The Bean Trees
Taylor (born Marietta) grew up in Pittman, Kentucky, a small rural town where families "had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown," and a boy with a job as a gas-meter man was considered a "high-class catch." She needs to get out to get ahead and to avoid pregnancy. She succeeds on both counts when she buys a '55 Volkswagen and heads west. She leaves almost everything behind, including her name. (Taylor is the name she adopts when she runs out of gas in Taylorville, Illinois.) When her steering fails somewhere in central Oklahoma, in country owned by the Cherokee nation, she stops for repairs at a roadside service station. A Cherokee woman looks at Taylor and sees a chance for her dead sister's child to escape a life of abuse and alcoholism. She hands the child over to Taylor and disappears. Taylor's journey of self-discovery suddenly becomes a transition into a relationship where she is not the most important person.
Taylor and her adopted child, Turtle, travel to Tucson, Arizona, where more car troubles land them at a shop known as Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. The owner of this odd establishment is a woman named Mattie, a serene, big-hearted soul who shelters political refugees from Guatemala, and who gives Taylor a job. Taylor and Turtle find a room with Lou Ann Ruiz, a self-described "ordinary Kentuckian a long way from home," and her newborn baby Dwayne Ray. The relationship between these two single mothers, one never married, one divorcing, and their relationships with the people around them are the focus of the story. After a few months, Taylor needs to rent an apartment. She ends up sharing an apartment with Lou Ann and her son, Dwayne Ray. Together Taylor, Turtle, Mattie, two refugees, Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray learn about friendship and belonging. Their lessons are learned through many experiences, including confrontations with Lou Ann's ex-husband, Angel, Dr. Pelinowsky, and others they meet along the way. Ties of family, friends, blood and love are what sustain the characters through hard times and heartbreaks. The supportive connections between people are likened to a symbiosis, interdependency in the most positive sense.
It didn't seem to matter to Turtle, she was happy where she was. The sky went from dust-color to gray and then cool black sparked with stars, and she was still wide awake.
Moving forward in their adventure together, Taylor feels that she is more mature than she ever was and realizes that being a mother is not a bad thing. The adoption certificate symbolizes evidenceevidence, and the freedom of discrimination that some people may have against her. Taylor expresses, “That means you’re my kid,’ I explained, ‘and I’m your mother, and nobody can say it isn’t so” (p.311). This tells us how satisfies Taylor is to become a mother for Turtle. Although it was the goal of her to avoid getting pregnant, now she finally understands that being a mother is such a wonderful experience that anyone can ever have. Honestly, Taylor loves Turtle with her whole heart and will make Turtle feel safe. Taylor becoming a mother is a great advantage for Turtle because Taylor has very good personalities that will make Turtle a happier girl and eventually get influenced by it.Firstly, Taylor’s car is an important thing that helped Taylor to move out of her little town of Kentucky. Secondly, a memorable event that occurs to Taylor is Turtle’s first-word “bean” because Taylor has made Turtle to feel comfortable enough to talk to Taylor and everyone else. Finally,
Over the summer, St. Francis High School juniors were required to read Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. In this novel, the protagonist's name is originally Marietta Greer. She wishes to escape her small town life and did so by getting a job working at a hospital while saving money to get an old Volkswagen bug. Marietta finally leaves five years after her high school's graduation. She changes her name to Taylor Greer when she leaves her hometown of Pittman County, Kentucky. Taylor travels to Oklahoma, where she is unexpectedly given a toddler. When the two arrive at a hotel room, Taylor gives the child a bath. During the bath, she discovers the toddler is a girl who has been abused and sexually molested. Taylor names the toddler Turtle due
In both positive and negative ways, Taylor’s life would have ended up contrasting to how she would have lived it in Pittman. As I paraphrase, Taylor would have presumably become pregnant at a young age, and married to a tobacco farmer similar to every other teenage girl in Pittman (Kingsolver 3). Assuming Taylor would become pregnant; her child/children would have given her a much different experience of motherhood than her inherited daughter, Turtle, did. As Taylor said after first getting Turtle, “When I pulled off the pants and the diapers there were more bruises. Bruises and worse…That fact had already burdened her short life with a kind of misery I could not imagine” (Kingsolver 23). From what Taylor had seen and therefore inferred, was that this child had been beaten and sexually abused. Turtle’s pre-Taylor days were almost certainly filled with terror and abuse coming from someone in her family. This scarred her and caused Turtle to resort to a mute state. For Taylor, this creates a d...
