Identity is something that every individual in the world has struggled with. Finding yourself and coming into your own is a mantra of adolescence and life as a whole. So far in our readings, identity as adolescence see it today, or at least as I saw it just a few years ago as an adolescent and as a young adult, hasn’t been discussed.
Charlotte Temple era, girls were women once reaching a certain age, say teenage, they were considered women, like Charlotte herself was. We found ourselves getting angry at Charlotte for making such silly decisions, but then we remind ourselves that she is, in fact, still a teenager. In The Lowell Offering, we see young girls/women working for a living so that they can support their family and so that their brothers can go to school and make a better life for themselves. The girls would cover for each other if they couldn’t come to work that day because they knew that if they were to get in trouble, they would lose the job they desperately needed. However, in The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is much more reminiscent of the adolescence that I know and think of when I hear the word. This book is more of a journal entry style, giving us close insight to her thoughts and feelings, similar thoughts and feelings that many adolescent age people go through. Esperanza struggles with identity and finding herself in a way that is much more apparent.
There’s times in The House on Mango Street where Esperanza is experiencing new feelings and different types of feelings and reactions to the type of things that she goes through. We grow up with Esperanza. We experience her first crushes, her longing to be older, her family life, and her social life.
The theme of identity is an implied, in my opinion. We have a Hispanic, poor, adolescent girl who uncovers some of the harsh realities of life. She witnesses one of her neighbors die and doesn’t really address it—he jumped of the roof and came crashing down to earth, quite literally described at that. His name was Angel, which I think is a greatly placed metaphor on the author’s end, and she gets sexually harassed at her job by a much older man.
I can only imagine how Esperanza feels inside growing up, looking back on my own experiences as an adolescent. She’s so young that she doesn’t quite know how to explain it explicitly, and that’s why we see her struggling to say what is really happening, I think.
The treatment of identity in The House on Mango Street is kind of expected, I think. Since the book is written from the perspective of the young girl, it makes sense that identity is understated because she may not yet know how to directly associate her happenings with it. At Esperanza’s age, I didn’t know how to grapple with identiy, either.
I think that identity is one of the most key things about adolescence, therefore I feel like it should definitely be prevalent in the rest of readings and discussions in class for the rest of the semester. Especially since the other books are more recent, I think that the modern day adolescence and identity will be shown more than they were in Charlotte Temple and in The Lowell Offering.
Shayna McCracken
Representing Adolescence @ Pitt 
I agree, identity is one of the most important parts of being a teenager. I found it interesting that you said that part of figuring out your identity is not understanding how to deal with it. I agree that uncertainty is a big part of the process of growing up. A part of growing up is not always knowing all the answers. Esperanza slowly works through her problems and through her experiences gains knowledge to answer her questions about her own identity.
Rachel Allmandinger
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I agree with your point on Esperanza being the closest representation of what we know to be adolescence by today’s standards. The House on Mango Street is also the most recent book out of the three we have read thus far, so it makes sense for Esperanza to be what we think of as a typical adolescent. However, I also think Esperanza deals with a lot of adult issues as well. She’s worried about money, which is an adult issue. She’s worried about her future, her physical home, her social status, etc. The book also hints at the issue of sexual assault. It’s interesting to me that this is the closest representation of today’s standard of adolescence, yet the protagonist still deals with so many complex, mature topics. I think this book is a good example of how teenagers are often forced to grow up quickly and deal with mature topics, that they shouldn’t necessarily have to handle during their teenaged years.
Rachael Bindas
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I really enjoyed the parallels you drew and the comparisons you made between the different stories we read. A particularly interesting part of your comment was the juxtaposition between Charlotte Temple and the mill girls: Charlotte is outwardly an adult in her own cultural context, though the audience knows she is actually a scared and confused young girl grappling with circumstances beyond her control; conversely, many of the mill girls are younger than Charlotte and may seem to be younger at heart, but they take on a great deal of responsibility and mature characteristics. I also enjoyed your pointing out the narrative style of The House on Mango Street: I agree that it creates a much more intimate portrait of the central character’s life than the other texts. We see new ideas and emotions form as Esperanza ages; this level of insight into the main characters’ minds is something we catch only glimpses of in The Lowell Offering and Charlotte Temple. -Andre Bizier
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