Esperanza in The House on Mango Street

(4).
             The house on Mango Street did not live up to Esperanza's standards of her dream house. Likewise as a teenager, Cisneros' family had accomplished their goal of purchasing their own house but, "Cisneros regarded the house as ugly and shabby and nothing like what she imagined a house should be" ("The House on Mango Street" 1). Both females had large families, lived in ghetto neighborhoods and were deprived of a "real home." These factors later contribute to their desires to challenge social norms and acquire a house of their own. This parallel between the author and the protagonist's childhood is an indicator that Esperanza is a surrogate for Cisneros because she is a manifestation of Cisneros' previous adolescent experiences and desires. .
             Through a Freudian lens, the adolescent experiences Cisneros suppresses as a child resurface in her phantasies. For much of her youth, Cisneros was not fond of her upbringing. For some time, she was even ashamed of her situation. Living in a small house in an underprivileged section of Chicago was a stain on her life she preferred not to dwell on; hence, she suppresses the very memory of it. According to Freud, "suppression is one of the three factors that contribute to the process of falling ill in hysterical patients because it can produce symptoms that affect the psychological well-being of the individual" (Lectures 14). During her childhood, those symptoms were already present in Cisneros when she admits to "the presence of a narrator's voice recounting the everyday experiences she lived and witnessed in her own childhood mind" (Wissman 29). Sandra Cisneros is described as an "adolescent playing at being an adult" because as a creative writer her mentality is similar to that of a child (McCay 1). Since only Cisneros hears this voice, it demonstrates how, similar to a child, she "ha[s] created a phantasy [s]he takes very seriously- that is, which [s]he invests with large amounts of emotion-while separating it sharply from reality" (Freud, Day-Dreaming 143).