Balancing Acts - Kingsolver
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
A woman can undertake a journey for many reasons: to escape, to seek a new way of life, to find adventure, to find love, to return to someone or something, or simply to keep moving. In Barbara Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, the main character Taylor Greer journeys in many of these ways. She leaves her rural Kentucky home to escape from the life she will be expected to live there. She has no goal toward which she is traveling. She intends only to keep driving until her old Volkswagon breaks down; then she will stop. She even chooses a new name by chance; she names herself after the town where she makes her first stop.
But her simple escape from all her past ties changes into a different sort of journey. When Taylor is given an abused baby, she must begin to balance the freedom of her travel with a new responsibility, the need to give care, to find a job and provide for both her foster child and herself. She gradually begins to establish herself among other women with similar concerns and problems. And she finds that, finally, she must make another journey, back the way she has come, to become "legally" the mother of her child and to help a couple of illegal aliens on their own escape from fear and journey to freedom.
Through the story of Taylor's journeys, Kingsolver deals with issues of women as mothers and as survivors who manage to maintain some humor and grace. She writes of loss and fear of loss, of the ways in which people's lives twine together, often without their conscious choice, but always with strong effects on one another. The Taylor who sets out for Oklahoma to claim her daughter both is and is not the same Taylor who drove boldly away from Kentucky. Since she provides the main voice for the novel, we can experience her uncertainties, her decisions, her hopes and fears at first hand. But all the characters in the novel share in the attempt to balance stability and loving relationship with the necessity of change, of loss, of always "traveling on." And though Taylor is headed back, at the novel's end, to her network of friends in Tucson, she has not arrived yet; she's still in the car, on the road.
The lives of all these people, Kingsolver suggests, grow like the wisteria, the "bean trees" of the novel's title or like the purple beans in Mattie's garden. One of the first things Taylor sees in Tucson, Mattie's plants are offspring of seeds brought from China eighty years before, a gift from another woman's garden saved and replanted year after year. The plants are sturdy, "trooping on down the block, climbing over anything in their path." And these beans, like the wisteria trees, can thrive in poor soil because they have a support system at their roots, provided by other organisms. Like these plants, the individual characters of Kingsolver's novel, only ordinary people, survive through their connections to one another.
Suggestions for further reading
Atwood, Margaret. Edible Woman. New York: New York Popular Library, 1976.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal Dreams. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
———. Pigs in Heaven. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Mason, Bobby Ann. Shiloh and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.
Paretsky, Sara. Tunnel Vision. New York: Delacorte, 1994.