Content Synopsis
"The Bean Trees" follows the journey of a young woman from a small Kentucky town to
Tucson, Arizona. Marietta Greer is determined to be different, to not become pregnant
and wind up stuck in a dead-end marriage like many of the girls around her. Her mother,
who supports herself and her daughter working as a domestic, believes in her daughter
and believes she can do just about anything she sets her mind to. After five and a half
years of working in a lab at the hospital, Marietta buys a used car and announces she's
leaving.
When Marietta drives out of her small hometown of Pittman, Kentucky, she vows that she
will change her name and that she will drive west until her car stops running. Her first
promise is fulfilled, and she changes her name to Taylor after the name of the town
where she runs out of gas. The second promise she breaks, because it turns out to be in
the "great emptiness" of the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma (13). She reflects on the
irony of finding herself stranded there, since her family has Cherokee roots. It is while
she's at a bar next door to the repair shop that she encounters a woman with a young
child, who then leaves the child in Taylor's car. Not knowing what else to do, Taylor
drives to a motel, and, having no money for a room, she talks the owners into letting her
stay there in exchange for doing housekeeping. She ends up befriending the owners and
staying with them for several weeks. In January, she takes off again, with the little girl,
whom she's named Turtle. Turtle has quickly attached herself to Taylor, literally clutching
onto her tightly and reminding Taylor of turtles from back home. While Taylor guesses
the little girl is about two, when she takes her to a doctor at a later point in the novel,
they discover she is at least a year older, and that there is evidence of sustained abuse.
The doctor calls the stunting in her growth and development "failure to thrive."
Taylor stops in Tucson after her tires go flat. Here she meets Mattie, the owner of Jesus
Is Lord Used Tires. Since she can't afford new tires, Taylor decides to stay. She
eventually gets a job working at Mattie's shop. In her search for a place to live, she finds
Lou Ann Ruiz, also a transplanted Kentuckian, whose husband has left her and her infant.
Lou Ann becomes a friend, and by the end of the book Taylor considers Lou Ann and her
son Dwayne Ray her family. Mattie, who shelters refugees from Guatemala, also becomes
another important person in her life. Taylor learns about the political repercussions of
American involvement in Central America first-hand when she meets Estevan and
Esperanza, who have escaped persecution for their involvement with a teacher's union in
Guatemala. Esperanza is grieving for their lost daughter and is drawn to Turtle. Taylor
falls in love with Estevan, but knows she can't pursue a relationship with him. The two
spend a night together on the couch, becoming intimate but not sexual, while Esperanza
is in the hospital for attempting to kill her-self.
One day while Turtle is in a nearby park with a blind neighbor, a man approaches them,
possibly to assault or abduct Turtle. Turtle escapes him, but the attempt undoes all the
progress she has made in her development, as she reverts back to silence and inactivity.
When the police and social services take the report, the circumstances of her "adoption"
become problematic. After a crisis of conscience in which she feels unfit to be Turtle's
mother and believes Turtle would perhaps be better off in a foster home, Taylor decides
to try to legally adopt her.
Taylor subsequently volunteers to drive Estevan and Esperanza to Oklahoma, where they
will be able to pass as Cherokees. The trip will also give her the opportunity to find out
what she can about Turtle's family. When she returns to the bar where she had first seen
Turtle, however, the bar has turned into a diner and there is no sign of anyone she'd
seen before. Taylor realizes then that there "had never been the remotest possibility of
finding any relative of Turtle's" but that she had made this trip for a reason unknown to
her: "I must have wanted something, and wanted it badly" (203). She decides to go to
Lake o' the Cherokees, a scenic area on the reservation, without really knowing why.
While they are there, Taylor connects Turtle's love of burying with her cries of "Mama"
when she sees a cemetery. She asks Turtle if she'd seen her mother get buried, and
Turtle affirms her suspicion. It is at that point that it is clear to Taylor that she is meant
to keep Turtle. The next day Taylor goes to the office of a notary with Estevan and
Esperanza, who pose as Turtle's parents giving her up for adoption. The papers are then
filed for a "legal" adoption of Turtle. Taylor says good-bye to Estevan and Esperanza at a
church, and she and Turtle head back to Tucson.
