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 a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart" (324).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 tyranny. Instead, it is an emotionally and spiritually powerful and moving story about specific human beings (fictionalized or not) resisting specific evils and thereby expressing with their lives, and their deaths, their faith in goodness. Another important particular of the novel is the fact that the heroes are women: "Obviously, these sisters, who fought one tyrant, have served as models for women fighting injustices of all kinds" (324).
The reader who kno...