Summary
Sally has married a young man in order to get away from her father. Now, Esperanza says in "Linoleum Roses," Sally has a house and furniture, but her husband gets violently angry some days, and he doesn't want her to see her friends, so they must go to see her while he is working. Most of the time, Sally stays in her new home and looks at the things that she and her husband own.
In "The Three Sisters," Lucy and Rachel's baby sister has died, and the family is having a traditional viewing and reception at home. Esperanza is nervous, but three old ladies are there and they reassure her. The three sisters look her over, tell her she is special, and tell her to make a wish. She does so, silently, and they say it will come true; then, as if they can read her mind, they tell her not to forget to come back to Mango Street.
Esperanza and Alicia are sitting on Edna's steps, talking. Esperanza says she wishes she were from somewhere other than Mango Street and the red house; Alicia tells her that she is, however, from Mango Street and that she will carry it with her and someday come back to it. In "A House of My Own," Esperanza tells us that someday she will live alone in a clean, quiet house with everything just as she wants it. And in the last chapter, Esperanza says that she likes to tell stories, that she belongs and does not belong in the house on Mango Street, and that sometimes writing the stories helps. She will go away someday, she says, but will come back for those who could not leave.
Analysis
The final five chapters of Mango Street offer a marriage, a death, three witches and a wish, a friendship, and a satisfying yet subtle resolution for Esperanza. We hear no more of the attack made upon her. Has she told anyone of it: her mother, for example? Perhaps not, for throughout the book — except in "The Red Clowns" — she has been somewhat secretive, something of a stoic, keeping her feelings and conflicts within herself, letting even the reader see only hints. She may have told Alicia, for Alicia seems now to be her confidante. Almost certainly she will not have told Sally, for to Esperanza that experience, which she did not want to talk about or remember in the first place, is something to be confided — if at all — only to a truly best friend, and it is now clear to Esperanza that Sally is not her real friend.
Still Sally is a "friend," in the same sense that Cathy (Queen of Cats) was a friend very early in the book. Part of Esperanza's stoicism is that she seems to accept people for what they are, knowing they will not change in radical ways; as she has said several times of her sister, "That's how she is." So Esperanza goes to visit Sally, now probably approaching her fourteenth birthday, in the home Sally shares with her new husband, where she is kept a virtual prisoner by this "marshmallow salesman" with a violent temper. Esperanza says she knew this would happen; now it has happened and there is nothing to be done about it. Esperanza tells this in a flat, unemotional tone. She knows Sally is not "in love" but was only governed by a need to escape her unbearable life.
Esperanza has now grown beyond her wish to emulate Sally. That wish may have extended only to matters of makeup and style, of course, but it seems linked (by her association of Sally with the queen Cleopatra) to Esperanza's decision to be "beautiful and cruel" — that is, to pursue relationships with boys in which she herself had the upper hand, the "power." Her experience at the carnival has taught her that she does not yet have that kind of power and has shown her graphically that what some people call "love" may be an exercise of physical power directed against her. Whatever she may do in the future, whether or not she continues to visit Sally, whether or not she enters into a mutual relationship with a boy, Esperanza for now seems in effect to have said good-bye to Sally and to have moved beyond that earlier phase of sexual curiosity and desire. That tension has been released, in a very negative way, and that part of Esperanza's inner conflict has been, for a time at least, resolved. Now she is faced with her original problem, the question of who she is, where she belongs, how to escape from Mango Street (and her childhood, and her family) — how, in brief, to become the adult that she wishes to be, the strong woman who controls her own life.
Traditionally, in folk tales the world over, young women are sometimes guided at the beginning of their journeys through life by older women, crones even, who offer practical advice and/or magic charms. Esperanza has already sought such advice — and perhaps charms as well — from the "witch woman" Elenita. Now, in the magical and powerful presence of the dead, she finds unexpected help in the persons of three elderly women, Lucy and Rachel's aunts (probably, given their ages, great-aunts). Esperanza does not tell their names; perhaps she does not know them. She describes them, however, in language that sets an atmosphere of real magic, ancient beliefs mixed with Christianity, and, although they offer her mundane gifts (chewing gum and Kleenex), they are obviously, in her mind and the reader's, real, powerful — and good — witches.
Alicia too is an older woman and the giver of a gift. What the old women have told Esperanza is repeated by Alicia, who is now (although Esperanza, always economical with language, does not say it in so many words) her real friend; their friendship is sealed by Alicia's gift and by a confidence, for Esperanza tells Alicia out loud what she wished for in silence in the room with the dead baby. And if her guidance by the three sisters suggests she will choose a form of magic, Alicia's influence suggests that she will also choose education. Thus Esperanza's resolution, at the end of The House on Mango Street, is revealed to be ambiguous, ironic, but real: She will escape Mango Street but will never escape it, for it is part of her. "You will always be Mango Street," Alicia tells her, using the same figure of speech that Lucy inadvertently uses early in the book: "Me, I'm Texas." Esperanza's escape from Mango Street (and from her childhood) must be by a magic of her own making, and it ironically involves her re-creation of the house, the neighborhood, and her childhood in stories. So she writes these stories sometimes, Esperanza says, and after she has written them, she is for a little while free of their power.
Glossary
"One night a dog cried . . . ." a traditional harbinger of death; a bird flying into a house, too, is supposed to foretell a death in the house.