Marietta was raised in a small town in Kentucky. When she became an adult, she decided she needed a change. She wanted a different name and a different place to call home. She got in her Volkswagon, started driving, and on this journey she changed her name to Taylor. A stranger gave her a three year old Indian child to take care of, who she names Turtle. The two finally settle down in Tucson, where they live with a single mom who is also from a small town in Kentucky. Taylor works for a woman who hides political refugees in her home, and Taylor becomes good friends with two of them. These two refugees act as Turtle's parents and sign over custody to Taylor, so that Turtle could become her daughter legally. Taylor was very unsure about whether or not she would be a good mom, but in the end she realizes that Turtle belongs with her, and that Tucson is home.
Taylor only had two goals in her life at the start of this book and these were to not get pregnant and leave Pittman, Kentucky one day. She fulfills one of these by leaving the only home she has ever known and drives west with little money and no real plan on what she is going to do. Taylor is determined to avoid being tied down. She says, “I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up-Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife" (3). She is filled with ambition and drive. Taylor wants more than what Pittman offers. Taylor leaving Kentucky is showin...
Working as a teacher serving at-risk four-year-old children, approximately six of her eighteen students lived in foster care. The environment introduced Kathy to the impact of domestic violence, drugs, and family instability on a developing child. Her family lineage had a history of social service and she found herself concerned with the wellbeing of one little girl. Angelica, a foster child in Kathy’s class soon to be displaced again was born the daughter of a drug addict. She had been labeled a troublemaker, yet the Harrisons took the thirty-hour training for foster and adoptive care and brought her home to adopt. Within six months, the family would also adopted Angie’s sister Neddy. This is when the Harrison family dynamic drastically changes and Kathy begins a journey with over a hundred foster children passing through her home seeking refuge.
When Denny’s late wife Eve dies, his whole world is changed. Trish and Maxwell - the evil Twins - plot against Denny by pulling him into a major court battle. As a result, Denny is forced to sacrifice major opportunities in order to win custody of his daughter, Zoë. “ “I appreciate your generous offer,” he [Denny] said. “But I’m afraid certain things prevent me from leaving this country – or even this state – at the moment. So I have to decline.” (Stein 276) Luca Pantoni – a man that worked at Ferrari – asked Denny if he wanted to move out to Italy with his family where he could test cars for a living. With the major court battle going on Denny had to politely refuse the offer. Knowing Denny’s personality it would have been difficult for him to decline such a great offer, but at that moment he had to think about his family first. Next to Eve, Zoë is the most important person in Denny’s life. The death of Eve was unexpected for both Denny and Zoë, but Denny could not let his sadness and frustration show...
