the house on mango street: pink and red

the colors, pink and red play a significant role in the novella, the house on mango street.pink and red in this book, means that there is hope and carfulness in the air. they use this idea of hop when there are things that need hope, like when she is raped or when she wears these shoes and the bum wants a kiss from her.

In the vignette titled, red clowns, red is used to show hopefulness towards the clown from the rape that she is enduring rite now. :I waited by the red clowns...the red clowns, laughing their thicked tongue laugh."Pages 46-48. She looks up to these clowns for forgiveness and for help. this is hop in a fashion.

Another place where we notice a connection to red is on Page 4. "Its small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you would think they were holding their breath." Page 4. Here we can see that Esparanza uses  the color red to represent small, like the way this house appears to be. She feels that red and pink are colors that should be used this way, to describe insignificant things.

My last quote belongs to the time were she was compare her self to Sire's girlfriend. she writes how they were both next to each other and she noticed that sire's girlfriend had pink toe nails. "And once when she was standing next to me in front of Mr Benny's grocery she was barfoot, and i saw he barefoot baby toe nails all painted pale pale pink, like little pink sea shells, and she smells pink like babies do." Page 73. Here, we can see that she likes this color and how she almost wishes that her own toe nails were as "awesome" as Sire's Girlfriend.

Throughout these vinettes, we have seen the importance of red and pink and how they represent the hopefulness of the women in the latin cultue. this is al so true in the asian culture, as we have seen in the book. The way she wants these colors to mean represnt a hopeful and almost meek esperanza.