Barbara Kingsolver's World

Nature, Art, and the Twenty-First Century

Linda Wagner-Martin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623560317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since Barbara Kingsolver published The Bean Trees in 1988, her work has been of great interest to readers-first, American readers; then British and South African readers; and finally to readers the world over. With incredible speed, Kingsolver became one of the best-known United States writers, a person who collected honors and awards as if she were a much more mature literary producer. From the beginning Kingsolver touched an elbow of keen interest in her readers: hers was the voice of world awareness, a conscientious voice that demanded attention for the narratives of the disadvantaged, the politically troubled, the humanly silenced. By paying special attention to her non-fiction (essays and books), this new study by renowned literary critic Linda Wagner-Martin highlights the way Kingsolver has become a kind of public intellectual, particularly in the 21st century. It provides fresh readings of each of her novels, stories, and poems.

1

Flight Behavior: Dellarobia’s Bildungsroman

Return is what we are banking on as we attempt to put back what has disappeared, the songs of wolves in Yellowstone, the pale-edged wings of condors in California sky, the dark, thundering herds of buffalo to Indian country, the flamingoes along the River of Hope.

Linda Hogan, Dwellings 90

As its title suggests, this novel stubbornly holds the reader to the notion that flight is possible. As she often has, Kingsolver here fixes on a metaphor that seems to be central to many of the novel’s events. In the case of this 2012 book, however, readers who wish for the protagonist’s escape from her husband’s small Tennessee farm are led to crushing disappointment. Not only can Dellarobia Turnbow not escape her life as farmwife to move to a nearby town, so that she can attend college—and consequently change the direction of her personal story; she cannot even take the first step out of the flooded farmland.

The ground was spongy with snowmelt and sank strangely under her feet … the whole mountain of snow was melting in a torrent. Every channel gouged in this slope by a long wet winter was now filled to overflowing. (Flight 429)

Whether people called it a “freak storm” or a “sudden flood,” the fact that Dellarobia saw—that had created within her an “inflated edginess”—was that the walls of pouring water were covering not only the land but also the cars, the farm implements, and the corner of her small frame house. The unquestionable fact was that she “was alone out here.” At first the water had reached her knees, as “the current pulled in a way she understood to be dangerous. This was where she lived.”

Instead of positing ecological disasters in remote countries, Kingsolver here stresses that the disaster facing Dellarobia Turnbow is swamping her very yard. The way the author makes this frightening water both visible and palpable is to create Dellarobia’s time line of recognition. With her two small children at school and at her mother-in-law’s house, she knows she cannot even use her cell phone: why would she bring her husband into this kind of danger? What could another adult do in this terrorizing threat? Soon, Kingsolver gives the reader this description: [Dellarobia] “was stunned to see the water had now risen level with the porch and doorsills of her house. Its foundation and cement steps were no longer visible and the yard had eerily vanished, its embankment dissolved into the road, all memories of her home’s particular geography erased” (Flight 431).

As Dellarobia accepts the power of the flooding water and the unrecognizable state of the previously abused land, she has learned in working for the Monarch butterfly project that those thousands—millions, numbering perhaps fifteen million at the start—of the butterflies have come to her Tennessee woods after having found their Mexican habitat destroyed (by flooding, wind storms, aberrant weather of all kinds): now the butterflies are being forced from these protective woods by a similar kind of immensity—the snowmelt that finds no natural boundaries to stop its progress. The deft descriptions that Kingsolver creates show the reader that Dellarobia has learned the lessons of a nature in outrage—she watches the frantic birds, she ferrets out the remnants of the Monarch colony, she eventually finds a fragment of personal tranquility in the midst of the destroying waters. By the end of this effective description, Kingsolver has created a haven for Dellarobia as well as for what Monarchs remain. As the author writes matter-of-factly,

She’d come out here to see the butterflies. Since yesterday she had watched them leave their clusters in the dead peach orchard and scatter downhill into cedars and tangled brush along the roadsides. Now they dotted every small muddy rise that was not yet swamped. Wherever she looked she saw their aggregations on the dwindling emergent places: forming bristling lines along tree branches and the topmost wire of the fence, clustered on driftwood, speckling even the distant, gleaming roof of her car. Orange clouds of the undecided hovered in the air space above them. (Flight 432)

Because much of the biological surveying of the Monarchs had been given to counting the dead, focusing on how many butterflies remained alive during and after the inimical weather, the reader does not expect to find this almost euphoric description of living butterflies. (Many, far too many of the butterflies have died.) The paragraph continues, “The vivid blur of their reflections glowed on the rumpled surface of the water, not clearly defined as individual butterflies but as masses of pooled streaky color, like the sheen of floating oil, only brighter, like a lava flow. That many” (Flight 433).

