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Overcoming Obstacles In Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

805 Words4 Pages

In the novel The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, Taylor faces many obstacles. Throughout the obstacles that Taylor faces she grows and changes into a new person unlike the one that she was before. Taylor is a girl who does not want to be stuck in her home state of Kentucky any longer. She leaves her mother in Kentucky to try and find a way to create herself a new life. Becoming a mother so quickly and helping Esperanza and Estevan are obstacles that Taylor faces during trying to start her new life. Since she faces some obstacles she grows to become more loving and more selfless.
Taylor has faced many obstacles as she starts her new life and leaves behind some parts of her old life. Becoming a mother so quickly and helping Estevan and …show more content…

As Taylor begins this new chapter in her life she becomes selfless and more loving. Her new selflessness allows for Taylor to grow and change as she lives this new chapter in her life. Taylor care about herself about she also cares about Lou Ann just as much. Lou Ann is always putting herself down and is very insecure about her image. Taylor always tries “to be positive with her, although I’d learned that even compliments” seemed to be insulting to Lou Ann (103). Even though Taylor and Lou Ann just met a few months ago Taylor really care about her. Family is not just the people who you are related to it is also the people who love and care for you all the time. Taylor thinks of Lou Ann as a part of her family and care about her as if she was actually related to her. Now with Turtle in her possession, Taylor wants to provide nothing but safety for her. One day when Taylor was coming home from work, she could sense that something was wrong. Something seemed off as she walked towards the house and “I knew right away that something had gone wrong” (173). Her first instinct was that something was wrong with Turtle. Her new maternal instincts began to kick in and she wanted to know exactly what was wrong. Turtle is her main priority in her life now and she cannot help be worry about her because of her past. In her old

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Have you ever wondered what all immigrants have in common? In the Bean Trees by Barbra Kingsolver it tells about some immigrants from Guatemala. The immigrant experience is classified by not giving up, escaping a past worse life, and making sacrifices. In the bean trees it follows Esparanza, and Estevan two immigrants from Guatemala.

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How The Bean Trees is a coming of age themed novel In The Bean Trees Taylor and Lou Ann struggle to come of age, or mature, with these two being very important characters I believe a major theme of the book is coming of age. There are many pieces of evidence to support this claim, therefore I will provide them. Our first example would have to be Taylor’s journey throughout the book.

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In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Bean Trees, one major social issue that Kingsolver attempts to educate her readers on is xenophobia. Virgie, a character in the novel, is someone Kingsolver uses to demonstrate the presence and effect of xenophobia. During a dinner party with Virgie and Estevan, a refugee working at a restaurant owned by Chinese immigrants, Estevan mentions how he “work[s] with a very kind family who speak only Chinese.” (Kingsolver 111) In response, Virgie “mutter[s] that she thought this was a disgrace,” as Virgie believes that immigrants “ought to stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs.”

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In The Bean Tree’s, Taylor’s character grows and changes quite frequently throughout the book. When Taylor goes off on her own she becomes even more worldly and cultured. Not that she was ever naive, but experiencing and hearing things like Estevan and his wife's story then Turtle’s prowler encounter opens her up to the real corruption in the world which gives her character a strong desire to make the world better and help those who are mistreated. She also becomes more independent and strong willed from these experiences which is apparent from her name changing decisions. For, it is a very private decision and yours alone to

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In my own personal opinion, motherhood does not sound like an easy thing. I mean, think about it, all the responsibilities and precautions you have to take when it comes to taking care of a child. In The Bean Trees, Taylor takes on the role of a mother when she is given a child by a strange woman at a bar in Oklahoma. Even though this child was not legally hers, Taylor decided to care for Turtle.

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This is “bad news” for Taylor, because it means that the government has the right to legally take Turtle away from her. Since Taylor has “no legal claim” to Turtle, she must either find a way to adopt Turtle, or give her up to the government. Taylor has started to learn how to thrive with Turtle, but she must first go through the struggle of finding Turtle’s legal guardian, and having them give Turtle to her. Since she doesn’t even know the name of the woman who gave Turtle to her, finding her, or finding another way to adopt Turtle, will be one of Taylor’s hardest trials in stage three of her journey. After Taylor successfully adopts Turtle, they visit a library while waiting for

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At first Taylor is unsure about what her life may look like but by the end of the story the reader gets to see Taylor with her new family in Tucson, Arizona and predict what may happen next. Without Turtle, Taylor will not get to experience motherhood and will never learn the true definition of love maturity, and

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She looked at her peers and saw how they will become exactly like their parents or worse before they even had a chance to realize or think about planning out their future. A clear example of this is Newt Hardbine. He was not able to continue in high school, but, instead had to work in the tobacco fields alongside his father. Newt then married a girl from the town, simply because the girl, Jolene had the opinion of “why the hell not” instilled in her by her father who shamed her for being a slut. Taylor knew from a young age, that this life was not for her.

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After this incident, Taylor was convinced that she can’t take care of Turtle since she couldn’t keep her safe from the world. According to The Bean Trees, “…That they have the right to take her out of a perfectly good home and put her in some creepy orphanage where they probably make them sleep on burlap bags and feed them pig slop”(Kingsolver 235). Even though, Taylor believed that she can’t keep Turtle safe from this society where people try to hurt a child so young, on the other hand, Lou Ann thinks that Taylor can keep Turtle safer than anybody else. According to Abuse in America, “As of September 30, 2004, there were 517,000 children in foster care in the United States” (“Abuse in America”). This shows that people that are living the way that Lou Ann has described is not safe for children, not to mention that lots of people, because of poverty put their children

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Women , now as much as ever, struggle with gender roles and expectations in society. For example, many would be surprised to learn that a woman who does the same job as a man makes 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Barbara Kingsolver exemplifies this idea in her novel The Bean Trees, a story about a young woman who struggles to survive as she travels across the country from Pittman County to Tucson, OK, illegally adopting a baby along the way. Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees argues that American societies’ gender roles influence the treatment of women as well as shapes their character and personality, pressuring women across America to conform to the propagandized stereotypes. The Bean Trees, specifically regarding Lou Ann, expresses

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