Life Brings Out the Best Differences in People Ultimately, experiences shape who a person is and who they become. In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Bean Trees, three characters, Taylor, Lou Ann, and Mattie, all go through contrasting circumstances, molding them into different people. However, their comparable situations do create some similarities. Taylor is an independent woman who leaves her home in Kentucky and makes a new life for herself in Arizona with a child that is not her own. Lou Ann is also from Kentucky, but undergoes different events, like divorcing her husband and having a baby. Additionally, Mattie is a strong woman who runs her own business, Jesus is Lord Used Tires, and is heavily involved with helping illegal immigrants …show more content…
After Taylor comes home one day to Lou Ann calling out names to Turtle, Taylor says, “It’s not like we’re a family, for Christ’s sake. You’ve got your own life to live, and I’ve got mine. You don’t have to do all this stuff for me” (89). Taylor sees her life as herself against the world. She has never really had a real family, so at first, she is apprehensive when it comes to calling herself, Turtle, Lou Ann, and Dwayne Ray a family. Taylor lives her life on her own; she leaves Kentucky by herself and tries to care for Turtle by herself. However, by the end of the novel, Taylor finally accepts losing some of her independence and admits that she has formed a family with Lou Ann. Kingsolver demonstrates that it is right for someone to accept help when they need it. Yet, Lou Ann foils Taylor and goes through the opposite transformation: she gains more independence. She finally stops depending on Angel and gets a job. After receiving a package from Angel, Lou Ann talks about her new responsibilities, and Taylor says, “In just three week’s time, she had been promoted to floor manager, setting some kind of company record” (165). Once Lou Ann gets a job at Red Hot Mama’s salsa factory, she devotes herself to her job and excels at it. At work, she realizes that she does not need to constantly depend …show more content…
Mattie is the best example of a woman being able to do anything on which she focuses. After Taylor goes to Jesus is Lord Used Tires for the first time and sees Mattie, she says, “I had never seen a woman with this kind of know-how. It made me feel proud, somehow” (45). Mattie has sort of a masculine identity when it comes to working at Jesus is Lord Used Tires and fixing cars. Although the stereotype is that working in a car garage is a man’s job, Mattie crushes the stereotype and establishes herself as a strong and powerful woman, remaining static in this trait for the entire novel. Kingsolver wants women to know that they can do anything if they try hard
Taylor receives no explanation from the woman who leaves Turtle with her, yet Taylor still takes on huge responsibility of caring for the child. Then, Taylor starts to notice a lot of things that makes her wandering what happened with the little girl. Taylor starts noticing Turtle’s smile while she was bathing her, and she also discovers that Turtle has been sexually molested and abused. By discovering these details of Turtle’s life, Tylor want to know more about Turtle’s life. She start working, but Tylor keeps thinking about Turtle. For example, in page (69) Tylor starts the work at Burger Derby, but after 6 days she quiet. She kept thinking about Tylor and who will take care of her while she is in work. That shows how Tylor start acting like mother when she left her job and tried to find a good place for her and
The percent of single parents in the United States is about 12 million with 80.6% of them being single mothers and 45% of them being divorced. The amount of children who are living with single parents is uncalled for but unfortunately it is starting to be a normal thing for children to be living with one parent. In the novel The Bean Trees, Lou Ann Ruiz is a perfect example of the hardships of being a single mother. In the novel The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, Lou Ann Ruiz is a sympathetic character. The readers are shown that through her having experience in life, giving advice, and opening up to other easily. Lou Ann is a very strong and sympathetic character because she understands others and has experienced life in different ways
The character who changed the most from beginning to end in The Bean Trees was Lou Ann Ruiz. When Taylor first meets Lou Ann, she has just been left by her husband, Angel, to raise her newborn son, Dwayne Ray, alone. Despite this Lou Ann still wishes for her husband to return because she believes that a marriage should last forever. Throughout the story, Lou Ann goes from relying on her husband to unbuckle her shoes for her to becoming an independent, single mother.
Turtle and Taylor end up living in Tucson, Arizona. Taylor finds a job and a place to stay. While she is in Tucson she starts to recognize that there are a lot of people in the world that have gone through much worse situations than she has. She tells Estevan, "I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about" (141). She is growing out of her naiveness and learning more about the realities of life. This in turn is making her a more understanding and
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.
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
“My grandparents didn’t come all the way from Germany just to see it get taken over by immigrants. Not on my watch.” (Donald Trump). The thinking of aA privileged American, one such as Donald Trump, who has the net worth of four billion dollars, wouldn’t know the challenges that immigrants experience. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver, highlights some of the many issues immigrants face when living in America. In The Bean Trees, the character Taylor decides to makes a life changing decision to leave her hometown for good. However, she had acquired a child, whom she names Turtle, and she is suddenly faced with the hardness of a mother in a land filled with social injustices that is constantly tripping her. She is able to overcome the obstacles
All around the world people are moving to find a better life, over 3.3% of the world's population are international migrants. People are always going through a rebirth from when they get a job to becoming a family or when they move. Rebirth is not always a big change, but it always changes life some way or the other. The characters in The Bean Trees lives are constantly changing during the whole book. Throughout The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, there is a common theme of rebirth that the characters Taylor, Turtle, Estevan and Esperanza all experience.
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.
In The Bean Trees the character Taylor goes through some of her own courageous adventures. When she was still at home and working at the hospital, she had to deal with a girl named Jolene, someone she knew from her town. Jolene’s husband, who had a bad reputation, had been shot and was now dead. The woman was a little crazy, telling her husband “don’t daddy…” (Kingsolver 7). This circumstance is not an adventure of the body but of the mind. Taylor has to be strong, courageous, and smart to be able to deal with Jolene. This situation was one of the first adventures that Taylor goes through, and it helps her to deal with later adventures because it made her stronger.
Starting right now, you’ve only got one Ma in the whole world,” (Kingsolver 302). Taylor made a comeback to Turtle calling Esperanza by “Ma” by telling Turtle that she only has one “ma” in the world and that’s is Taylor. Taylor was a character that was acting as a mother figure only to Turtle. Even though she had a child, Taylor was still a child inside that tried to avoid pregnancy.
By embarking on these journeys, the plot lines begin and end with risk taking. Taylor’s move away from Pittman and her taking Turtle, Louann not going after her husband, and the many risks of Estevan and Esperanza, create conflicts which drive the plot of The Bean Trees.
(AGG) When losing someone you dearly love, your world is turned around, Nusrat shows us her journey through loss and healing in the chapters of this novel. (BS-1) First, Nusrat loses her sister, Margaret, and struggles after losing someone so close to her to later question her religion. (BS-2) Then, Nusrat disconnects with her parents slowly after she converts to Islam and begins to start a new life. (BS-3) Lastly, At the end Nusrat loses her husband, Faiz and begins to reconnect her relationship with her parents. (TS) In the novel Under the Persimmon Tree by Suzanne Fisher Staples, Nusrat loses multiple important people who understand her the most, she has to cope with living without the people who have had such a positive impact on her
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.
In the excerpt of the television show, ‘Merry Christmas Mr Bean’, directed by John Brinkin with the actors Rowan Atteinson, who plays Mr Bean and Matilda Zieglar, who plays Irma Gobb. The episode features and consists of inter-linked sketches, based upon an excerpt when Mr Bean is preparing a Christmas lunch. In this assessment task this comic excerpt is to be analysed, and individually in essay format, analyse its use of the elements of drama, stage craft and comic style to determine the creation of comic meaning.