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Family And Friendship In Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

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In her romance novel The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver discusses the importance of family and friendship. The protagonist Taylor Greer escapes her home in Pittman County to live a more fulfilling life elsewhere. She arrives in the Cherokee Nation where she is handed a baby. She names the baby Turtle and drives to Tucson where she stops by Jesus is Lord Used Tires and meets Mattie, the owner. The tire shop doubles as a sanctuary and protects illegal immigrants. Kingsolver uses the motif of birds to symbolize the illegal immigrants and emphasize a theme of salvation. Taylor moves in with a self-deprecatory, single mother named Lou Ann Ruiz. Lou Ann changes her negative attitude over the course of the book, which adds on to the theme of backbone and internal strength. Turtle develops an attachment to vegetation, a motif of the novel that symbolizes growth and rebirth. Taylor, Turtle, Lou Ann’s son Dwayne Ray, and Lou Ann’s family-like qualities illustrates Kingsolver’s themes of a true home and family. At the end of the novel, Taylor faces a difficult situation in which she Taylor could lose Turtle to further highlight Kingsolver’s theme of true family. Kingsolver presents the tension between legality and morality through the depictions of her characters’ choices and values. In doing so, she underscores the message that shared morality, rather than legality, defines and creates a better family.
Kingsolver uses Taylor’s internal conflict about whether or not she should “legally” adopt Turtle through illegal means to demonstrate the conflict between legality and morality. While outside a bar in the Cherokee Nation, a woman hands Taylor an undocumented baby, which Taylor later names Turtle, and tells Taylor to raise her. Taylor reasons to herself, “I can take this Indian Child back into that bar and give it to Earl or whichever of those two guys is left. Just set it on the counter with the salt and pepper and get the hell out of here” (Kingsolver 19). The decision to keep the baby is morally right because Taylor would most likely be able to provide a better home for the baby than the woman who is giving the baby away to strangers. However, Taylor also contemplates giving the baby back to the woman or one of the men

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