Overview Of Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

Every day, a child is born somewhere in the world, which means that new family is made. The idea of family involves bringing together a group of people who love each other very much, will do anything for each other, and be with them through the good and bad times. The right to choose to stay with one’s family without anyone else’s permission in the present day is not always the same as it has been. Over time, it has changed drastically. So, when families become deprived of their freedom of choice to stay with their family because of the harsh realities of their dictators, problems arise. People start to run and and hide to protect themselves from the realities that they live in. Through these realities, women are expected to play a certain

Kingsolver’s introduction to the book describes how Taylor leaves her home in Kentucky to find a new beginning, and after searching for a home for weeks with a broken down car she tells herself, “Whether my car conked out or not, I made up my mind to live in Arizona” (Kingsolver 49). In relation to the setting of Arizona in the novel, Kingsolver also chooses to move away from home, even though “she had virtually no money, so she rented what she came to see as “a horrible apartment” in downtown Tucson (Wagner-Martin 40). The similarities of Tucson, Arizona as the setting in the novel proves how the author tried to connect her personal experience to the story. Additionally, the novel explains Taylor’s life in Kentucky with her mother, and her new found job that she “learned to look in microscope at red blood cells, platelets they are called though they aren’t like plates but little catchers’ mitts, and to count them in the little squares” (Kingsolver 8). Similarly, after Kingsolver decided to change her major from English to Biology, she landed a job at “the University of Arizona Medical School Physiology Department as a medical technician” (Wagner-Martin 40). Kingsolver purposefully put them into the same field of work so she can have a deeper connection personally in the story. Also, when asked to talk about the purpose of the main

Kingsolver has a strong belief in the fact that women should always be and feel empowered which is why she bases most of her novels off of her philosophy:

Kingsolver’s feminism leads her to create characters who are either slaves to standard gender constructions (such as Barbie in Pigs in Heaven [1993]), refreshingly free of some of the traps of womanhood (such as Taylor in Pigs in Heaven…), or in the process of developing from a redesigned woman with a circumscribed life and imagination to one who dreams and acts (such as Lou Ann in The Bean Trees [1988])...” (Watson