Finding Flight: Capturing the Complexity of Climate Change and Defying Traditional Gender Roles in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

Katrina’s Review of:
Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. 433 pages.

 

Since I was a teenager, Barbara Kingsolver has been one of my favorite authors. My mom, my sister and I used to pass around her books as if they were exotic sweets. I was first exposed to her writing through her novel The Bean Trees (1988), which I believe, if I recall correctly, that I read in one of my English classes in high school. Thinking back on all of the novels written by Kingsolver that I’ve read since that first taste of her narrative as an adolescent, I am amazed at the diversity of themes and settings that she has addressed in the fourteen books she has published thus far. Yet the one thing that almost all of her narratives have in common, and that keeps drawing me back to her writing, is the way she gives voice to nontraditional female characters, allowing them to tell their own story in incredibly intimate and powerful ways, and enabling the reader to forge strong connections with the protagonists.

While it has been a while since I read it, I have incredibly fond memories of reading The Poisonwood Bible (1998), a 500-page novel by Kingsolver set in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s. I’m sure that many of the historical and political references were lost on me as a young reader – and for that very fact I plan to re-read it in the near future to see what other treasures I can glean from it today – but I was nevertheless fascinated by the intersecting voices of the five female narrators and the way that their stories were woven together to create a single, flawless narrative tapestry. The voices of Orleanna Price, the wife of impassioned evangelical Baptist missionary Nathan Price, as well as those of their four daughters, reconstruct the story of the family’s slow demise in the midst of the Congo’s struggle for independence from Belgium.

This technique of using multiple narrative strands to construct a single cohesive novel employed by Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible may seem passé today, and indeed maybe it already was in the late 1990s (as a Spanish lit. person, I know that Latin American writers of the Boom were already exploring with literary form in much more innovative and complex ways beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s – think Carlos Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962; or Mario Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde, 1966), but as a young reader I was fascinated by this multiplicity of voices that enabled me to view the same event from many different perspectives. The strange beauty of this foreign land unfolded before my eyes as Kingsolver described in minute detail the culture and traditions of the Belgian Congo in a way that avoided its exoticization, a misstep that many North American and European writers make when portraying African cultures or that of any other subaltern community.

The women in Kingsolver’s novels are never one-dimensional or stereotypical; their identities are spun so carefully that they truly come to life in the pages of her books, and they do not shy away from the painful or difficult things in life. These protagonists reflect on experiences as intimate as the stillbirth of an unwanted child born in the bathroom of a young woman’s family home (Animal Dreams), the internal turmoil of a discontented wife and mother who struggles to find satisfaction in those traditional roles (Flight Behavior), the bittersweet life experiences of a young girl abandoned by her parents as an infant (Bean Trees), or the struggles of a girl labeled as mentally disabled whose true intelligence is never fully appreciated (The Poisonwood Bible). Kingsolver’s female protagonists defy traditional gender norms and assert their will and independence in a world that is often unsteady, dangerous or unwelcoming to them.

While the author’s prose has been criticized for trying to manipulate her characters to fit her own (liberal) political agenda, I have always believed that the most valuable and powerful literature is socially and politically transformative; that literature is not meant to just reaffirm our own identities or reflect our reality in an unquestioning manner, but rather to turn that status quo on end, to defamiliarize dominant societal norms and standards in order for the reader to see them in a new light, and perhaps reconsider their understanding of certain phenomena. Kingsolver accomplishes this task in her writing without flinching or conforming to the expectations of a certain cross-section of mainstream U.S. society that expects literature to follow certain formula, just like the staged narratives of Hollywood films.

Kingsolver continues this type of complex character development in her most recent novel, Flight Behavior, which takes place in a small rural town in Appalachia. While I must admit – as my mom warned me before I started reading the book – that it is a hard book to get into at first, it is worth wading through the novel’s slow start to truly appreciate the beauty of the narrative. As is often the case with Kingsolver’s novels, Flight Behavior addresses something that I am utterly unfamiliar with: the lifestyle of rural southern farmers in the Appalachian mountains. An Appalachian native herself, being born and raised in rural Kentucky, Kingsolver eloquently captures the way of thinking and the daily reality of the people of southern Appalachia through the voice of Dellarobia Turnbow, a 29-year-old mother of two and the perpetually unsatisfied wife of Cub Turnbow.