Subject to the human curiosity that motivates not only the scientists who have come to work at Dellarobia’s farm—and Dellarobia herself, and the reader—the most pressing question here on the last page of Flight Behavior becomes, how many are left? How many is “That many”? Thinking that the novel has been a traditional account of a woman character’s growth through education as well as life experiences, the reader may be momentarily confused: Flight Behavior in Kingsolver’s deft hands, however, does not give the reader Dellarobia’s outcome. It does not explain how she likes her college courses, or how much influence she will be able to maintain over her smart young son Preston. Most strikingly, it does not even explain whether she lives or dies. Instead, the narrative’s focus moves entirely to the Monarchs as they shroud the remaining protective trees. The book’s two final paragraphs are Kingsolver’s choice to force the natural world to become integral to the human one, a feat that is accomplished without Dellarobia’s name ever being mentioned.

She was wary of taking her eyes very far from her footing, but now she did that, lifted her sights straight up to watch them passing overhead. Not just a few, but throngs, an airborne zootic force flying out in formation, as if to war. In the middling distance and higher up they all flowed in the same direction, down-mountain, like the flood itself occurring on other levels. The highest ones were faint trails of specks, ellipses. Their numbers astonished her. Maybe a million. The shards of a wrecked generation had rested alive like a heartbeat in trees, snow-covered, charged with resis-tance. Now the sun blinked open on a long impossible time, and here was the exodus. They would gather on other fields and risk other odds, probably no better or worse than hers.

The sky was too bright and the ground so unreliable, she couldn’t look up for very long. Instead her eyes held steady on the fire bursts of wings reflected across water, a merging of flame and flood. Above the lake of the world, flanked by white mountains, they flew out to a new earth. (Flight 433)

Avoiding outright didacticism, Kingsolver draws the reader back into the metaphor of the fragile, lost Monarch butterflies. It is the natural world, even in chaos, that provides information for the reader. Intent on continuing their new lives on some “new earth,” the butterflies—the countless living organisms that are truly facing extinction—have managed to find a place of unexpected life in the midst of disastrous global changes.

The ambiguity Kingsolver creates is itself almost flooded away in these closing scenes. How wide is the implication of “They would gather on other fields and risk other odds, probably no better or worse than hers.” At first, the reader thinks the reference is to Dellarobia’s terrain, the farm, her land. Grammatically, however, it becomes clear that that is far from the author’s intent. Kingsolver is talking about chances. Chances and risks. Just as Dellarobia was about to chance going to college, moving away from the limitations of the Turnbow family and its farm, she is forced into a life-and-death struggle with her own natural world. Her learning about the Monarchs and their defiant processes has brought her, along with them, into a flight path that seems only destructive.

From the earliest scenes in Flight Behavior, Kingsolver has given readers vocabulary that equips them to understand the science of good observation. Early on, when it appeared that this novel was to be a feminist story of Dellarobia’s escape from too-early marriage into ways of learning about life important to her and her questing intelligence, this protagonist’s relationship with her girlhood friend, Dovey, is described as choosing a “flight path.” In one instance, when the women are still in high school, Kingsolver points out their united purpose—to escape their small town lives. Dellarobia and Dovey had “sworn onto a flight plan, older guys with vocabularies and bank accounts, men from anywhere but here” (Flight 41). (The ultra feminine name “Dovey” matches the somewhat ornate “Dellarobia” in creating difference within the female population of the town: these two are prestigious women, beauties worth owning, women who wear unusually fashionable clothes, even if cheap ones, and smoke cigarettes.)

In one of the few positive scenes between Dellarobia and her husband Cub, the author echoes the phrase. Cub, depressed over his father’s desperate need for money, has taken refuge in the loft of his father’s barn. When Dellarobia joins him there, his desperation touches her also and she moves—in a useless search for answers—to the propped-open door at the end of the loft. “A person could just run the length of the haymow and take a flying leap … she could see perfectly well how a person arrived in that flight path: needing an alternative to the present so badly, the only doorway was a high window” (Flight 41). Just as her recklessness here terrifies her, she sees how the financial ruin of the once-prosperous Turnbows marks every member of the family.

