The Bean Trees Character Analysis

Taylor Greer is the primary protagonist of the adventurous tale taking place throughout multiple states in America, The Bean Trees. Taylor is girl from a town of simpletons, and she wants to escape that and live freely somewhere else. The Bean Trees is written by Barbra Kingsolver, an acclaimed author, and the story is about Taylor and her life after leaving a small town in Kentucky to find happiness. Taylor is a very complex person with a number of defining characteristics such as devotion, strength, and affection that make it possible for her to have such a mediocre story.

Some people adjust to their changing lives better when there is someone there beside them going through the same things. This is what happened for Taylor and Lou Ann. Taylor moved in with Lou Ann when she came to Arizona and they begin to change each others life for the better. Taylor teaches Lou Ann about confidence, and standing up for herself. Lou Ann teaches Taylor how to adjust to her new surroundings in Arizona, and together they form a bond that makes their changing lives easier to tolerate.

When Taylor learned about her friends’ past, she realizes the hardships they went through. She empathized them. To have done this she would have had to imagine the situations playing out in order to understand them. This lead to her understanding the reality of being an illegal immigrant and how it feels for her two friends.

In The Bean Trees, Taylor is consistently faced with a lack of choice. She decides to leave home, but on her way she stops at a bar and a woman puts a child in her car and leaves before Taylor can stop her. When she gets to a motel “[she] pulled off the pants and the diapers there were more bruises. Bruises and worse.” (31) The child abandoned had been sexually molested, making raising her a much harder burden since the child had experienced “a kind of misery [Taylor] could not imagine.” (31) Yet although the child, who Taylor names Turtle, is “just somebody [she] got stuck with” (70), she cares for her and she becomes like her own child. However, finding work and raising a child isn’t easy and “[she] was starting to go a little bit crazy. This is how it is when all the money you have can fit in one pocket, and you have no job, and no prospects.” (66) Taylor also realizes “that [her] whole life had been running along on dumb luck and [she] hadn’t even noticed.” She hadn’t been making any choices, just running with whatever life threw her way. Taylor finally realizes her luck has run out when she learns “[i]f a child has no legal guardian she becomes a ward of the state.” Turtle was not legally adopted by Taylor and therefore she could be taken away. Taylor now has the choice to either fight for Turtle or give up, but Taylor is convinced she doesn’t have a choice at all. Her friend Lou Ann calls her out on this, claiming “there’s got to be some way around them taking her, and

The book The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver, is a coming of age story about a young girl, Taylor, that is thrust into motherhood when a baby is left in her car. Taylor however, is not the only example of a mother in the story. There is Lou Ann and Esperanza, both literal mothers, but only one of them has their child to take care of. There is Mattie, one of the first people that Taylor meet in Tucson, and who becomes almost a surrogate-mother for both her, and also the refugees that she shelters. In all of the both literal and figurative examples of motherhood in the story, none of them really fit into the idea of a traditional family setting. Kingsolver is expressing to the reader that being a successful mother does not rely on whether the family is “normal”, but rather being able to do the best for your children.

Born into poverty, wealth, or even fame, no one has any control over what they are born into in this world. Throughout the novel Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver provides many examples of how the effects of what environment a person is born into effects them morally during the 1980s. With all of the characters being stuck in penury all the way from the beginning of the novel to the end, helps to explain how it affects them each differently as an individual. The main character from the novel, Taylor Greer, is a prime example of the consequences of how her environment affected her moral traits as a character.

The influence of being raised by a single mother and the environment around Taylor leaves her determined to avoid motherhood and after finishing high school, leaving Pittman in favor of a more interesting life. Doing so makes her realize she is completely unprepared to take care of a child when she decides to keep Turtle. As she gradually starts spending more time with Turtle and living with Lou Ann, however, she learns what it is like to be a single mother, and grows confident in her abilities of taking care of Turtle. Moreover, she even helps Lou Ann gain more confidence in herself, setting an example of being an independent woman and even encouraging Lou Ann get a job. When Lou Ann does get a job, Taylor notices that Lou Ann “finally stopped comparing her figure to various farm animals. Having a job seemed to even out some of Lou Ann’s wrinkled edges” (205). Lou Ann learned to stop worrying over her appearance all the time and demeaning herself, showing the influence Taylor had over her life. Taylor’s presence helped Lou Ann realize that maybe she does not need to fit the mold society has set for her, and that she can be her own person instead. She uses that newfound confidence to help Taylor when her confidence in caring for Turtle diminishes. Taylor believes she is unfit to take care of Turtle after Turtle gets attacked, but Lou Ann does not let Taylor mope

Author use many symbolism in the book The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. She uses symbolism because it makes it easier for readers to understand the deeper meaning or feeling of the character or the events that are happening. For example, author uses the symbolism of bean trees as transformation and Ismene as the abandoned children to show the deeper meaning of them.

