Perhaps it is Esperanza's imaginative intelligence that makes her suspect the traditional path to womanhood, through courtship and early marriage, of being a trap. It is a trap that draws her, of course; like most young girls, she feels herself becoming a sexual being, and she is impatient to get away from home, to stop being her parents' daughter and start being her own person. Doing this in the traditional way, she sees, would be dangerous. Finding a new way will be lonely and difficult, for she will have to swim against the current. But Esperanza is able to employ her natural adolescent impulses and feelings in this enterprise, channeling them into independence, ambition, and the courageous refusal to capitulate to social pressures towards conformity.
In order to make these transformations, Esperanza necessarily dramatizes herself somewhat, as when she decides to become "beautiful and cruel." Such self-dramatization really amounts to forming a mental image of herself that she can adjust as needed. Part of Esperanza's self-image is one of stoicism; she keeps her feelings to herself and actually — for the narrator of a book — says relatively little, leaving the reader to infer a great deal. In "Four Skinny Trees," she seems to be working on her self-image, rather enjoying her identification with the trees in what she sees as their strength, anger, and feeling of displacement. Only in "Red Clowns" does Esperanza actually break down — significantly, not to the reader but to her own mental picture of Sally — and characteristically she returns in the next chapter in her usual terse style, as if the incident had never happened. And, in the three short chapters at the end of the book, she reveals what we might already have guessed about her: Esperanza is a person who will feel everything very deeply and will quietly channel her experiences and feelings into creative energy; they will emerge transformed, as art.
