Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Bean Trees exhibits a feminist consciousness concerning the meaning of family, which emerges in this novel on several levels. The main character, Taylor Greer, leaves her own family behind as she strikes out on her own to find a more fulfilling life, but along the way she develops a new family group in Arizona. The idea of family projected in this novel is associated with a concept of community, and the latter centers on a group of women demonstrating their growing sense of personal power and identity in a world that often requires them to sublimate both in service of a patriarchal family structure.

Nancy Chodorow notes the way the family structure developed through history and the fact that the Western family has been largely the nuclear family for centuries, being households which rarely have more than one married couple with children. In the traditional family, the women's role became centered on child care and taking care of men (Chodorow 4-5). In Kingsolver's novel, this traditional family form disappears to be replaced by a mixed family unit, with adults and children from different households; without a male figure; with duties and responsibilities being shared, including those for child care; and indeed with several people in one household who are not related. The idea of family in this novel is derived from what a family should provide rather than how a family should be structured. Women are still the nurturing force, but they are

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ntimacy as well. Kingsolver indicates her fear on the night her husband leaves: Finally, late in the night, she cried until her eye sockets felt empty. At the beach she had gotten seawater in her eyes and they felt like this. Angel had warned her to keep them shut, but she had wanted to see where she was going. You never knew what kind of thing could be down there under the water (Kingsolver 34). These two women meet and form a unit, offering one another support and security. Each feels she can rely on the other, which is not something they felt about other people before. Taylor has always relied on herself and been the stalwart one, while Lou Ann has always relied on others and then been left feeling betrayed, as when her husband leaves her. The two women become close friends, and again this sense of friendship between women becomes the basis of a new family unit, one stronger and more lasting than the traditional family unit precisely because the women understand one another and know what it is to be a woman in this world. Margaret Randall sees the feminist underpinning of the book as differentiating it from similar fiction by writers like Jack Kerouac or William Eastlake: But it would be misleading to compare Kings

Category: Literature - B