ESPERANZA’S PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT AS REFLECTED IN SANDRA CISNEROS’ THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET

This study discusses The House on Mango Street, a novel written by Sandra Cisneros. This novel presents a main character named Esperanza who experiences personality development. This study is meant to answer three problems concerning the main character’s personality development. The first problem is Esperanza’s basic personality in the novel. The second problem is Esperanza’s personality development. The third problem is the influencing factors toward Esperanza’s personality development. This study is a qualitative study applying content analysis method. This study applies the theory of personality and personality development emphasizing on Hurlock’s theory on personality development. The object of this study is Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. The data collected are lines related to the topic under study found in the novel. The data analysis was conducted by analyzing the required lines found in The House on Mango Street in accordance with the theory. In achieving reliability, the researcher read and reread the novel comprehensively, then recorded the data. The triangulation method was applied to gain the trustworthiness of the data through consulting the finding with first and second consultant. The result of this study shows that Esperanza’s personality develops. There are two significant factors that influence Esperanza’s personality development. The first is the early experiences within family. The second is the important events outside home. Early experience within family gives influence toward Esperanza through supportive parents and family’s financial difficulty, while important events outside home also gives influence toward Esperanza’s personality mostly through the peers and neighborhood. From the analysis on the factors that influence Esperanza’s personality, the researcher finds that Esperanza is unconfident, pessimistic, and naïve at the beginning of the story, and then she turns into a confident, optimistic, and sophisticated person at the end