At this point, as The House on Mango Street approaches and then reaches the turning point from which its resolution will emerge, the book’s tensions are drawn more clearly than ever. First, Esperanza makes a decision for herself that is a compromise between her emerging sexuality and her sense of the dangers sexuality holds for her. Then, in her mother’s story, she clearly hears the terms of her conflict, the choice she must make. But her loyalty to Sally is met by careless betrayal, leading to disaster.
The decision Esperanza makes in “Beautiful and Cruel” is part real choice, part fantasy, and part compromise. Ultimately, she decides not to follow the accepted, culturally sanctioned example of such women as Rafaela, Minerva, Mamacita, Rosa Vargas—even Sally, Marin, and her own sister Nenny, who are waiting for someone to take them away from their childish dependency into what seems to be only an adult dependency. To Esperanza, if this is what “acting like a woman” amounts to, then she will begin to practice “acting like a man,” which means in part that she will start letting somebody else carry out her dinner plate for her (for such things are really the only way she can “act like a man” while she is living in her parents’ house). But the way Esperanza reaches this decision is interesting: She tells herself she is “ugly” and will not be courted. In part, she may believe this because she fails to meet her culture’s standards of “beauty”—she is “skinny” (by which she probably means her breasts and hips are not yet fully developed). However, her “ugliness” seems to consist of failures in grooming, which suggests that Esperanza is using a familiar and helpful ploy to avoid going the way of Sally, Minerva, and the others—she is pretending to be unattractive; thus, she does not have to deal with the consequences of being “pretty.”
Interestingly, too, she has chosen to be “beautiful and cruel”—that is, she has found a way to reject conventional femininity without rejecting her femininity. She fantasizes that she will adopt a sort of femme fatale image and behavior, attracting men but rejecting them, keeping her power for herself. Thus Esperanza’s image of herself as “ugly” is in direct conflict with her image of herself as “beautiful and cruel”; one imagines that both are fantasies, comfortable as they alternate and cancel each other out.
Esperanza’s mother’s story, it seems, is less a cautionary tale than those of Rosa Vargas, Minerva, and Mamacita, but only because she is relatively happy in her marriage and her life, which in turn seems to be true partly because she is an intelligent and humorous woman. Here, she is smart enough not merely to tell Esperanza what to do (which would probably not accomplish anything), but instead to tell her what she has lost by quitting school. She could have been a serious singer or painter, but now must treat these talents as hobbies, embroidering flowers (a traditionally “feminine” art unlike painting) and singing in the kitchen. Without suggesting that she’s sorry she had a family, she manages to convey the feeling that she wasted her talents and is not happy about having done so. This is a kind of reasoning Esperanza can understand and apply to her own life.
Interestingly, Esperanza’s mother brings in a fictional character to reinforce her argument. “Madame Butterfly,” the protagonist of the opera she has been singing, is a Japanese woman who falls in love with a Western naval officer, bears his child, waits passively for him to return as he has promised, and is eventually betrayed by him. Don’t wait for a man to make a life for you, Esperanza’s mother seems to be saying. Make your own life. She must recognize that Esperanza will probably be unhappy if she chooses the traditional path. It must worry her, too, to see that Esperanza has chosen to befriend Sally, a girl who seems headed in absolutely the wrong direction for Esperanza, for she knows the temptation is great to try to emulate Sally’s looks, style, and apparent popularity with boys. Yet both of Esperanza’s parents must recognize their daughter’s generous spirit, for if anyone ever needed a friend, Sally does now.
But despite the efforts of Esperanza (and her parents) to shelter Sally, the other girl is seemingly doomed to live out the tragedy of her own unhappy family relationship. Clearly, Sally’s father is stupidly and weakly repeating his own father’s mistake, driving his daughter to the very sort of behavior that enrages him. Clearly Sally herself is not strong enough to leave home except (as we shall see) with another man, although Esperanza’s parents have invited her to live with the Cordero family. By now, in fact, Sally has probably begun to define herself as someone whose function is to inspire passion—sexual passion or rage—in men. And so, probably without understanding what she is doing, Sally uses Esperanza as a companion and enjoys her friend’s loyalty and admiration without taking the trouble to return the friendship. Sally’s carelessness results in disaster in “Red Clowns”; however, Esperanza has a forewarning of it in “The Monkey Garden,” if she only knew how to read her friend’s signals.
The “monkey garden” is one of Mango Street’s strongest symbolic images, like the four trees in front of Esperanza’s house, the house itself, the woman leaning out a window on her elbow. Both beautiful and frightening, both an Eden and a wasteland, this place attracts Esperanza both for its strong and mysterious sexual overtones (in the rank, luxuriant growth and the memory of the monkey) and for the fact that it seems a wilderness within her urban neighborhood, the sort of natural place she craves. Here she can discard the civilized shell of the adult she is becoming for one last fling at being a child. When Sally seems to be threatened by Tito and the other boys, Esperanza is angered both for the threat to her friend—which is a real threat at least in essence, although Sally seems to invite it—and for the doom it spells to her own childish self; these sexual games mark the end of childhood.
The misery Esperanza feels later, when she wishes to die, is real as well, but it is not entirely embarrassment and anger. In part she is feeling but trying not to acknowledge Sally’s betrayal. (Is Sally the “best friend” for whom Esperanza has longed? Almost certainly, Sally has confided sexual secrets—real or fantasized, probably a little of both—to her, which suggests Esperanza has entrusted her own secrets to Sally.) In part, Esperanza is miserable for her own loss of innocence, which has not yet occurred except symbolically, as she is thrust out of the garden.
And then her loss occurs in fact, when Sally disappears with a boy, leaving Esperanza alone to be preyed upon by other boys or men. The details of what actually happens to her at the carnival are not clear; however, given her clear and unemotional description (in “The First Job”) of a relatively minor assault, we can be sure that this one is far more serious. Esperanza’s language in “Red Clowns”—she addresses Sally, not the reader—is shocked, badly hurt, out of control in its syntax but nonetheless tremendously revealing in its tone and imagery. She says she does not remember what happened, but her reluctance to “tell it all” suggests that she does remember. And it seems that her friend’s betrayal is as painful to her as the rape that resulted from it.
