Delhi: Cengage Learning India Pvt. Ltd., 2012. Print.
- Abrams, M.H. Glossary of Literary Terms.10th New Delhi: Cengage Pvt. Ltd., 2012. Print.
- Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 2009. Print.
- Marchetta, Melina. Looking for Alibrandi. New York: Random House, Inc., 2006. Print.
- Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso Press, 1987. Print.
- Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. USA: Indiana University Press, 1981. Print.