This thesis analyses Gloria Anzaldúa’s redefinition of "home" in her ground-breaking book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and applies it to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street....Show moreThis thesis analyses Gloria Anzaldúa’s redefinition of "home" in her ground-breaking book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and applies it to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. Anzaldúa redefines home as a space of contradictions, instead of comfort, and this notion of home can also be seen in The House on Mango Street, especially towards the end of the novel. Importantly, home in the borderlands Anzaldúa and Esperanza inhabit is closely connected with their fractured sense of identity. However, both Anzaldúa and Esperanza eventually are able to make a home in the borderlands and resolve their identity struggles, albeit in different ways. Anzaldúa accomplishes this by theorizing what she calls a “mestiza consciousness,” which allows her to accept her multiple identities and to make a home in the contradictory space of the borderlands, while Esperanza makes her home by writing about growing up in the poor urban Latino neighborhood of Mango Street and thus comes to terms with her identity conflicts by constructing an identity for herself as a Chicana writer.Show less
Anxieties about writing and privacy are often at the heart of Edith Wharton’s fiction. In the two works discussed in this thesis, Wharton’s early novels The Touchstone (1900) and The House of Mirth...Show moreAnxieties about writing and privacy are often at the heart of Edith Wharton’s fiction. In the two works discussed in this thesis, Wharton’s early novels The Touchstone (1900) and The House of Mirth (1905), private letters written by women acting outside the domestic sphere, a woman writer and an adulterous wife, play a central role. Wharton uses these letters to explore the boundaries between the private and public spheres and to ask questions about the position of woman writers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether they can function in the public realm and make themselves heard, or are destined to remain in the private sphere and be silent. The principal female characters in The Touchstone and The House of Mirth are, in a sense, both “authors” who are unable to break free from the limitations of their lives. In spite of their moral superiority, they remain subordinate to men who misread their writing, with disastrous consequences. Although Wharton criticises the male-dominated society of early twentieth-century America, she suggests that woman writers had better stayed within their domestic confinement, and, as a consequence, that private letters by women had better be burnt than published.Show less
