Barbara Kingsolver by Shannon Cunningham
The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes. They filled the sky. Out across the valley, the air itself glowed golden. Every tree on the far mountainside was covered with a trembling flame, and that, of course, was butterflies. - Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
Introducing Barbara Kingsolver
Those vibrant illustrations in your mind from the quote above are a brief sample of novelist, poet, essayist, speaker, and activist Barbara Kingsolver’s talent. Born in 1955, Kingsolver passionately and beautifully utilizes her writing as a form of art and activism. From a young age, Barbara was exposed to the beauty of nature surrounding her childhood home in Kentucky and a variety of other cultures specifically in the Democratic Republic of Congo where her dad volunteered his services as a medical doctor. She attended DePauw University in 1973 and graduated with a degree in biology but only after taking a broad range of liberal arts courses where music theory and creative writing peaked her interests.Her broad exposures and interests both at a young age and academically were the spring board for her unique writing that often highlights topics such as social justice, feminism, and environmentalism. Her writing demonstrates the intersection between the environment and human structures and actions. Often, she does so in the interactions between humans or her characters and their environments and communities. Kingsolver’s work has not gone unnoticed; she has been nominated for many honors, and her writing is a part of core literature curriculum education across the country.
Anthropocene... What is it?
Geologists, paleontologists, other scientists, and general members of society are typically familiar with the geologic time scale. It is a system of describing the timing and relationships of events throughout Earth’s history. Officially, we are living in the Holocene Epoch; others propose we are living in the Anthropocene Epoch. The Anthropocene marks significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. The greatest example of this being anthropogenic climate change as well as mass extinctions of plants and animals, polluted oceans, and altered atmospheres (Stromberg). In a less technical sense, the Anthropocene marks the time we are living in because of the human impact on the Earth.
Defining Anthropocene Artists
The Anthropocene is such a fraught over topic in the science community due to the need for specificity; however, Anthropocene novelists attempt to encapsulate the many aspects of society that enable humankind’s impact on the Earth and demonstrate its complexities. More specifically, effective Anthropocene novelists demonstrate movements largely capitalist, political, patriarchal, and/or racial forms of power that have built a society whose many actions are detrimental to the Earth. These artists do so by creating stories and characters who embody similar characteristics in the hope of problematizing society’s current social and ecological structure in a way that can connect to the average reader and sparking conversation.Barbara Kingsolver effectively draws connections between the environmental and scientific world and the intersectionality of the world within which the common person lives today. It is evident that throughout her writing, Kingsolver is cognizant of and interested in connecting to all readers, not just educated readers, not just supporters of climate change, and so on. She is aware of the pressure placed on every individual grappling with accepting global climate change. Michel Foucault, a modern French Philosopher, in his text Two Lectures, describes the modern forces of power to be in a net-like arrangement, overlapping and influencing each other (98). Kingsolver demonstrates such complexities in her work in an effort to embody the experience of an individual in the Anthropocene; she recognizes that all these patriarchal, capitalistic, and religious forms of power make it difficult for one to alter their life in the name of climate change but believes firmly in the value of doing so.
Featured Works
Flight Behavior
In her seventh novel, Kingsolver utilizes a unique comparison between the path of a 28-year-old woman and the migration of monarch butterflies. Before delving deeply into an analysis as to how this novel is an example of Anthropocene art, I will provide a brief synopsis of the novel. One day while on a hike in the back of her husband’s farmland to meet another man to begin an affair, the young mother, Dellarobia, notices a sea of orange over much of the land. She decides against the affair and returns home; for “unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road” (15). When she hears her husband’s family plans on cutting a deal with a logging company, she becomes concerned as to what the sea of orange really was. Together with her husband’s family, they hike to discover the beauty of many monarch butterflies occupying the land; however, the father in law still recognizes the area as a place for economic profit.As the story progresses, reporters and other townspeople take interest in the discovery. A scientist also arrives and explains how the butterflies have altered their southern migration patterns from Mexico to this town in Tennessee due to warming temperatures from climate change. Dellarobia learns more and more about the monarchs and climate change from Ovid, the scientist, and grapples with faith versus science; much of the town remains fairly ignorant on the issue. In the end, the monarchs sustain the winter and continue their migration, which inspires Dellarobia to also change the path of her life. She leaves her unhealthy marriage with her children with the intention of attending college.