Self-sacrifice is an act done by many, specifically Roselily. “Roselily” by Alice Walker is a story about Roselily, a woman getting married for her children to have a better life. Because of this marriage, Roselily sacrifices numerous aspects of life for her children. Alice Walker shows that self-sacrifice is a life-changing decision through various aspects of Roselily’s marriage, such as religion, cultural norms, and having to leave everything she’s known, all for the sake of her children’s well being.

In Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the concept of understanding sacrifice to establish a greater moral good is central to the main characters and their developed values. Specifically, McCarthy incorporates a great sacrifice of young love made by John Crady Cole’s love interest, Alejandra. Alejandra strategically surrenders her promising relationship with John Grady in order to accomplish a greater agenda: bailing him out of jail therefore, assuring the forbiddance of their of their future union. In this instance, the sacrifice of love and union reveals the character’s deeper values rooted in moral obligation. This passionate act of love exemplifies Alejandra’s strength and selflessness, while also displaying a deeper understanding to the overall meaning of the book by highlighting how valuable friendships and relationships come at a great cost.

The oppression of women has occurred all throughout history across the world in the thousands of years that patriarchy has existed. During recent times as social standards have progressed, the voices of women are heard more often than long ago. Nonetheless, it is often overlooked that women of decades before used their voices in other ways in order to speak out against oppression. One of the ways these women did this was in their literary writing. Despite the progress made today to stand up against oppression of women, there is much that can be learned by looking back at problematic situations portrayed by women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Out of all of the texts written by women only three will be discussed; Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills, Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers and Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People, in which specific symbols are used as representations of the ways in which women were oppressed and how important it is to study these texts today. By narrowing down the number of literary texts to three as well as discussing only one literary device from each, one can begin to understand the importance of learning about the American women’s literary tradition.

Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Bean Trees, emphasizes her societal views throughout the novel and tells the story in the first person narrative of Taylor Greer, a practical but spirited girl trying to escape her simple and somewhat boring life to a more exciting one. Taylor’s character reflects Kingsolver in the way that they both focus on creating a more just society in which women are treated as equals and have the same rights as men. They both share a pride of being female and attempt to better the lifestyles of other women in their societies. Barbara Kingsolver writes novels which focus on social justice and she often writes about situations that are familiar, basing much of her writing on places or experiences that are personal to her. Kingsolver’s early life experiences in Arizona influence the characters, such as Taylor, who are developed in The Bean Trees and she connects these life experiences to the characters to express her feminist views and inform the reader of her concerns on this topic and demonstrates ways through her literature in which people can help solve the societal problems that women face.

Lou Ann is a character that was introduced in the second chapter. Lou Ann is single and has a son whom she loves. Lou Ann met Taylor later on with the book and got in a huge mutual

Lula began working as a housekeeper for several white families and Edward started several successful businesses including a painting company and a laundry mat. Neither Lula, nor Edward went to college. Though he tried several times to get into one. Lula and Edward then had six kids and were occupied with raising their three girls and three boys. Lula tried to raise her family in a loving home unlike the one she remembers. She worked hard to hide the abuse she would later experience from her husband who became an alcoholic and suffered from PTSD. Lula instead focused on giving her children every opportunity that had been denied her. She might have coddled her children a bit too much. Now all of them are grown and most of them are self-sufficient and successful with families of their own. But a few of them are still interdependent. Lula continues to work as a housekeeper and caretaker for the a white family and her

In many cultures, even today, there are stereotypes about women; i.e. that their job is to cook and clean, or that they are not as strong as men are. Many people would probably admit that they view men as tougher individuals whose responsibility is to protect and put food on the table. This theme of the male versus female power constitutes as prevalent in both Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. These authors intricately weave this idea into their novels through their characters’ specific duties, their characters’ behaviors and emotions, and the way children are viewed and treated according to gender. Both novels are set in the late 19th, early 20th century, but take