Analytical_Essay

The Two piece of literature that I have chosen for this paper are The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Salvation written by Langston Hughes. Both of these pieces have meaning to me in more than one way. I am going to explain the way that the authors connect to their writings and how the stories relate to them. I will also go over both of the author’s usage of literary devices that I learned in this course as well as the way that I relate to these pieces. I will end this paper with a comparison of both. I will begin with The House on Mango Street. One of the main literary devices that are used in this story is tone. The tone in this story is kind of a mix between discontentment and defensiveness. In the beginning the tone is discontent; but there are many things that narrator points out that make it seem sad. For example after the narrator says that her family moved into the house on Mango Street but then she says, “But even so, it’s not the house we’d thought we’d get.” (Richard Abcarian, 2007) The reader can feel Esperanza’s sorrow. Esperanza then talks about the house on Loomis where she felt embarrassed at the way the nun from her school said, “You live there'” (Richard Abcarian, 2007) The narrator becomes very upset and the tone changes drastically from a calm innocent child to a person who feels that they have something to prove. Sandra Cisneros, like her main character Esperanza, was a Mexican- American and moved a lot as a child. She went to the University of Iowa and attended the Writer’s Workshop there. She said that,”…My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks.” (Richard Abcarian, 2007) The House on Mango Street is a story that she wrote that, I believe, mimics her life as a child. I read the book and after reading her bio I can see where all the passion that she put into the story came from. As written in her biography at Grade saver, “A prime example of how Cisneros' writing speak to the experiences of the forgotten or invisible of American society is The House on Mango Street. In this work, widely celebrated by critics, teachers, adults and adolescents alike, Cisneros introduces the reader to Esperanza- a poor, Latina adolescent who longs for a room of her own and a house of which she can be proud. Although Cisneros is noted primarily for her fiction, her poetry has also garnered attention. In My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), Cisneros writes about her native Chicago, her travels in Europe, and, as reflected in the title, sexual guilt resulting from her strict Catholic upbringing. A collection of sixty poems, each of which resemble a short story, the work exemplifies one of Cisneros' acclaimed knack for combining and crossing the boundaries of genre.” (Grade Saver, 1999) I connect to this story because I was a foster child and growing up I lived in many different homes. I never got attached to any of those places because they were not my home. My social worker told me many times that it would get better and that the next house that I went to would be better, kind of like Esperanza’s parents were telling her. Also like the narrator I was ashamed of the paces were I was living. I, like Esperanza, knew that my social worker (her parents) was just telling me things to make me happy; but it never worked. On the other hand, after I went through all the different houses I finally got a home. However my home was not technically a home but rather a family. In the essay Salvation by Langston Hughes he uses point of view as the main literary device. He is telling a story about a moment in his life, so he is the narrator as well as the main character. This entire essay is written through his eyes and through his interpretation of everyone around him. From his point of view he was jealous that everyone around him could see the light of god and he felt as though he was not a good enough person to see it. He then lies to appease his aunt and all the other church people around and later feels worse that he lied. He displays a lot of emotion throughout the essay and in the end the only emotion that he is displaying is remorse. In the middle of the essay Langston Hughes develops a huge climax and the reader may feel as if they are going to experience the light through his eyes, but then he just gets up and walks to the front. “That night, for the first time in my life but one for I was a big boy twelve years old - I cried. I cried, in bed alone, and couldn't stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me. She woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me.” (Hughes) Langston Hughes was a very well rounded writer because he wrote plays, stories, poems; not just geared toward the black community. He started his journey at Columbia University and graduated from Lincoln University in 1929. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching.” Despite Heyward's statement, much of Hughes's early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life." (Poetry Foundation, 2010) In Salvation I did not get a negative impression of black people. I wouldn’t have even put color to any of the characters except that I know that Langston Hughes was black. In this essay I believe not that he was focusing on the characters but rather what they were doing. Only when he says, “A great many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands (Richard Abcarian, 2007)” does he mention the color of any ones skin. Even with that description I get the sense of over worked people who still make time for church. I thought it was beautifully written. I connect with this piece of literature because when I was 12 I went to Acquire the Fire. A place where I was also told that I would find Jesus, but I unlike Langston I thought that I had. I saw people who were very fanatical about the sermons. They had their hands raised in the air and they were calling out to “the Lord Jesus Christ” and so I did the same. I sang the songs and I went to the front and gave all my sins and sorrow to the lord. I cried and felt touched by the light, and just knew that I was going to be a better person. As soon as I walked out of the room I could no longer feel the light; so I did a lot of soul searching. I went to a Jewish camp thinking that maybe I could find some peace in my religion but again I was disappointed. Then one day when I was 16 I woke up and literally cried because I wanted to feel the light. I was then told by my mother that,”the light is not something that you will see but feel on the inside. As long as you believe what you feel you have been touched; but you have to go to school!” After reading the biographies of the authors and the pieces of literature that I chose, I believe that they are more alike than I had originally thought. Both of the authors were writing about things that they had experienced firsthand. The main characters of both literary pieces reflected the author in more than one way. They used similar literary devices to get to the core of their stories, but the pieces of literature themselves were very different. Sandra created a character that instead of moving from country to country was moving from house to house. She took her childhood and built a story around it. Whereas Langston spoke of an experience he went through many years earlier. He did not create a character for his lead he just used himself. Both authors were remembering things from their pasts, and recalling emotions. Although Esperanza is a fictional character I cannot help but think that some of her sadness was how Sandra felt when she was a child. As said in her biography, “Thus, Cisneros decided to write about conflicts directly related to her upbringing, including divided cultural loyalties, feelings of alienation, and degradation associated with poverty. These specific cultural and social concerns, coupled with Cisneros' feelings of alienation as a Latina writer, came to life five years later in The House on Mango Street (1983).” (Grade Saver, 1999) In conclusion I believe that Sandra Cisneros’s story is something that many people would read back then and even nowadays. Books that focus on true events draw people in, because they can feel the relation between the author and what is being said. Though I like Langston Hughes’s Essay about his experience I just felt that The House on Mango Street was more intense and I related better to it. Both authors were and are great writers who went through some tough times and made it out with a great talent that they chose to share with the world. Works Cited Grade Saver. (1999). Retrieved June 3, 2010, from Grade Saver: http://www.gradesaver.com/author/sandra-cisneros/ Hughes, L. (n.d.). Retrieved June 3, 2010, from http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG200-dwc/hughes.htm Poetry Foundation. (2010). Retrieved June 2, 2010, from The Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html'id=3340 Richard Abcarian, a. M. (2007). Literature: The Human Experience Reading and Writing. Bedford/St. Martin's.