Throughout the novel parallels between this woman and butterflies are drawn. Both the monarchs and Dellarobia were set off their original trajectories due to a number of reasons, many outside of their control. For Dellarobia, breaking away from social norms in her small town to be young and strong independent woman was difficult. There were also economic influences that steered her away from breaking away and adventuring out on her own. For the monarchs, human induced and accelerated global climate change caused an unusual shift in their migration pattern. Dellarobia’s encounter with the butterflies breaks down the religion and science debate many readers grapple with in their own lives.
Kingsolver also incorporates race in her story. The scientist that arrives in town and enlightens Dellarobia is an African American man. In The New Yorker article entitled “Barbara Kingsolver, Barack Obama, and the Monarch Butterfly,” Kingsolver states “Making him an African American would confound their expectation of scientific authority. And naturally, he had to be tall, dark and handsome” (Martyris). In this article, she references how she intentionally chose for the scientist to be black to introduce another element in an effort to break down people’s preconceptions and notions of who can represent science. This article was published three years after Flight Behavior was published; it is a recap on Barack Obama’s administration committing $3.2 million towards saving the monarch butterfly. In its very essence, the article captures the “literary echo” of Kingsolver and her book’s influence. The article demonstrates the lasting impact Kingsolver’s art has in the Anthropocene and movements for improving the Earth.
By being able to observe “from the outside looking in,” readers can build a connection with the character and journey together on the road of understanding the social, political, religious, and economic complexity of climate change. Kingsolver eloquently accomplishes such a tall task by reaching readers in a non-pretentious way. Often, the rhetoric surrounding climate change is geared towards educated liberals from the cities, and leaves behind an entire audience of people willing to understand when approached in an appropriate fashion. The New York Times article, “The Butterfly Effect,” describes a conclusion many readers may be able to identify with and respect. It states, “Dellarobia will always sail on a wing and a prayer — that is how she is — but the monarchs open her heart to a crazy wanting to protect something larger, nothing less than this gorgeous endangered world of ours” (Browning).
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
In her nonfiction account of eating locally and growing their own food, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver describes the adventure and very real difficulty of straying away from mass produced foods in a society whose cultural norm is to do just that. In the account, her family nurtured an extensive vegetable garden and roosters, made cheeses, and purchased locally sourced grains/olive oil to name a few of their large changes. This novel brings to light the negative role mass production and consumption has on the environment and individual health. She realizes the difficulty in doing so because many Americans only think of food as plentiful and polished as one would see in the grocery store.The narrative is honest and one that emanates curiosity and struggle; Kingsolver writes “Six eyes, all beloved to me, stared unblinking as I crossed the exotics off our shopping list, one by one” (33). Not once throughout her story does she fail to recognize the radical change her family endeavored. Her own daughter, Camille, wrote in big letters on their family’s grocery list, “FRESH FRUIT, PLEASE???” (35). Kingsolver presents her family’s experience in such a way that relates to the inquiries of the average reader.
Often, terms like “organic” and “vegan” produce a specific image in the minds of Americans. In Janet Maslin’s article she states “experiments in studied simplicity are increasingly frequent;” however those who often have the ability to do so are well off financially (Maslin). Kingsolver and her family intended “to establish that a normal-ish American family could be content on the fruits of our local foodshed” (24).
Kingsolver is not ignorant of the economic factors that also play a role in people’s food choices and production. The way society is constructed today people need to have jobs to pay the bills and jobs tend to be collected in urban areas where land to live off of is limited. Food and agriculture has become a “big business” subject to political, cultural, and economic forms of power that has negatively effected the environment.
The Anthropocene artists recognize the convergence of human power structures and their relation to the Earth in their work. Often, we are so entrenched in these current forms of power, we inhibit any noticeable environmental progress. By recognizing these structures and their effects on the earth and environment with the help of artists like Barbara Kingsolver, change can be made within societal structures and the environment.
Bibliography
Browning, Dominique. “The Butterfly Effect.” The New York Times, 9 November 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/books/review/flight-behavior-by-barbara-kingsolver.html.
Foucault, Michel. Two Lectures, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. NY: Pantheon Books, 1980.
DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver a Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 1999.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. HarperCollins, 2007.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. HarperCollins, 2012.
Maslin, Janet. "Because It's Good For You, That's Why." The New York Times, 11 May 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/books/11book.html.
Stromberg, Joseph. “What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?.” Smithsonian.com,
January 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the- anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/. Accessed 8 November 2017.
