SOURCE: Sanchez, Reuben. “Remembering Always to Come Back: The Child's Wished-for Escape and the Adult's Self-Empowered Return in Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street.” Children's Literature 23 (1995): 221-41.

In the following essay, Sanchez contends that the narrator of The House on Mango Street rejects the traditional patriarchal myths of the home while celebrating the empowerment that comes from writing about and remembering the childhood experience of the household and family.

In an essay on “home” and “homelessness” in children's literature, Virginia L. Wolf suggests that one distinction between literature for children and literature for adults may be that the former tends to embrace myth while the latter tends to embrace reality: “Whereas much adult literature laments our homelessness and reflects the fragmentation or loss of myth, most children's literature celebrates home and affirms belief in myth” (54). In doing so, however, children's literature might very well offer an unrealistic view...