Abstract
This exploratory analysis examines female friendships presented in two mid-twentieth century Chicana feminist Bildungsroman, each between a Chicana protagonist and a female friend as foil. One friendship in Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena María Viramontes, is interracial; the other, in The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is Chicana. Both friendships interrogate the boundaries within mainstream feminism, particularly its monolithic views and complicity with power. Each friendship offers a Chicana feminist perspective centering family and cultural community. The theoretical foundation includes classical and contemporary understandings of Bildungsroman as literary form, Toni Morrison’s American Africanism, and feminist psychoanalytic perspectives. These frameworks underscore the importance of strong female relationships that cultivate resilience and transformation, especially within liminal spaces where new alliances emerge. Existing scholarship confirms that reciprocity and closeness are vital stabilizing elements in adolescent friendships, a claim that resonates with feminist understandings of healthy relational dynamics. Feminist psychoanalytic frameworks further posit that women’s identities are deeply rooted in relational processes, with both mother-daughter and female peer relationships playing pivotal roles in individuation and maturation. Morrison’s perspective underscores the importance of readership in stirring the literary imagination beyond the pages of the book and into a community of readers, unconstrained by labels and moving from the racial object to the racial subject. This analysis then asks, “How might friendships involving difficult and oppressive family relations facilitate and complicate the relational process?” and “Is it vital that the foil also be considered for her latent emergent qualities, in tandem with the leadership exhibited by the protagonists?” The concluding chapter constructs a hypothetical mother-daughter story of Maxine and Mrs. Devridge through intertextuality and historicism.
Advisor
Edward Avila
Committee Member
Sarah Henderson Lee
Date of Degree
2026
Language
english
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Master of Arts (MA)
Program of Study
English Literature
Department
English
College
Humanities and Social Sciences
Recommended Citation
Donnelly, P. (2026). Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus and Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street: An exploratory analysis of female friendship in the Chicana feminist Bildungsroman [Master’s thesis, Minnesota State University, Mankato]. Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/1638/
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Included in
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