Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

Abstract

Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own:Stories from My Life Sarah Staes Introduction This article1 focuses on Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from my Life, an impressive compilation of (auto)biographical texts written throughout her literary career for very different occasions and published in 2015 by Random House. Not only does the compilation map out a significant part of Cisneros's personal trajectory, but it also displays the evolution of the cultural, social and linguistic self-consciousness of her authorial 'posture,' a concept developed by Jérôme Meizoz. As we will see, the collection foregrounds important events in the development of Cisneros as a Chicana author, topics that were already well known by those who read the poetry and fiction she published throughout her 40-year career: her growing up as a migrant, middle-class subject, the desire to write and live independently that clashed with the married life that her Mexican father had in mind for her, the discovery of and love for Mexican culture, the challenges of living between cultures and languages, and the increasing importance of her role as a canonical writer, feminist and cultural mediator. To both support and stress these motives, Cisneros displays the same particular multilingual strategies used in her other works, which have already been described in detail by Ernst Rudin (1996), Lourdes Torres (2007), María López Ponz (2009), María Laura Spoturno (2010) and An Van Hecke (2017) amongst others. Rather than identifying them, we aim to analyze how the (sometimes scarce, sometimes abundant) references to Spanish throughout the English texts increase the level of theatricality and sentimentalism described by Peter Brooks (The Melodramatic Imagination, 1976) as characteristic of melodrama. It is our hypothesis that this textual "melodramatic mode," which appeals to her readers' emotions and the image Cisneros constructs of herself outside the text, facilitates identification with her bicultural subjectivity rather than overcoming Mexican-American dualisms. [End Page 144] Multilingual situations vs. multilingual strategies in the U.S. Multilingualism has long been a common practice for human beings and societies. Two centuries ago, however, the relativist2 view of languages determining thoughts and the romantic myth of monolingualism started to extend deep into the foundations of the emerging modern nation-states. Individuals were said to have a singular primary language, an innate 'mother tongue,' as described by Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1813. This 'true language' was supposedly part of a common identity shared by fellow citizens of monolingual, homogeneous territories. The monolingual paradigm became the "theoretical foundation for territorialized, nation- and ethnicity-based language/identity" (Lvovich 520). The binary view of 'native' vs. 'foreign' persists, although this historical construct has been under pressure ever since its rather artificial implementation, as Yasemin Yildiz shows in her groundbreaking book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012). Describing the trajectories of five 20th- and 21st-century German writers, who in their literary productions attempt to reimagine "the identitarian force of language" (Yildiz 6), Yildiz labels their critical endeavors to challenge and overcome the limiting functioning of the monolingual paradigm 'the postmonolingual condition' (Yildiz 4). Aiming to move beyond their 'native' language, these modern multilingual writers can be categorized as 'translinguals,' a term coined by Steven Kellman in The Translingual Imagination (Kellman 16). These examples serve to demonstrate the tension between the still active monolingual paradigm and a fragmented cultural and linguistic reality which nowadays gains more visibility due to globalization, mass migration and common economies. In recent decades, interdisciplinary studies on the relationship between multilingualism and identity, culture, history and society have approached the monolingual paradigm with skepticism, actively unmasking the myth of monolithic, stable identities (Meylaerts 1). Scholars have come to agree that the relationships between a multilingual's languages and his/her sense of self must be approached carefully, taking into account that the connection between language and sense of self is not exclusively reserved for the 'mother tongue' and considering every case as an individual trajectory (Lvovich 520–521)3. Of special interest for the purposes of this research paper is the situation of the Chicano community in the United States, as Sandra Cisneros is internationally considered...