How do the different connotation and tone portrayed in the "hips" and the "high heels" scenes from The House on Mango Street compare and...

Connotation has to do with the popular meaning of a word or concept. Tone refers to the author's attitude conveyed in the story. Since The House on Mango Street is told from Esperanza's perspective, her understanding behind the "hips" and "high heels" might be different than what an adult or younger child might understand. For example, in "The Family of Little Feet," Esperanza and her friends walk around their neighborhood wearing lemon-colored high heels. They are feeling grown up and pretty as they practice crossing their legs when they sit or making "the shoes talk back to you with every step" (40). The tone for this scene is fun and happy as the girls pretend to be women in these womanly shoes. The connotation of high heels, to the girls, has to do with feeling pretty and grown up. However, the tone and connotation changes when Rachel asks a bum if he thinks the shoes are pretty. To the bum, high heels connote prostitution, and he offers Rachel a dollar to kiss him. The tone changes from fun to creepy, with a little bit of seriousness mixed in, because Esperanza says, "She is young and dizzy to hear so many sweet things in one day, even if it is a bum man's whiskey words saying them" (41). This coming-of-age experience teaches Esperanza, and hopefully Rachel, not to discuss high heels and other such things with strangers—especially older men on the street.

The coming-of-age theme continues in "Hips" as the older girls discuss the connotation hips have for them. The girls say that hips are for holding babies while cooking, for dancing, and to signify that a girl is turning into a woman and not a man (50). The tone of this vignette is happy, yet analytical, because the girls are excited to be getting hips and becoming women, but they are just beginning to learn about and become interested in these changes. The girls innocently talk about how hips help with bearing children, but Esperanza adds a scientific tone to the subject and says that girls need to practice how to walk correctly when they get hips, too.

Nenny, on the other hand, being younger, is oblivious to the concept or importance of hips and continues to sing her innocent jump rope songs rather than making up one about hips like the older girls. The difference behind the older girls' connotation of hips and Nenny's shows a gap between girlhood and womanhood. The vignette ends with a childlike tone as Nenny, oblivious to puberty and womanly changes, continues to sing her childish jump rope songs. "She is in a world we don't belong to anymore," says Esperanza (52).