Home/lands and Contested Motherhood: The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver

Abstract

The protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees (1988) (discussed here out of publication sequence as one of two narratives that focus on the same central characters; the dates of publication straddle that of Animal Dreams) is, like Codi Noline, a quester. Like her (traditionally male) predecessors in American fiction, she sets out from home, “going west” to see the world, where she ends up creating a new home for herself. Along the way she renames herself and passes from the state of young adulthood to motherhood. She leaves her original home—no father but a loving, supportive mother who accepts “whatever [she] came home with”1—because she wants to avoid the limiting and limited fate of her female peers: adolescent pregnancy and early marriage (typically in that order). Ironically, the most decisive and destiny-altering event in her life is her unconventional entry into motherhood.