Discussion Topic
Sensory Descriptions in The House on Mango Street
Summary:
Sandra Cisneros uses vivid sensory descriptions in The House on Mango Street to draw readers into the protagonist's world. Through detailed imagery, she captures the sights, sounds, and smells of the neighborhood, making the environment feel real and immersive. These descriptions help convey the emotions and experiences of the characters, enhancing the reader's connection to the story.
Where does The House on Mango Street feature music using smells?
I have just quickly skimmed through the book and I am unfortunately unable to find a piece of music that directly involves smells as part of its appeal. Out of the three pieces of music that there are, the closest one that could be argued to use the scent of smell is the song that Louie's cousin sings in the vignette entitled "Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin." Note how she is described:
She can't come out--gotta baby-sit with Louie's sisters--but she stands in the doorway a lot, all the time singing, clicking her fingers, the same song:
Apples, peaches, pumpkin pah-ay.
You're in love and so am ah-ay.
Although there are no scents explicitly included in this song, the rich, visual images of the fruits and pumpkin pie clearly suggest their scent as relating to the experience of being in love with somebody who returns that feeling. If you can find another example of music involving smell that you wish to ask about, please feel free to respond to this question stating the vignette from which the music is taken.
Where does The House on Mango Street describe using touch and smell?
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One of the distinguishing features that makes this work stand out is the intense, vivid imagery that Cisneros creates through her descriptions. Imagery is of course a way of creating mental pictures of a scene through the incorporation of the senses in the description: sight, taste, hearing, smell, and touch. One rather disturbing place in the narrative where the author uses touch and smell is in the vignette "Red Clowns" when Esperanza talks about the experience of being sexually molested. Note how she describes what happened to her:
Why did you leave me all alone? I waited my whole life. You're a liar. They all lied. All the books and magazines, everything that told it wrong. Only his dirty fingernails against my skin, only his sour smell again. The moon that watched. The tilt-a-whirl. The red clowns laughing their thick-tongue laugh.
Note how the sense of betrayal that Esperanza experienced is conveyed through her discovery that sex is not as "all the books and magazines" present it, but, through her experience, becomes related to nothing more than the feel of the boy's "dirty fingernails against my skin" and the smell of his "sour" mouth. Such imagery helps convery the immensely disturbing experience that Esperanza suffered, as we associaty dirt and sourness with bad things.
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