Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment

Abstract

Critics of Sandra Cisneros have not paid much attention to her career-long advocacy of private enjoyment, possibly because it seems incompatible with the political commitment that is an equally prominent feature of her work. This essay argues that we cannot name Cisneros's politics without first coming to terms with her representation of the pleasures of withdrawing from face-to-face sociality. In the central chapters of her most famous work,The House on Mango Street, Cisneros maps the political salience of private enjoyment by means of a complex evocation and transformation of a poem by Emily Dickinson. Private enjoyment becomes in Cisneros's hands democratically accessible—the technologies of privacy range from writing to self-talk to masturbation—and constitutively insecure. Because privacy signifies not a space into which one might retreat but a point from which one must depart, it is for Cisneros the precondition of new collective formations.

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