The Bean Trees
by Barbara Kingsolver
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,
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
29
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30 | Introduction to Literary Context: American Post-Modernist Novels
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
029-036_The_Bean_Trees.indd 30
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 stony-heartedness 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.
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The Bean Trees | 31
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
029-036_The_Bean_Trees.indd 31
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
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32 | Introduction to Literary Context: American Post-Modernist Novels
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
029-036_The_Bean_Trees.indd 32
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,
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The Bean Trees | 33
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
029-036_The_Bean_Trees.indd 33
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
64–65).
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
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34 | Introduction to Literary Context: American Post-Modernist Novels
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
029-036_The_Bean_Trees.indd 34
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
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The Bean Trees | 35
published three other novels to date: “Animal
Dreams” (1990), “The Poisonwood Bible” (1998),
and “Prodigal Summer” (2000).
Alyssa Colton
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Barbara Kingsolver:
A Literary Companion. Jefferson, North
Carolina and London: McFarland & Company,
2004
Works Cited
Clarke, Deborah. “Domesticating the Car:
Women’s Road Trips.” Studies in American
Fiction (2004) 32.1: 101–29. 10 December
2005. InfoTrac OneFile
DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A
Critical Companion. Westport, Connecticut and
London: Greenwood Press, 1999
“Guatemala 1.” The Columbia Encyclopedia
(2004). 20 December 2005
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees. New York:
Harper & Row, 1988
“The People of Oklahoma.” Britannica Student
Encyclopedia. 2005. Encyclopædia Britannica
Online. 20 Dec. 2005
For Further Study
Frye, Bob J. “Nuggets of Truth in the Southwest:
Artful Humor and Realistic Craft in Barbara
Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees.” Southwestern
American Literature (spring 2001) 26.2: 73–83
Murrey, Loretta Martin. “The Loner and the
Matriarchal Community in Barbara Kingsolver’s
The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven.” Southern
Studies (1994) 5.1-2: 155–64
Ryan, Maureen. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat
Fiction.” Journal of American Culture (winter
1995) 18.4: 77–83
029-036_The_Bean_Trees.indd 35
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36 | Introduction to Literary Context: American Post-Modernist Novels
Discussion Questions
1. What makes Taylor Greer different from her
peers in Pittman, Kentucky? Why is she “the
one to get away”?
2. Discuss the various ways in which
motherhood is depicted in the novel. What
characteristics are echoed throughout each
depiction? How does each relationship serve
to characterize Taylor’s relationship with
Turtle?
3. Compare and contrast the community of
Pittman, Kentucky and the community in
Tucson that Taylor becomes a part of.
4. Examine the ways in which setting influences
character in each of the three locations
throughout the novel: Pittman, Kentucky;
the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma; and
Tucson, Arizona.
5. Discuss the repetition of religious language
throughout the novel. What does such
language reveal about the author’s attitude
towards religion?
6. Locate and discuss the various scenes in
which imagery of plants and animals occur
in the text.
7. Discuss the “lessons” Taylor learns about
the political situation that forces Estevan and
Esperanza to become refugees. How do these
lessons inform her perspective and shape her
understanding of her world and herself?
8. Compare and contrast the depiction of men
and women in the novel.
9. Discuss your reaction to Taylor’s decision to
employ fraud in order to adopt Turtle. What
other choices do you think she had?
10. Discuss your reaction to the depiction of
Turtle. Is her characterization realistic? Do
you believe she has, or will, fully recover
from her neglect and abuse?
Essay Ideas
1. Write an essay in which you examine the
role of free will and self-determination in
the novel.
2. Many of the characters in “The Bean
Trees” are refugees of some kind. Write an
essay examining the different ways various
characters, including Taylor, might be
considered refugees, and how this depiction
reinforces underlying themes in the novel.
029-036_The_Bean_Trees.indd 36
3. Analyze the use of nature imagery in the novel
and explain how it expands on and reinforces
the underlying themes in the novel.
4. Analyze how setting is developed in the
novel and how it relates to the journey
construction of the novel.
5. Research Bildungsroman and explain in
what ways “The Bean Trees” fits into this
definition.
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