Monkey Garden

Life as a kid is effortless, where the only motive is to have fun. Some people never want to have responsibility and complexity that comes with being an adult as they realize they must take accountability sometime. Esperanza tries her best to avoid what is renegade against the normal expectations of women .Aging promotes the loss of childhood and innocence. Esperanza's only way to avoid having to become part of the adult world around her, is by entering The Monkey Garden where she gets to be a kid. Sandra Cisneros, “The Monkey Garden”, addresses the emotions that occur during this drastic transition through the view of Esperanza. Esperanza's overwhelmed tone reveals her fear and doggedness to adversity when Sally's game defiles the garden's innocence/purity, exposing Esperanza to the realization that she cannot remain a kid forever.
As soon as the monkeys leave the garden, the children gain a new playground. The garden is describe almost like Eden, and it is significant of that at the beginning of the story, Esperanza runs through it freely, while Sally stands at its edge. Cisneros describes the garden in using great visual description “There were sunflowers as big as flowers on Mars anddizzy bees and bow-tied fruit flies tur

s turning somersaults and humming in the air.” (164). She even describes the smells of the garden including the “sleepy smell of rotting wood, damp earth and dusty hollyhocks, thick and perfumed like the blue-blond hair of the dead.” (165). This vivid description of the scenes and aromas of the garden enable the reader to imagine what the garden is like and relate in the readers' mind, their own childhood sanctuary. Next, Cisneros describes the actions and games, which take place in the garden along with Esperanza own reasons for going there. These games of jumping “from roof of one car to another and pretend [ing] they were giant mushrooms” (165) address the unbounded imagination of a child. In the garden, the kids were able to play without any adults around. The garden became a place of rejuvenation for Esperanza, where only kids were allow and the horrors of the adult world remain unnoticed. Esperanza observes, "Things had a way of disappearing in the garden, as if the garden itself ate them, or, as if with its old-man memory, it put them away and forgot them."(165). This shows that the garden was a place where things easily went unnoticed and it was not common to loose things. For Esperanza, this represents the place where she is force into her loss of childhood, and comparing this to a forgetful old man when people mature, they loose their innocence and