The book's title refers to the recurring image of the bean tree, or wisteria plant,
throughout the novel. As Taylor discovers at the end of the book, the plant is able to
flourish in poor soil because of rhizobia, a microbe that nourishes its roots. The image
underscores the importance of the mostly female community that nourishes Taylor and
her adopted daughter.
Historical Context
"The Bean Trees" is set in the early 1980s and can be read as a critique of "the stonyheartedness of conservative bureaucrats [who] generated a selfishness and lack of
compassion for the downtrodden" characterized by the Reagan era (Snodgrass 92).
Turtle is given to Taylor when she is on the Cherokee reservation. The Cherokee was one
of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes who was moved by the U.S. government from the
southeastern United States to Oklahoma in the 1830s and 1840s. This trip, which
resulted in many deaths and hardships, is often referred to as the Trail of Tears. Once the
Cherokee and other tribes were established, however, "they prospered," building their
own homes and schools and participating in the drafting of the state constitution ("People
of Oklahoma" par. 3).
The characters of Estevan and Esperanza, as well as the other refugees Mattie hides and
helps to safety, represent real historical political refugees who were lucky enough to
escape the brutal, repressive regimes of the time in Latin America. Kingsolver herself
helped refugees from Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala in 1986 (Snodgrass 15). Estevan
and Esperanza are Mayans from Guatemala, where at the time the non-democratic
government was engaged in anti-insurgency campaigns that resulted in the destruction of
Indian villages and the deaths of tens of thousands. ("Guatemala" 1)
Societal Context
A self-described political writer, Kingsolver addresses social issues on many fronts.
Women's empowerment, class consciousness, political oppression, and racism all play
roles to varying degrees in the novel.
In her study of women's road narratives, critic Deborah Clarke compares "The Bean
Tree" to Bobbie Ann Mason's "In Country" for its use of the automobile as marking a new
symbolic connection to women's freedom in the 1980s. She notes that in the twentieth
century, women's narratives opened up to include stories of travel, marking a move
beyond traditional stories of house and home: "No longer relegated to waiting, women
wrote increasingly about journeys, about mobility, and about the power inherent in this
increased freedom. The motif of the journey, so long associated with men, from
Odysseus to Sal Paradise, comes up more and more in women's texts." (Clarke par. 1)
In "The Bean Trees," by presenting female characters such as Taylor, Taylor's mother,
and Mattie, the car repair shop owner, Kingsolver "tweaks women's traditional roles
without eradicating them." (Clarke, par. 30) This is because all three women take on the
mother role while also displaying skills in handling car maintenance and repair, a
traditionally male domain. Taylor's mother supports herself and her daughter and
challenges her to learn how to maintain the used car Taylor has purchased. Mattie, the
tire-shop owner, exhibits care- giving tendencies in her sheltering of Latin American
refugees. Taylor, who eventually takes a job with Mattie, becomes a mother in the novel
ironically as she is trying to escape the future of many of her peers in Kentucky of
becoming "barefoot and pregnant" at a young age. In addition, the novel represents a
departure from the historical and more popular convention of the happy marriage as
ending; Taylor's love interest is married and remains faithful to his wife. Thus in the
novel, despite its depiction of single motherhood and divorce, marriage and family remain
sacrosanct.
As a daughter of the working class from the socially stratified town of Pittman, Taylor is
keenly aware of class divisions. She compares herself at the very beginning to the
Hardbines, whose clan's father we first see being propelled into the air by an exploding
tractor tire. At the same time as she clearly notes the differences between herself and
them, she also is careful to acknowledge that she and Newt Hardbine were in the same
class and that they were "cut out of basically the same mud" (2). Yet clearly Taylor as a
young child has a sense of her own equality, since she insisted that she be called "Miss"
Marietta as she "had to call all the people including the children in the houses where [her
mother] worked Miss this or Mister that" (2). Later in the novel Taylor tells Estevan about
Pittman and makes distinctions among the different groups: the town kids, whose
parents were the business owners; the hoodlums (the "motorcycle types"); and the farm
kids, also called the Nutters, because they would pick nuts. Estevan likens her description
to the Indian caste system. A slightly less obvious comparison here is the oppression of
the Mayans in Guatemala, which is represented by Estevan and Esperanza.
