Women In Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

In John Steinbacks “The Chrysanthemums,” the shift of the setting from the ranch to the road plays an important role in the development of the main character, Elisa. Therefore, in the first setting, Elisa is in her garden attending to her the chrysanthemums, which she loves and cares for. Immediately, we’re placed in a rural setting, where women happen to live in isolation and man is manly. Elisa sneaks quick glances towards the men by the tractor shed, who is talking to her husband, waiting for them to leave, so she can throw aside her gloves and work her fingers into the soil of the garden. However, Elisa shows her fearless side by quickly digging in the garden, with her eagerness to grow her chrysanthemums, right after the men leave. Consequently,

Racial and gender biases have been constant issues throughout history. From the persecution of women in the early America to modern day victimization of people based solely upon race, gender and racial biases have shaped and continue shaping history in a major way. While modern America is known for being an all-welcoming country of free speech and mutual respects throughout races, hidden racial and gender biases are often overlooked, leading to the manifestation of these biases in people and their community. In The Bean Trees, a novel set in 1980s America, Barbara Kingsolver illustrates the presence of racial and gender biases and their effect on the community. Through the characters victimized by these biases, Kingsolver illustrates that

In the novel The Bean Trees, Kingsolver’s belief that people survive through another 's generosity and empathy recur throughout the novel. This belief holds truth as many of the characters within Kingsolver’s novel find survival within the empathy and generosity they receive from others. The relationship between Taylor and Turtle reflect this theme through their mother-daughter relationship. Kingsolver’s belief also holds truth with Estevan and Esperanza’s situation and the help they receive. Kingsolver even weaves her belief within the relationships between minor characters such as Virgie and Edna as well as Sandi and Kid Central Station.

It has often been said that once you spend enough time with someone and create a strong bond with them, you end up becoming very close and considering them family. What has also been said is that we find friendships when we need it most. As important as family is in real life, it is often shown that in literature, authors use this concept to offer a clear understanding on how close an individual can get to someone within months. Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates the importance of family through Taylor in her novel The Bean Trees, as she creates strong relationships on her way through life.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s story, “The Bean Trees”, something that makes it so effective is her use of figurative language to depict scenery. In chapter 12, Mattie takes Taylor, Esperanza and Estevan to a beautiful desert at the time of the first rain, so they can see the natural world come to life. In order to make the scene come alive, Kingsolver uses sillies, metaphors and personification as a mean of figurative language.

One of the most predominant themes in “The Woman Warrior” is finding ones voice. Throughout the book, voice is referenced many times and most often as a disability of the women in Kingston’s memoirs. Being voiceless is not always a defect that one is born with but can also be due to societal pressures and expectations. The women that appeared as voiceless in the book were most often the ones that did not have an identity of their own. They simply led their lives following someone with a voice hoping that they would be able to live under the shelter of other’s voices. Kingston gave voice to women in this book that were not able to speak for themselves and to deny the accusations and taunts of society. She expresses in the beginning of her book how

Speaker: Alice Walker writes in a first person point of view. The speaker is a single mother who “never had an education” (Walker 49). She is a minority, and accepts the lower status: “Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in in the eye?” (48). The mother refuses to challenge the people society deem as better than her.

Walker’s essay shows the dehumanization and abuse that black women have endured for years. She talks about how their creativity was stifled due to slavery. She also tells how black women were treated more like objects than human beings. They entered loveless marriages and became prostitutes because of the injustice upon them. Walker uses her mother’s garden to express freedom, not only for her but for all the black women who had been wronged. Walker described her mother as radiant when she was planting, her work outshining the wrongdoings done to her and the people before her. The garden was where her mother could make truly make “art.” The garden was also a representation of the creativity of the women who hold a talent close to their heart

Maxine Hong Kingston's use of talk stories in The Woman Warrior emphasizes that individuals will find a more fulfilling life if they defy the traditional gender norms place on them by society. While contemplating beauty standards in Chinese society in “No Name Woman” Maxine Kingston thinks, “Sister used to sit on their beds and cry together… as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush back into their veins” (9). From a young age girls are expected to be binding their feet and are told that it is to look beautiful, but in reality that is not why. When a womans feet are bound they are restrained and silenced. These girls could be free and happy but they are restrained by men through this binding. Kingston reveals another example of how defying gender roles can lead to a better life in her story “Shaman.” As her mom is

Ultimately, the human heart seeks comfort and familiarity. The great unknown strips away this feeling of safety, leading to a vulnerability that draws the true nature of a person into the harshness of reality. Unfamiliar environments, newly met strangers, the imminent and all-too-unpredictable future--these things generally incite feelings of insecurity and anxiety; for some, panic accompanies the thought of not having control. Some avoid matters of fear altogether, opting for a life softened with intentional ignorance. It is the fatal tendency of mankind to manipulate their troubles into trivial tasks that can easily be ignored and eventually forgotten, or at the very least, left to the side. Humanity thrives on acknowledging, promoting, and

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.

Taylor comes from a nontraditional family. She was raised by her mother, who worked long hours as a housekeeper to support Taylor and herself. Her father, Foster Greer, left her mother when he found out that her mother was pregnant. Her mother doesn 't mind that Foster left; in fact, she often tells Taylor that "trading Foster for [you] was the best deal this side of the Jackson Purchase." As Taylor matures and is exposed to horrible things that fathers can say and do to children, she feels quite lucky to have grown up without a father. The resiliency of Taylor 's mother and her commitment to Taylor, as well as her indifferent attitude toward men, represent Kingsolver 's feminist

The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s. Skeeter, a southern society girl, interviews the black women who have spent their lives being servants for wealthy white Southern families. There are various scenes throughout the film that show social stratification, racial inequalities, gender inequalities, and class inequalities.

Afro-American women writers present how racism permeates the innermost recesses of the mind and heart of the blacks and affects even the most intimate human relationships. While depicting the corrosive impact of racism from social as well as psychological perspectives, they highlight the human cost black people have to pay in terms of their personal relationships, particularly the one between mother and daughter. Women novelists’ treatment of motherhood brings out black mothers’ pressures and challenges for survival and also reveals their different strategies and mechanisms to deal with these challenges. Along with this, the challenges black mothers have to face in dealing with their adolescent daughters, who suffer due to racism and are heavily influenced by the dominant value system, are also underlined by these writers. They portray how a black mother teaches her daughter to negotiate the hostile, wider world, and prepares her to face the problems and challenges boldly and confidently.

The Woman Warrior is a “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts” in which Maxine Hong Kingston recounts her experiences as a second generation immigrant. She tells the story of her childhood by intertwining Chinese talk-story and personal experience, filling in the gaps in her memory with assumptions. The Woman Warrior dismantles the archetype of the typical mother-daughter relationship by suggesting that diaspora redefines archetypes by combining conflicting societal norms.