Negotiating Borders and Sexual Empowerment in The House on Mango Street and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

초록

This essay examines the construction of female agency within the transnational frameworks of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1983) and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Although emerging from distinct cultural landscapes, both novels depict the border as a central motif for the female diasporic experience within the United States, documenting how female sexuality and identity are navigated and formed across borders. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza’s maturation is depicted as a series of agentic border crossings whereby she rejects the conventional American Dream narrative of escaping poverty for middle-class domesticity. Conversely, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Beli’s coming-of-age is marked by a passive embrace of sexual power that renders her an object of the predatory male gaze, illustrating a failure of negotiation that ultimately results in a trajectory of disempowerment. By comparing and contrasting these narratives through transnational and border theory, this essay concludes that empowerment for the female diasporic subject is found not in individual escape, but in a continuous, collaborative process of negotiating borders and reclaiming space from oppressive structures.

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