Feminism in Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Bean Trees presents a number of fictional examples of ecriture feminism, particularly as that feminist theory is described by French writer Helene Cixious. This study will examine ways in which Kingsolver's novel reflects the ideas of Cixious. Specifically, Cixious argues, as in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," that it is up to women to define themselves in their lives and in their writing, without the restrictions placed on them by men in this patriarchal society or even by history:

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies---for the same reason, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text---as into the world and into history---by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past (Cixious 245).

Kingsolver's novel reflects these ideas first and foremost in her choice of narrator---Taylor Greer, a strong girl and woman who thinks and acts for herself. Taylor creates her own life and her own identity through thought and action, but Kingsolver follows Cixious's theory by refusing to express hateful views toward most men. To Cixious, this would be simply falling into another patriarchal trap, seeing men as victimizers and women as victims. Cixious is not anti-man, but believes instead that men are capable of breaking free from their own cultural, sexual and historical traps and bia

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onfuse the biological and the cultural (Cixious 245). Taylor's odyssey through America is more importantly an odyssey through herself, an adventure in self-becoming and self-creation. Again, this reflects the ideas of Cixious, as we read in Patricia Reis's Through the Goddess: A Woman's Way of Healing. Reis writes that women have been taught by men that they are weak creatures, afraid of "the dark," which means the unknown. Women are taught---by men and by women who pass along the male warning---that they should fear even leaving the house without a man to protect them from the frightening darkness. Kingsolver's Taylor, however, heads fearlessly out into the darkness, reflecting the ideas of Cixious: By positioning herself and other writing women as Medusae returning from our exile on "the dark continent," [Cixious] reminds us that we have been banished there because we have been taught that "Dark is dangerous. You can't see in the dark, you're afraid. . . . And so we have internalized this horror of the dark" (Reis 82). Taylor's strength comes in part because she has been raised by a strong, supportive mother, and has not ben taught by a father, or any man, that she is a weak creature who should be afraid of the darkness. For

Category: Literature - F