The Bean Trees Chapter Summary

The Bean Trees explains how men can shape the personalities, attitudes, and characters of women, sometimes boosting their confidence, sometimes depriving women of their confidence. The Bean Trees forces the reader to focus on women in

The definition of motherhood is “the state of being a mother.” Throughout the novel, The Bean Trees, written by Barbara Kingsolver, Taylor Greer learns the simple things about motherhood when a toddler, Turtle, is thrown in her car. Learning to raise the child brings up many tough decisions and obstacles, letting Tayor experience what love really is. Readers get to see everything Taylor does, reading through her eyes and getting to watch her mature into a young, independent individual. In the book, the storyline revolves around Taylor Greer’s growth, as she explores motherhood through love, maturity, and sacrifice.

The Bean Trees takes place in rural Pittman County in Kentucky. Taylor Greer, the narrator, and main character, talks about her childhood and her years as a teenager. Later on in life she starts to travel the country and a stranger drops off a kid in her car and she decides to take her in and take care of her.

In Chapter One of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster points out that almost every trip in literature is a quest. The five elements to a quest are: a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials, and the real reason to go. Gene is the quester in A Separate Peace by John Knowles. He visited the Devon School, where he had been a student fifteen years before, to see two “fearful sites,” (Knowles 10). While at the school, he noticed that it looked new, which he found slightly unsettling, for “...it made the school look like a museum...” (Knowles 9). The first site that he visited was a marble staircase that was “...the same as ever,” (Knowles 11). Gene implies that he also had not changed much, except he “...had more money, success, and ‘security’,” (Knowles 12) than before. He then battles his way through mud, rain, and cold to see a tree by the Devon River. This act of determination highlights the importance of his visit to the tree. He notes that the tree seems smaller. By seeing how the tree had changed, Gene changed,

Thought out a persons ever changing life, the one thing that is always consistent is their name. However, sometimes a persons identity will change so much that their own name seems foreign when speaking it out loud. This creates the need for a new name to match a new identity. Kingsolvers The Bean Trees and Lena Coakley’s Mirror Image both apply characterization, conflict, and symbolism to show how identity changes with names and labels.

There is always someone that is considered to be a catalyst of change in their lives and the lives of those that surround them. In the novel “The Bean Trees”, the main character named Taylor, who from a very young age, knows that she needs to make changes in her life if she is to not become like the other girls in her small Kentucky town. Taylor embodies a personality of progression and individuality. In the novel Taylor goes through different stages of transformation and learning toward personal maturity that can be divided into 4 major segments. Those segments being first her hometown life and when she decides to move away, second when she arrives to where she moved to, third her developments with the people she meets, and finally her final commitment she makes to

With the exception of Angel and Lou Ann’s relationship, it seems like every personal interaction in The Bean Trees is equal parts of give and take. For example, Virgie Mae helps Edna Poppy who is blind, while Edna Poppy runs interference on Virgie’s inappropriate remarks. Lou Ann teaches Taylor how to hone her abilities, and Taylor calms and reassures Lou Ann. Even Estevez and Esperanza are symbiotic; they have been through so much, with their illegal immigration that they cannot function outside of one another. In what ways do these relationships, and the other, less prominent relationships in The Bean Trees promote a network of reliance? Think of the quote, “It takes a village to raise a child", how do these reciprocal relationships enable

Some people mature faster than others, and some take their time doing so. In the book The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, a young woman named Taylor happens to end up with a little girl, Turtle. Throughout the story, Kingsolver mentions birds often. Birds represent maturity to Turtle. She use birds to compare to Turtle's life and her situations while she is maturing and growing up.

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver uses birds to represent several of the main characters in the novel. Taylor saw in the desert birds nesting in a cactus which shows the connection between several characters in the novel. Turtle represents the birds in the nest because she is depending on taylor just like the birds depend on the cactus for shelter. Also it shows how how turtle in not where she is meant to be because birds usually nest on trees. Lou ann represents the nest. The nest is there to protect the birds from the sharp cactus and lou ann protects turtle from any danger , like a safety net. Finally Taylor symbolises the cactus that provides for everyone and everyone depends on.

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 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. By this I mean how she continued to understand what she needed to do and did those things no matter the difficulty. An instance would be when she was stuck with Turtle, Or maybe how she made sure to hunt for a job to keep a roof over her and Turtle’s head. Lou Ann doesn’t begin maturing until she meets Taylor as we find out she cannot speak about her problems

In “How Flowers Changed the World” by Loren Eiseley is described the Earth as a barren. Deserted planet hundred million years ago, just likes Mars. After millions of years, a new greener Earth presence appeared on the platforms of the continent and there were still no flowers at all. About one hundred million years ago, “just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles” (360) there occurred a “violent explosion” (360) a mystery happened. Flowers appeared and changed the face of the planet. The Evolution of the planet takes thousand millions of years.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Bean Trees, Taylor represents a bildungsroman character. A bildungsroman story is a coming of age story that consists of four stages. In the first stage of a bildungsroman character’s journey, she experiences a loss or painful experience that drives her to start a new life. The character goes through a baptismal rite in the second stage, which always involves water. The character endures many difficult trials in the third stage, but ends up gaining a new insight about life in the fourth stage. Taylor’s journey in the Bean Trees has all four of these stages, making her a bildungsroman character. Although Taylor’s desire for independence begins her journey, she eventually realizes people need a network

Within the novel “The Bean Trees”, written by Barbara Kingsolver. Within the book, abuse is taken into different terms. Abuse is not only physical, but it can also be categorized as sexual, mental, verbal, psychological, financial, elder, and spiritual abuse. The only four types of abuse that were introduced into the book was sexual, physical, verbal, and

The essay “How Flowers Changed the World” is a popular excerpt from The Immense Journey, written by American natural science writer, Loren Eiseley that discusses the significance of the rise of flowers on the evolution of living organisms. Eiseley implied that flowers carry many different significant attributes to the growth of living organisms may it be for animals, for other plants, and for humankind.