Kingsolver, who was pregnant when she wrote the novel but did not experience life as a
single mother, also addresses the struggles of poor, single mothers in the United States,
struggles still very much relevant to readers twenty years later. In addition to Lou Ann,
Taylor befriends another woman, Sandi, at a fast food restaurant. Sandi's strategy for
handling childcare on minimum wage is to drop her child off at a free mall childcare
center and to dash in on her breaks. Taylor rightly sees this as inadequate, especially for
the already developmentally-delayed Turtle. By moving in with Lou Ann, Taylor finds an
alternative arrangement by making a family of sorts, where Taylor and Lou Ann support
each other, as an egalitarian married couple might, showing that building community is a
vital activity for low-income families.
Contrasts between urban and rural landscapes also reveal in a more subtle way
Kingsolver's dedication to environmental concerns and to her sensitivity to the ways in
which these landscapes shape communities. Taylor and Lou Ann live near a park that she
nicknames "Dog Doo Park." Taylor describes it as "pretty awful. There were only a couple
of shade trees, which had whole dead parts, and one good-for-nothing palm tree so
skinny and tall that it threw its shade onto the roof of the cooler-pad factory down the
block" (111). The grass reminds her of "an animal with mange" (111). The description
reminds readers that parks in poor urban neighborhoods are subject to neglect and are
often surrounded by industry. Still, it has its redeeming feature: wisteria, the bean tree
plant. Taylor calls it "the Miracle of Dog Doo Park," thus reinforcing the theme of the
novel. Dog Doo Park acts as a contrast to another park Taylor goes to, a "little hideaway
by a stream" which they get to by car, a place described as having white rocks, clear
water, and a ring of cottonwood trees. It is a place where Taylor and her friends bask in
the sun, "feeling too good to move" (91). Such a place is nourishing to them, yet because
it must be reached by car and then by a footpath, it is also less accessible.
Religious Context
Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes Kingsolver's religious outlook as "a homemade patchwork
based on experience" and as infusing her fiction with "the human yearning for a faith
suited to idiosyncratic needs" (172). Certainly Taylor seems to view religion, particularly
a grassroots form of Christianity, in a humorous yet tolerantly respectful light. She
gleefully observes when her car breaks down in Oklahoma that she's in the Cherokee
nation, a place that connects her to a full-blooded Cherokee grandfather. One of the few
things she seems to know about the Cherokee is that they "believed God was in trees"
and that when she used to climb high up in trees her mother would tell her that she was
"'trying to see God'" (13). This observation expresses her feeling of being different,
foreshadowing her escape from Pittman and her own unique life path.
The connections between religion and community are made clear through Lou Ann and
the arrival of her baby. In the first chapter in which we meet Lou Ann, she is planning on
a Catholic baptism for her baby, "purely for practical reasons; if one of the grandmothers
was going to have a conniption, it might as well be the one who was eighteen hundred
miles away" (28). After the baby is born, Granny Logan and Lou Ann's mother come to
visit from Kentucky, creating more tension for Lou Ann. Lou Ann's mother continually
hums one line of a hymn, "'All our sins and grief's to bear'," over and over until Lou Ann
thought she would scream" (53). Granny Logan gives Lou Ann a bottle of water brought
all the way from Kentucky in order to baptize the baby. Later, Lou Ann reacts to Granny's
slur on her husband's Mexican ethnicity by muttering that she's prejudiced because he
hadn't been baptized "in some old dirty crick" (59). Religion, then, is a cultural
attachment, one that is shaken off when Lou Ann leaves behind Kentucky and her family.