A bright woman who had once aspired to attend college and get the hell out of the dead-end town of Feathertown, Tennessee, Dellarobia instead found herself knocked up and married at the age of seventeen, never having travelled outside county lines, owned a computer, or flown in an airplane. The insular, isolated reality of the people of her town was startling to me, having never ventured into the American South—and admittedly with little interest in doing so—yet through the perspective of this endearingly flawed female protagonist, I came to understand the socioeconomic circumstances and the history behind the way of life of these tight-knit communities whose families have been farmers for generations, and who know nothing else than the age-old traditions passed on to them by their parents and grandparents.

The beauty of the narrative, to me, comes through Kingsolver’s vivid description of the phenomenon of the roosting of monarch butterflies, and her in-depth exploration of the frightening effects of global warming through the story of one family’s encounter with these majestic insects. The initial description of the butterfly-covered trees in the valley owned by the Turnbow family conjures up biblical images of fire and brimstone, “The forest blazed with its own internal flame. ‘Jesus,’ she said…Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave, like the disturbed surface of a lake. Every bough glowed with an orange blaze” (p. 14). Yet what first frightens Dellarobia – the first person to discover this phenomenon in the woods of Feathertown – quickly turns into a “vision of glory,” of “unearthly beauty,” that in the protagonist’s mind could only be the work of God. It becomes clear early in the book that religion plays a central role in the lives of Feathertown’s residents, and Dellarobia is soon regarded as a saint or miracle worker by the congregation of the Holy Beacons Sanctuary, the largest Baptist church in the area, when they discover that she had a supposed “vision” of the butterfly-covered woods.

While Dellarobia’s husband may believe that she had a vision, as he states proudly in church, she actually stumbled upon the butterflies accidentally just as she was about to throw her marriage away for a romp in the hay with a much younger telephone repairman. This reveals the other side to Flight Behavior – the private side of a restless, unsatisfied wife who wants more from life than being a stay-at-home mom and constantly bending to the will of her in-laws. In Dellarobia’s slow transformation from a sheltered, repressed housewife into an independent-minded woman who sees a future for herself outside of marriage, Kingsolver challenges the traditional gender roles that are engrained in mainstream southern values to this day.

By the end of the book, Dellarobia – like the butterflies – has taken flight, making the decision to separate from her husband, which had her paralyzed for so long. I must admit that reading the protagonist’s detailed internal monologues regarding her unhappy marriage, and her guilty thoughts regarding her attraction to and flirtation with other men, was painful and uncomfortable at times but only because of their raw candidness. They were so brutally honest that it almost hurt to read such intimate, tortured thoughts of another woman. Yet Kingsolver’s portrayal of the complexity of a marriage in decline seems to work in Flight Behavior, intertwined as it is with the concerns of the public side of the Turnbows’ life and everything that has to do with the roosting butterflies.

The reality of this unexpected appearance of millions of butterflies in the Appalachian mountains – which for centuries had never before been the destination of the migratory monarchs – turns out to be the tragic result of global warming, putting the very existence of the species at risk. What Dellarobia and the town first saw as a beautiful miracle gradually turns sour for the protagonist as she becomes aware of the true meaning of the monarchs’ unexpected appearance in their lives. In short, because of the warming of the climate in their traditional roosting site in the mountains of Mexico, the butterflies became confused and ended up in Feathertown, Tennessee, far from their original destination.

Through Dellarobia’s own learning process regarding the biology of the monarch species and the field of entomology, which is patiently unveiled to her by the handsome and accomplished visiting scientist Ovid Byron, the reader also becomes versed in the details surrounding global climate change and its disastrous effects on the monarch butterfly. This one small insect, while magnificent in its fragile beauty, may seem insignificant in the big scheme of things, but the monarch’s imminent demise functions as a metaphor in the narrative for the large-scale consequences of global warming that have the potential to alter life on earth as we know it. Dellarobia’s original vision of the biblical burning bush on the mountainside was not necessarily empty of meaning, but rather points to the danger that potentially threatens humanity’s collective future. I hope that others are able to glean the same warning from Flight Behavior as I did; it is time that we start taking global climate change seriously and making active strides to combat its effects. Indeed, for some flora and fauna, it may already be too late. As Dellarobia wonders, “What if there’s no place else for them [the butterflies] to fly away to?”

Keep Writing,
Katrina Oko-Odoi
Founder & Chief Editor