This paper is a rhetorical analysis of Sandra Cisneros' short story, "The Monkey Garden." This story is filled with vivid imagery in its account of the painful passage from childhood to adolescence. Cisneros uses the description of a fanciful, mysterious garden in which she played as a child to show the wonders of girlhood and the unfamiliar, frightening landscape that this becomes as she starts to grow up.
The monkey garden has become overgrown and fascinating since the monkey who once lived there and the family who kept him moved to Kentucky. After the monkey left, the narrator and her friends made the garden their playground. Once the garden was abandoned, it began to take on a life of its own, which the children investigated in endless detail. Some of the discoveries were wonderful: "There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theater curtains" (386). The delights of the garden sparked her imagination and made her think of things familiar and unfamiliar: what life must be like on a mysterious planet like Mars, for instance, or how amazingly alive the curtains at the local movie theater could look if she stared hard enough.
Some discoveries were not so felicitous: "Weeds like so many squinty-eyed stars and brush that made your ankles itch and itch until you washed with soap and water" (386). She refers to the uncomfortable day she returned from the garden, appealing to her mother for help when the garden's imaginary fascinations proved all too real.
The longer she played in the garden, the more mysterious it became. She recalls, "Bit by bit, after the monkey left, the garden began to take over itself" (386). Flowers began to ignore the guidelines they had once been given, abandoned cars began to sprout like mushrooms, rumors began to grow. She remembers some of the stories the garden inspired: "There beneath the roots of soggy flowers were the bones of ...