By contrast, Taylor's religious sensibility seems to be tied closely with her own unique
take on the world. Faith is at issue, but religion becomes more of a metaphor for Taylor's
own faith in herself. When she is in the bar next door to the repair shop in Oklahoma, she
notices that someone on the television keeps saying, "Praise the Lord. 1-800-THE LORD."
(17). This is the place where she first sees the woman with the child who will turn out to
be Turtle. After the child is left in her car, Taylor wonders what she will do and tells the
child that she may have to call 1-800-THE LORD (20). Instead she finds a motel where
two women agree to let her stay in exchange for housekeeping work. The first contact
with someone meaningful in Tucson is Mattie, the owner of Jesus Is Lord Used Tires.
Taylor is partly attracted to the place because of its echo of the 1-800 phone numbers.
Mattie is not who Taylor expects; after noticing that Mattie has a mug with cartoon
rabbits fornicating on it she thinks, "I can't figure this woman out. This was definitely not
1-800- THE LORD" (41). Later, after Mattie announces that the Lord is sending a
message for them to go to a desert oasis, she sums up Mattie's religious leanings as "just
one damn thing after another" (91).
At the end of the novel, Taylor actually calls the 800 number, on an impulse, even though
she knows she doesn't "really need any ace in the hole" (226). A recording answers and
tells her that "the Lord helps those that help themselves" and asks for a pledge to the
Fountain of Faith missionary fund (226). When a woman comes on the line to take her
pledge, Taylor thanks her for the number's existence, as it's been her own "Fountain of
Faith." When the woman asks if she'd like to make a pledge, Taylor asks for money or a
hot meal for herself. After she hangs up, she feels like doing cartwheels. Her joy can be
interpreted as her satisfaction in succeeding in her struggles, from first finding herself the
unwitting mother of a young child, to making a home in a new city. Just as the recording
has indicated, she's helped herself. Kingsolver here turns religious rhetoric on its head by
having the toll-free number stand in for any representation of a Jesus or God. The
number, merely in its religious promise, is the one that represents faith, but when Taylor
calls it, she finds it's only another organization asking for money, not one that will offer
any real help for her. Perhaps, Kingsolver seems to say, it is through the self and
community that real spiritual work is done.
Scientific & Technological Context
In her analysis of women's road narratives, Deborah Clarke observes the connections
between the automobile, one of the most influential technological advances in the
twentieth century, and women. Clarke notes that Taylor "drives a car that contains few of
the advances of twentieth-century automobile technology such as windows and starters.
In push-starting her car, she evokes the days of the crank engines, aligning herself with
… intrepid women …who refused to let the necessary physical exertion keep them from
the automobile "(Clarke, par. 28). The kind of relationship between a woman and her car
that is depicted in "The Bean Trees" challenges assumptions about male power, which is
often connected with almost-secretive knowledge and brute strength. The car is a
particularly powerful symbol, in that it represents a person's ability to leave and go long
distances easily and independently. Yet, as Clarke suggests, for Taylor the car becomes a
domestic space; Turtle is left in the car and it acts as place for Taylor to sleep.
As a trained scientist herself, Kingsolver can't help but include her own scientific
knowledge in her writing. This knowledge is put to use through plant and animal imagery.
As noted in the synopsis, the wisteria, or bean plant, is an important thematic tool in the
novel. According to Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Kingsolver "makes use of the lowly bean as a
double symbol of humility and of nature's building blocks." (50). Snodgrass notes that
beans and plants in general, become an important teaching and communication tool for
Taylor and Turtle. Turtle's language mainly consists of the names of plants; she is also
especially interested in planting activities, which is later explained by Taylor's realization
that she must have seen her mother be buried. In comparing Turtle's development to
food such as corn, Kingsolver places human life "within the greater context of nature"
(Snodgrass, 51).
