When Hope Rattles the Cage
Impressions and Explorations of Confinement
in Women's Autobiographical Writings
1,2,3,4
Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after.
Only a house, quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.
-- Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
The dreams of Esparanza are simple, plain and clean. She wants to leave Mango Street, and the house on Mango Street, and have a house all her own, "clean as paper before the poem." Sandra Cisneros has named her protagonist well; Esparanza, whose name in Spanish means "too many letters," knows that her name is hope, and she also knows that it is upon hope that a woman can build a house of her own. If a woman can have her own house -- if she can have her own life and her own authorship to her life stories, with no one locking her up or shutting her up -- then anything is possible.
Woolf called for rooms that could be locked by their occupants as the minimum requirement for women to write fiction. If this is what must be had to write fiction, what else would be required for a woman to be able to write fact? And, if that requirement could be met, would it be enough? Prisons are not always horrible to look at; for example, Gilman describes the site of her incarceration as "a big and airy room, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore." Sometimes women have been confined for so long that confined is all they know how to be. Giving them what they barely need, while it might constitute a start (as well as a foundation for a political statement) is not enough to free their voices, to disentangle them and their stories from the coils of confinement that have been so long wrapped around them.
Confinement is all about architecture, but not merely the architecture of buildings; it encompasses the architecture of experience and existence, the structuring of life and the building of desire. Windows, light, locks, even £500 a year (Woolf's other requirement) -- none of these is enough. Together, however, they are the beginnings of a blueprint for escape, a design for deliverance, for they are the pieces of not a room but a house; a place with many rooms and windows and doors; a place that can represents not the structure of confinement but a framework for independence of the spirit and sovereignty of one's own life and life story.
Esparanza wants to get out, get away from the house on Mango Street, to leave with all her books and paper and tell stories. Esparanza also knows that one of the reasons she will go away is to come back for "the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot get out." Esparanza is a child, but understands that those who get out, must go back for the ones who cannot. She must tell her stories for the ones who cannot leave Mango Street, so that they can. Her stories give them life, and her escape is their escape. A fate of confinement might befall Esparanza, but by holding her story in our hands we know it did not, or at least, if it did, she managed to break out of it long enough to tell the stories of her life on Mango Street.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself? The world would split open.
-- Muriel Rukeyser
Finally, after weaving through the maze of the yellow wall-paper, we see that this knowledge of esparanza -- of the hope that each woman's story gives, and the name of hope that each telling gives to the teller -- is the key that opens the locked room, the light that sustains other women and sometimes even allows them to find the inner strength to search the very bright spots and the very shady spots for just the right place at which to shake the bars of their prisons, and shake them hard.
Not all women's stories get told. But the ones that do have the gift of bringing the forgotten ones along with them, of going back for the ones who could not get out, and of creating the hope that perhaps -- if enough get told -- the patterns of confinement can be, eventually, painstakingly, but possibly completely, torn from the lives of the women they ensnare, like old and tattered wallpaper from the airy upper room of a woman's house.
The key is not under the plantain leaf; it is in the hope, esparanza, carried from story to story and lifetime to lifetime.
May 1997
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