Kingsolver's Butterflies in Flight Behavior

Climate change is the leitmotif of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior. Set in Appalachia, rural Tennessee, Flight Behavior tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow – a 28-year-old unhappy housewife, stuck in a marriage brought on by a teenage pregnancy. Dellarobia was on her way to commit adultery when she stumbled on – what she believed was an act of god – a colony of monarch butterflies whose migration flight was disrupted. Kingsolver uses monarch butterflies as a device to illustrate the consequences

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour demonstrates that environmental degradation brought on by climate change tends to have a greater impact on people of lower social class. Kingsolver accomplishes this through numerous unique secondary characters. More specifically, Kingsolver illustrates through the Delgado family how industrial development and global warming are triggering devastating environmental catastrophes in less developed countries such as Mexico, and consequently causing mass migrations

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, both of the main characters develop a connection with the issues surrounding the state of the environment in the novels that leads to creation of a new character, the character of “environment”. Both Tayo and Dellarobia discover more about themselves through their relationship with nature and their surroundings, however, Silko manages to convey empathy for the character “environment” more efficiently when compared to Kingsolver

“title” Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, “Flight Behavior,” strays from the customary novel average readers are used to. Kingsolver’s education in biology is exposed throughout her novel causing the readers to experience a more scientific perspective on the story. The story takes place inside Dellarobia Turnbow’s mind; a restless farmers wife who got pregnant at seventeen and, as a result, had a shotgun marriage. Her life since then has been a wreck. Her marriage is deteriorating, her farm is failing

Many of Barbara Kingsolver’s characters in her novel Flight Behavior, are living within these limits. Dellarobia, for example, is a small town woman who would be classified under the first or second quintile. During a conversation about using less fossil fuel, with educated urbanite, Leighton