Butterflies Aren't Free A Review of In the Time of the Butterflies Julia Alvarez ( ©1994 Penguin Group, ISBN: 0452274427)

 

Based on the historical murders of the Mirabal Sisters, In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez, tells fictionalized accounts of the lives of Patria, Minerva, Dede and Maria Teresa Mirabal. It is a gripping story of four sisters who dared to undermine the abusive regime during the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic.  The saga Alvarez created pierces the heart with its contrasts of love and horror, with despotism as a backdrop for sisterhood and devotion.

 

While the memories of the Mirabal women are revered, Alverez attempts to take them off the high pedestal and allows them to be human, sharing their faults and struggles, their anger, their miscalculations, the tensions in their marriages, and their vulnerability to being pawns in the society in which they lived. From the first page the reader wonders why, of the four sisters, Dede is left alive. As Alverez unfolds the events leading up to the brutal murders, we are treated to the perspectives of all four women; the attempts by Patria to be true to the church when it fails her, the strong personality of Minerva whose idealism leads the others into the Revolution, the sister (Dede) on the sidelines controlled by a strong-willed husband, and the innocent diary entries of young Maria Teresa.

 

This story does not hide the treatment of women in their culture as sex objects, expected to bear the pain of straying husbands and the sexual advances of a dictator. The sisters’ mother endures their father having another family, strangely mirroring their own with four daughters—the author’s device to emphasize the bonding of sisterhood above later adversity. Besides their father’s infidelity, Minerva and Dede tolerate their husbands’ affairs. Caught in economic and societal constraints, they cannot deal decisively with these issues.

 

Maria Teresa’s journal entries express the anger she feels towards all men, but later reveals her own motivation for joining the Revolution—the love of a man, highlighting the confusion between anger and desire for intimacy many women feel in such a society. Maria Teresa’s innocence evolves into realism when she and her husband are both in prison and she discovers that she is pregnant; she contemplates, with the guidance of the prostitutes incarcerated there, how to abort her baby for fear of what the regime would do to the child. To contrast her former innocence, following her prison experience she freely tells dirty jokes which once shocked her, a sign of a more callused woman.

 

This kind of struggle may never have been a part of the Maribal Sisters' experiences, but they were struggles faced by women in that society. While some may prefer historically accurate accounts of their lives, Alvarez makes an assertion about the value of fiction which is, perhaps, just as significant as the story itself. She states, “I wanted to immerse my readers in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic that I believe can only finally be understood by fiction, only finally be redeemed by the imagination. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart” (324).

 

Lest we be quick to judge such blatant distortions of history, let’s remember that truth is often conveyed through other means besides through mere facts. Jesus did not say that the “facts” would set us free; he said that the truth would set us free. He practiced revealing truth through stories. While some stories ought to be as close to the facts as possible, such as the unique events surrounding the flight of Apollo 13, other stories about abuses, wars, love, etc. can be fictionalized for heightened impact. Telling the actual events might remove the jolt of truth that can only be found in fiction.

 

The sense of sisterhood within this novel is overwhelming. Dede knew that “Whether she joined their underground or not, her fate was bound up with the fate of her sisters. She would suffer whatever they suffered. If they died, she would not want to go on living without them” (193).  When they were murdered, she became the mother to all their children. In the end, she considered her job well done, maybe too well done, when Minerva’s child did not share the intense memories of her mother and the sad, frightening events that Dede expected to haunt her.

 

The historical value of this novel should not be underestimated. It opens a window into the tiny country of the Dominican Republic, allowing the reader to see from the inside out what it was like to live under tyranny. Beyond that, the sympathetic view of Fidel Castro in taking over Cuba, as it is seen by the characters in the book, helps readers to understand the pull of Marxist ideals as a positive, liberating change for their Cuban neighbors in contrast to Communist failings, when compared with suffering under a terrible dictator. Some of these details were lost in the movie version. Neither explores the United States’ role in supporting such dictators in an attempt to limit the spread of Communism. Might this speak to those today who allow the Republican party to set the evangelical agenda? Many Catholics in the '60's were seen as anti-American because they were pro-communist in the face of brutal dictatorships. Catholics (represented by many of the South American countries dealing directly with these issues) may have a more nuanced view of geopolitics than evangelicals had throughout the Red Scare, and even spilling over into current political issues.

 

Alvarez is a dynamic writer who brings together an important historical event along with issues of human freedom and human bonding, political confusion, and the value of fiction to teach us truth.

 

 

by Rachel Ramer