The night before Taylor plans to leave for Oklahoma with Turtle, Estevan, and Esperanza,
her neighbor beckons her over to see the rare sight of the night-blooming cereus in full
flower. Lou Ann calls it a good sign for their trip. The blooming of the cereus "seems by
its loveliness to transform the world and people around it, and in predicting something
good it foreshadows the knitting up of plot strands at the end of the novel" (DeMarr 6465).
At another point in the novel, Kingsolver also adds an emotional depth to Taylor by
depicting her response to the scene of a mother quail rounding up her babies in the road:
"Something about the whole scene was trying to make tears come up in my eyes" (96).
By showing her response to the quail, the author prevents the situation with Turtle from
becoming too sentimental while also giving Taylor the emotional responsiveness of a
mother. Other birds appear throughout the novel, in another, more subtle motif. In one
scene, just after the frightening incident with Turtle in the park, Taylor busies herself in
the kitchen with trying to free a bird trapped in the kitchen. In another more obvious
scene, just after Taylor is told by the doctor that Turtle had been subjected to continual
abuse that prevented her from growing, she marvels at a bird that has made a nest in a
cactus.
Biographical Context
Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, but spent most of her
childhood in the small town of Carlisle, Kentucky. Her father was a family physician; her
mother is described as "an avid birdwatcher and true mountaineer in thought and accent"
and "unorthodox" (Snodgrass, 7). She is the middle of three children. Growing up where
she did supplied her with "her liberal, humanistic conscience, the moral compass of her
writing" (Snodgrass, 8). Like Pittman, the fictional town where Taylor Greer is from,
Carlisle was a small community whose agriculture was focused on tobacco. Here
Kingsolver also witnessed the sharp divisions of class that Taylor describes in "The Bean
Trees," divisions marked by the wealthy from Lexington and the poor from Appalachia.
As the area's only doctor for thirty-six years, Dr. Wendell Kingsolver did not get rich in
his practice, sometimes accepting vegetables for payment from his poor clients. As
Kingsolver grew up, so did the awareness of her own poverty. According to Mary Ellen
Snodgrass, her inability to afford new clothes "placed her in the local pecking order
among country kids, a caste below the children of store owners, mine bosses, and county
bureaucrats," a status that mirrors Taylor Greer's (10).
From 1963 to 1966, Kingsolver's family lived in a small village in the central Congo, in
western Africa, where her father had a public health post for two years. This was when
the Congo had just achieved independence from Belgium; her experiences there form
material for a later novel, "The Poisonwood Bible." Here, Kingsolver learned what it was
like be a minority, taking away from the experience "an acutely heightened sense of race,
of ethnicity," a sensibility that informs her characterization of Estevan and Esperanza in
"The Bean Trees." (Kingsolver; qtd. in Snodgrass, 9)
Kingsolver attended DePauw University on a music scholarship, but as a sophomore
elected to pursue a B.S. in zoology and a minor in English. While there she was raped in
1974. Turtle could represent the innocence that she lost in the attack and an early
attempt at coping with the memory of the trauma. (She would later write about the rape
in her poetry and in an essay.)
Kingsolver graduated with honors in 1977. In 1979, after spending some time in Europe,
she drove from Carlisle, Kentucky to Tucson, Arizona, a trip that she fictionally depicts in
"The Bean Trees." She has been living there ever since. In 1981, she earned an M.S. in
animal behavior from the University of Arizona, thereafter working as a research
assistant and technical writer. Kingsolver's training in biology is clearly evident in the
novel, with its recurring images of plants and other natural phenomena.
Pregnant with her first child and suffering bouts of insomnia, Kingsolver wrote her first
novel, "The Bean Trees" in 1986. The book was published in 1988. "Pigs in Heaven"
(1993), called a "non-sequel," continues the story of Taylor and Turtle, in which the
consequences of Turtle's adoption cause more challenges for the little family. The author
of nonfiction, poetry, and short stories, Kingsolver has published three other novels to
date: "Animal Dreams" (1990), "The Poisonwood Bible" (1998), and "Prodigal Summer"
(2000).