Life physically and mentally tests Taylor when her daughter is thought to have been molested a second time by an unknown assailant when Taylor was not around. Taylor learns of Turtle’s injuries on page 280 in which “The medical examiner said that there was no evidence Turtle had been molested. She was shaken up, and there were finger-shaped bruises on her right shoulder, and that was all”, which slowly sent Taylor in a downward because she finally understood what it meant to be a parent and it suddenly dawned upon her that maybe she could not protect Turtle the way her aunt had asked her to. However, the incident in the park just reaffirmed her strength and vigor, which showed her friends and herself that she was slowly starting to evolve and that she could overcome any difficult task if she set her mind to it. The final Bildungsroman stage occurs on page 374 when Taylor says, “Here’s the big news, Turtle’s my real daughter, I adopted her.” This major change in the story symbolizes her newfound maturity and acceptance of her roles as a mother. She understands that she could have never dreamed of becoming a mother in her other lifetime because she simply was not ready to bring joy to other people’s lives before she met Turtle and the rest of her friends. She was taught how to accept the
There, Chris discovers that his father lives a double life with his ex-stepmother, Marcia. Chris rages about, “ divorcing them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live" (64). With an untrustworthy family, he feels outcast and useless. He then only can relate to other outcasts for the remainder of the novel. When he gets a chance at conversing with ‘everyday’ people Chris rants about how ‘fake’ they are. Maybe his trip was his final destination because he eventually realizes he has nothing to come back to. He never plans for the future, just the present scenarios, like sending away $24,000 to charity. When the trip was coming to an end, it overwhelmed him, remembering all the things he still angers him. The trip to El Segundo, California, also arose a very dark: “Two years after Chris’s birth, Walt McCandless fathered another child with Marcia” (64). Chris feels tremendous rage and hurt by this secret. He feels his life is a lie because unveiling this unpublished mystery brings skepticism to everything else surrounding his inner circle and family. Lastly, Chris is extremely heart-broken that his father wasn’t satisfied enough by him. Chris is the type of personality that will go over the edge of sanity if no one is there to stop him. When he leaves his family for good, he was out in the
As they drove she talks Bailey, her son, into taking a detour to see an old plantation she visited when she was younger, halfway...
People change you in so many ways that you might not even realize it. Turtle was probably changed the most by her new family and friends. At the beginning of the book she would not dare to say a word however by the end of the book she was singing. After Taylor had shown Turtle the adoption papers she just nodded her head and they were on their way Taylor was paying attention to Turtle and Kingsolver writes: “She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. "And me. I was the main ingredient."” (312). To Turtle, the most important things in life are the people around her that care about her. This shows how important it is to have people who love and support you in life because that is what will make you happy. This shows the importance of Taylor to Turtle, and proves that even when Taylor was thrown into a very difficult situation she took it and turned it into something wonderful. As Catherine Himmelwright writes in her
In the book, The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, the notion of a quest is very prevalent. According to Thomas Foster, a Quest consists of five things a quester, a place to go, a reason to go there, challenges and trials, and an actual purpose (Foster). Taylor Greer’s journey in The Bean Trees embodies Foster’s ideals through which she gains self-knowledge, learns to thrive and finds her place in the world.
...her father’s intense racism and discrimination so she hid the relationship at all costs. Connie realized that she could never marry an African American man because of her father’s racial intolerance. If she were to have a mixed child, that child would be greatly discriminated against because of hypodecent. One day, Connie’s dad heard rumors about her relationship so he drove her car to the middle of nowhere, and tore it apart. Then, he took his shotgun and went to look for Connie and her boyfriend. Connie was warned before her father found her, and she was forced to leave town for over six months. Connie’s father burned her clothes, so she had to leave town with no car, no clothes and no money at sixteen years old. Connie had lived in poverty her entire life, but when she got kicked out she learned to live with no shelter and sometimes no food at all.
Taylor, Turtle, Lou Ann, and Esperanza all develop because of their relationship with and to others. An iron is sharpened when it rubs against another piece of iron. Similarly, it is through contact and relationships that character is developed. The characters discover that they need each other to survive, just like the symbiotic relationship between the wisteria and the rhizobia. Taylor learns to depend upon the help of her friends. Turtle overcomes her emotional shock through Taylor’s love and care. Lou Ann finds her self-confidence through Taylor’s encouragement. Esperanza finds hope through her love for Turtle. All the characters learn how to be like the people in heaven. They are “well-fed” because they help and serve each other. The interaction among the characters provides nourishment and life. They develop into better people through this interaction.
...ound to happen, and there was no stopping it. Taylor ends up happy with her life, “It didn’t seem to matter to Turtle, she was happy where she was...She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. And me. I was the main ingredient” (Kingsolver 240). She has truly grown, developing into an adult that cares for Turtles happiness more than her own. When Holden finishes his story, he does come to a realization--though not entirely comfortable with it--that this really has occurred. He was here, presumably a mental clinic, because change was part of his life, a necessity. THe seclusion gets to him, he is lonely, needing change. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” (Salinger 214).