The butterflies have also managed to shape Dellarobia’s life in unexpected ways. She has first discovered the bevy of butterflies too numerous to count as she treks up the mountain to meet Jimmy, a young “telephone man”: conventionally, Dellarobia thinks that a new and forbidden romance may bring life to her existence. Instead, stunned by the beauty of this inexplicable mass that covers the trees with its orange and black constancy, she watches it, bemused, and then returns home. She avoids meeting the boy/man who has been flirting with her. Kingsolver’s imagery as Dellarobia absorbs the beauty of the massed insects leads the reader, like her protagonist, to a complicity in the relentless closing scene that is unsurprising: as the would-be-runaway wife watches the spectacle before her, she gives language to that astonishing view, “It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either of those elements alone. The impossible” (Flight 16).

Metonyms for life and death, beauty and a fearful kind of ugliness, the Monarchs and their several conditions take on Biblical overtones as they become the chart for readers’ judgments about Dellarobia and her personal attempts to escape. Can twenty-first-century readers find fault with Cub, the bumbling teenager who chooses to marry Dellarobia when she becomes pregnant? Can the Turnbow family itself—so typically middle-class, religiously conformist, and hard working—be made to seem threatening? Can the sexy Dellarobia, still defining herself through her physical and sexual appetites, be seen primarily as a sympathetic young mother? Can Hester, her mother-in-law, win the reader’s empathy by finally telling Dellarobia the story of her own unwanted first pregnancy? Kingsolver has chosen less than conventional characters as she works out her own flight plan for the narrative of a human world peopled by flawed and confined figures, a world eventually subordinated to the happenings of the natural world that surrounds them.

The ostensible plot of the Monarch butterflies’ searching for refuge is only one layer of Kingsolver’s narrative of ecological changes, all of them dire. In a sense, the glorious color of the huddling butterflies is a bright spot both literal and figurative: the rest of the Appalachian hillside is greyed into a sameness that seems, to Dellarobia, to match the tenor of her days.

No wonder the Monarch colony has attracted so much attention. In a world of financial strain like this one, the luxury of such color—and such abundance—is rare. The awe that tinges Dellarobia’s description of “air filled with quivering butterfly light” (53) stems partly from her unfamiliarity with sheer beauty.

The ecological drift that has taken over the farmers’ lives since Cub’s father, Bear Turnbow, built the modest house for Cub and Dellarobia more than a decade earlier has landed all these farmers into straightened times. Poverty that seems to be unmanageable has arrived: plans must be changed, neighbors must admit to needing help from each other, the patriarchal structure of the Tennessee families has been shaken. Without explanation, Bear Turnbow has more often been supporting his family from the profits of his metal working shop than from the farm. This summer, the crops have failed once again—this time from unrelenting rains. It is for those machine shop tools that he has taken on the balloon note. The note is now due. If he does not log (or, more accurately, clear cut) the hillside forests, he will lose the bulk of his mortgaged tools and once more be dependent on the whimsical weather patterns that have already driven some of his neighbors into bankruptcy. With his farm as collateral for the note, its failure may also take his farm.

At the start of Flight Behavior, Kingsolver makes the reader attend to the visible effects of this killing rain. When Dellarobia begins her climb up the mountain, she works to avoid stumbling over an uprooted tree, intact but dislodged by the wet surround: “After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mount...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1. Flight Behavior: Dellarobia’s Bildungsroman
• 2. The Innocence of The Bean Trees
• 3. Pigs in Heaven and Its Interrogation
• 4. Animal Dreams, a Prototypical Ecological Novel
• 5. The Fiction of Kingsolver’s Non-novels
• 6. Kingsolver as Essayist—A Different Expertise
• 7. Kingsolver as Poet
• 8. The Poisonwood Bible as Apex
• 9. The Prodigality of Prodigal Summer
• 10. Traveling to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
• 11. Small Wonder: Staying Alive and the Bellwether Prizes
• 12. The Lacuna
• 13. Flight Behavior, Our Bildungsroman
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint