Research Guide to American Literature

focusing more closely than did The Bean Trees on people involved in the Sanctu-
ary movement. Pigs in Heaven (1993) returns readers to the story of Taylor Greer
and Turtle; it was written in response to the criticism that in allowing her Bean
Trees protagonist to adopt a Cherokee child she flouted the importance of the
Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which gives tribes precedence over state and
federal entities in the placement of native children. She has said she recognized
her mistake in neglecting the moral and legal implications of Turtle having been
taken away from the Cherokee, and, as Wagner-Martin notes, she wrote Pigs in
Heaven to encourage readers to hear “sympathetically the claims of the Indian
community.”
Some readers thought that Kingsolver had taken a departure with The Poi-
sonwood Bible (1998), producing a longer novel with political turmoil in another
country as its backdrop. The story of four sisters who, along with their mother, are
brought by their evangelical Baptist father, Nathan Price, to the Belgian Congo in
1959, it received the National Book Prize of South Africa and was shortlisted for
the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Kingsolver has also published
a book of poetry, Another America (1992, enlarged in 1998), which features each
poem in English on one side of the page and Spanish on the other. Her novel
Prodigal Summer appeared in 2000 and The Lacuna, also a novel, in 2009.
Kingsolver names as her major influences Doris Lessing, Bobbie Ann
Mason, Flannery O’Connor, and Maxine Hong Kingston. In an interview with
David King Dunaway she stated, “In high school, I learned that there are three
great themes in literature: man against man; man against nature; and man against
himself. So it was all ‘man’ and it was all ‘against’; and yet so much of my life
has no ‘against’ in it. It’s mostly ‘with.’ I’m usually figuring out how I can get
something done with the help of somebody else, and that is not one of the great
themes of literature” she was taught. In her writing, she replaces “against” with a
sense of connectedness.
The Bean Trees opens with Marietta Greer—she will change her name to
Taylor during her trip, adopting the name of the town where she runs out of
gas—striking out from her home in rural Kentucky for new territory, in tradi-
tional American fashion. What is not traditional about her journey, however, is
that unlike James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Mark Twain’s Huck Finn,
Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and countless other American protagonists
who have fled confining homes for new land, Taylor is female; rather than shed-
ding commitments she gains an enormous one on the road when an abused
Cherokee child is given to her; and once she arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she finds
herself slowly but surely enveloped in community. Taylor learns to be a mother to
Turtle and becomes educated about the plight of Latin American political exiles
such as Esteban and Esperanza, who lost their child in Guatemala and are now
seeking sanctuary with Mattie, the tire-store owner who employs Taylor.
In an essay in Small Wonder Kingsolver describes having her mother read the
typescript for The Bean Trees when she came to see her new grandchild. Address-
ing her mother, she explains, it is “the longest letter to you I’ve ever written.
Finally, after a thousand tries, I’ve explained everything I believe in, exactly the
way I always wanted to: human rights, Central American refugees, the Problem

Barbara Kingsolver 2