In The Time Of Butterflies Gender Analysis

According to Angelo Codevilla, “Each culture is largely defined by the ways in which men and women within it come together to raise children, and each regime defines itself substantially by how it affects those ways…But every regime affects families by making the conditions in which they live” (Codevilla 169). In Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies (1994), referred to as ITTOB henceforth, which is a historical novel set in the Dominican Republic, family is the impetus behind revolution. The regime becomes the decider of the fates of individuals as well as their families, and in response the family becomes the main reason to resist the repressive regime. During this process, however, the concept of family itself is redefined and becomes more egalitarian

in Ink 788).

This patriarchal sexist political stance can be understood from Trujillo being referred to as the ‘Benefactor of the Fatherland’. He was projected by his regime as a benevolent authoritative paternal figure that guided the nation. This image concealed a host of exploitation of and abuses against the citizens of the Dominican Republic. It was essential to his act of being the saviour/father of the nation. He was referred to as El Jefe, by his public/children, a term that was used with a mixture of reverence and endearment. Alvarez sets up Minerva’s own father, Enrique Mirabal, as a sort of Trujillo like figure, albeit at a much smaller scale. Rosa Linda Fregoso in her essay “Julia Alvares, In the Time of Butterflies” point out that

“At the micro-level, Alvarez uses images of an authoritarian father and Catholicism to question the twin pillars of women’s oppression in provincial Dominican society. The patriarch of the Mirabal family embodies male privilege in Latin American families, directing his controlling gaze primarily at his most rebellious daughter, Minerva” (Fregoso