Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez, in her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, presents a fictionalized account of the lives and murders of three sisters who were in fact tortured and killed in 1960 in the Dominican Republic by the secret police of dictator Trujillo for their opposition to his tyranny. A fourth sister survived and her fictional spirit contributes to the telling of this enraging, heartbreaking, and finally inspiring story of tragedy and courage.

As Alvarez writes in the postscript to the novel, she and her own family were exiles from Trujillo's tyranny, leaving the country less than four months before the murder of the Mirabal sisters, known as Las Mariposas, or The Butterflies. In fact, the author's father was active in the underground resistance to Trujillo, along with the four sisters. Alvarez says that she wrote the book in order to try to understand how the sisters came to have such courage unto death. Alvarez emphasizes the fact that "what you find in these pages are not the Mirabal sisters of fact, or even the Mirabal sisters of legend." The author says she has not the facts nor the desire to present a biography of the sisters. Instead, "what you will find here are the Mirabals of my creation, made up but, I hope, true to [their] spirit. . . . A novel is not . . . a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart" (324).

Alvarez' novel is not a theoretical or political argument against Trujillo or dictatorships in general, or for rebellion against ty

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about the lives of the sisters rather than their deaths. The book is not a pessimistic analysis of the eventual victory of evil over good, but is instead a declaration of the goodness of these sisters, and of others, and, by extrapolation, of human existence in general. The time-jumping of the novel is also an effective use of the different voices of the sisters, including and especially Dede, for the surviving sister, in effect, has living within her the spirits of the dead sisters. The reader is not merely moved around in time by a disembodied narrator, but is reminded time and time again that these are real (if "made up" by the author) women who fought and died for freedom and justice, and that this is a woman--Dede--who could have easily died with her sisters but who survived in part precisely for the purpose of keeping their memory alive. Certainly the book does not whitewash the evil of the Trujillo regime or of any tyranny which Trujillo epitomizes. However, instead of focusing on the brutality of the men who perpetrated such evil and cowardly acts upon the sisters and upon countless others in the Dominican Republic, Alvarez drops small images which engender not the reader's hatred of evil but his or her love of these

Category: Literature - J