In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

The following notes are taken from both lectures at UCLA and my own personal observations from reading In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. I hope they help!

Told in three parts, the first two in which the Mirabels are characterized and the last in which they meet their demise.

The Mirabels are upper-middle class/ successful. Dad is a rancher, they own a store and pops is an assistant to a governor. They’ve got enough money and swing for the girls to be educated at seminary schools.

The class is supposed to be supporting the regime, and out of that class comes the most powerful opposition.

The girls are humble, hardworking. The huge plantations like the ones that the Mirabels have are the homes of the wealthy, and these people do not generally live in an urban setting. They are privileged people but they are not snobby.

Fela, their servant, is of African descent. She is also a valued member of their family unit, beloved by Mate who frequently looks to her for help, guidance and advice

There is going to be a real element of guilt here, that Dede survived while all the other died. Survivors generally do not want to talk about their experiences, and they often go through post-traumatic stress.
Minerva is a goddess of war or wisdom. That’s lucky for Alvarez. She has an indomitable spirit, she seeks freedom, both from the culture and from the regime. She slaps Trujillo in the face. She’s compassionate.

Mate is sensitive and scary. What are her motivations? Minerva is an intellectual, Patra does it to help the people, Mate does it for love.

The character is minutely crafted, she does an expert job of creating both interior and exterior portraits of these women.

The eventual martyrdom by survival for Dede is fascinating. All the important structural sections of the novel are introduced by Dede; while she doesn’t have the heroic stature of her sisters, she confesses that she’s scared to do the things her sisters do. It’s not about her husband, as she says at some times.

She’s not cowardly, she’s just a human being who recognizes a serious danger in her midst. She realizes when her sisters are taken away that she is a part of the revolution whither or not she wants to be. The careful reader would be more likely to identify with Dede, Alvarez had to retrieve the other characters from heroic and mythical proportions, which Dede was exempt from in a sense.

This humanization is evident in Minerva’s need to keep the appearance of strength up after she’s released from jail. She’s afraid, but she doesn’t want to let people down, and she knows that she’s become the icon of the revolution, so she smiles instead of weeping.

Women in Latin America do not often forage ahead in the world of men the way that the
Mirabels did. Feminists challenge the norms or the traditions that define the roles of women. Alvarez appropriates the language of religion to subtly subvert the roles of the genders within the story, with Patria taking on the role of a Jesus figure, and Trujillo’s self-deification.

When the women are jailed, they realize that they are sisters with the women who share their cell- the murderers and prostitutes are scary to them at first, but it doesn’t take much time for them to become a group.

The testimony approach to telling the story of the murders was the most realistic narrative trick she could have used. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable, but these people bring back what they remember and what they know about the facts of the situation. Here, the various voices bring back the perspective of the situation, but as the women are dead, they can’t tell the story themselves.