The Bean Trees

“There were two things about Mama. One is that she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.”

Using a simile, Taylor suggests that her mother’s reaction to her modest achievements resembled how a person would react to a far greater and more impressive accomplishment. This quote seems somewhat paradoxical—claiming that Taylor’s mother both expected the best and would treat any result as though it were incredible. This indicates that Taylor’s mother valued effort and willingness to try more than any particular result.

“It was clear to me that the whole intention of bringing the Cherokees here was to get them to lie down and die without a fight.”

This sentence features hyperbolic language, exaggerating the negative qualities of the Oklahoma landscape, to humorously convey Taylor’s dislike of the place where she’s accidentally stranded. She makes a reference to the historical displacement of the Cherokee people from their homes in southeastern America to Oklahoma, an event known as the Trail of Tears.

“It was pure pleasure not to have men pushing into her and touching her on the bus. It allowed her mind to drift far away from her strange, enormous body.”

Lou Ann describes the unexpected relief that pregnancy brings her in public; her condition allows her to avoid misogynistic harassment. Employing alliteration in the phrase “pure pleasure” draws attention to the intensity of Lou Ann’s happiness when men no longer objectify her.

“Hanging around here would be like living in a house made of bombs. The sound of the air hose alone gave me the willies.”

Taylor’s first reaction to Mattie’s tire shop features a simile and dramatic irony. The simile compares the tires that surround them to bombs, referencing Taylor’s fear of exploding tires stemming from a childhood experience. However, this quote is also an example of irony, as Taylor is later employed by Mattie and learns that her house is a sanctuary and refuge from the dangers of the world.

“Mattie’s backyard looked like the place where old cars die and go to heaven.”

This quote personifies the cars in Mattie’s backyard, implying humanlike qualities such as their dying and possibly going to an afterlife. The imagery associated with Mattie’s house combines life and death, juxtaposing the rusting cars with the rich growth in her garden. Thus, the novel hints at how new life can unexpectedly thrive even in difficult circumstances or harsh environments.

“Whatever you want the most, it’s going to be the worst thing for you.”

This aphorism, given to Lou Ann by Bobby Bingo, a vegetable salesman in her neighborhood, refers to the temptation of taking money from his son and moving to California, suggesting that he’s happier living modestly and selling food in Tucson than he’d be in Beverly Hills. However, the aphorism applies to Lou Ann’s situation too, indicating that reconciling with Angel would be bad for her.

“In the old days, I suppose it would have been bringing the city a fresh load of life, like a blood vessel carrying platelets to circulate through the lungs. Nowadays, if you could even call the railroad an artery of Tucson, you would have to say it was a hardened one.”

Taylor compares the old railroad tracks she lives near to the human circulatory system, using a simile that personifies the city of Tucson. Because of her background working in a medical lab, Taylor uses figurative language that relates to artery health, suggesting that her downtown neighborhood is in decline. This figurative language, which contrasts society with biological processes, recurs throughout the novel and indicates that both can be diseased or healthy.

“I said I had to confess I didn’t have the proper reverence for the Burger Derby institution, and to prove it I threw my hat into the Mighty Miser and turned it on.”

Taylor uses sarcastic language to deride the notion that she should take her job at a fast food restaurant seriously. Using terms like “confess” and “reverence” implies that her manager expects a religious level of devotion from employees, which Taylor rejects. She alludes to the Mighty Miser, a brand of circular heater used in restaurants, indicating that she’s symbolically destroying her uniform hat to signal that she’s quitting the job.

“I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona.”

This quote creates a comedic moment as Taylor sarcastically uses the exact language of other characters. Referring to a newspaper ad for a roommate and the words of a laboratory manager who denied her request for a job, Taylor’s comment exposes the absurdity and frustration of trying to survive in poverty.

“Every time I went to see her and check on the car I felt like John Wayne in that war movie where he buckles down his helmet, takes a swig of bourbon, and charges across the minefield yelling something like ‘Live Free or Bust!’”

Taylor uses an allusion to actor John Wayne, a popular performer from Hollywood’s Golden Age who often starred in Westerns and war films. She compares her own nervousness around tires to his heroic and glorious charge across a minefield, humorously contrasting the different circumstances. John Wayne was often thought to represent rugged independence and American machismo, which Taylor co-opts for finding her own courage and self-reliance.

“Constellations of gum-wrapper foil twinkled around the trash barrels.”

This quote uses a metaphor that compares the trash in the park to constellations of stars in the sky. The description is a form of verbal irony, playing with the idea that stars are typically a beautiful and pleasant image while gum wrappers blowing around a trash can aren’t. The similarity between the sparkling night sky and the sparkling trash in the park draws attention to the park’s unpleasantness.

“It reminded me of that Bible story where somebody or other struck a rock and the water poured out. Only this was better, flowers out of bare dirt. The Miracle of Dog Doo Park.”

Alluding to a biblical story from Exodus in which Moses strikes a rock in the desert to obtain miraculous water, Taylor describes how flowers growing in the polluted park seems like a miracle. Images of water and fertility in the desert are a recurring motif throughout the novel, indicating nature’s resiliency. The text frames the park’s flowers as a sign of hope for Taylor and Lou Ann, who are finding ways to thrive despite their circumstances.

“The moon threw shadows of fig branches that curled like empty hands across Estevan’s face and his chest. Something inside this man was turning inside out.”

In this description of Estevan in the aftermath of Esperanza’s attempted death by suicide, the text uses simile and personification to figuratively explain the torment Estevan feels. The image of the shadows of the branch on his face and chest like hands implies that he looks as if someone is hurting or attacking him, while the image of him turning inside out suggests vulnerability and the exposure of his inner turmoil.

“From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.”

When Taylor comforts Estevan after his wife’s attempted death by suicide, she notices that she’s continuing to replicate the social role of women in typical marriages. This foreshadows her growing attraction to Estevan, while also indicating that Taylor is troubled by the tendency of women to automatically assume the role of caretaker in all relationships. Her reference to food relates to the symbolic importance of vegetables throughout the novel, associating growing crops with resiliency and emotional nourishment.

“Tears would be like worrying about watermarks on the furniture when the house is burning down.”

Taylor uses a simile to explain the insufficiency of tears to capture the grief that Estevan is feeling over the loss of his daughter, Ismene. Taylor imagines an absurd and hyperbolic scenario: a person worrying about minor damage to furniture when the house it’s in is being destroyed by fire, to indicate how Estevan crying would be equally incongruent with the severity of his loss.

“Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I’m counting them as blessings?”

This dialogue uses a rhetorical question, which calls for no answer, in order to expose the irony of Taylor’s situation. While she left Kentucky because she feared ending up like Newt Harbine’s family, she actually found solace and happiness in the very same things that brought her grief. This irony demonstrates Taylor’s dynamic character development at this point in the novel.

“Her mouth stretched a little bit in the direction of a smile. But her eyes looked blank. Dark, black holes.”

This description captures Esperanza’s deep depression through metaphorical language. While her mouth is smiling, the novel compares her eyes to blank, dark holes, suggesting that the smile is an empty and meaningless expression that doesn’t represent her true feelings. Emptiness, hollowness, and disconnection are signs of trauma that both Esperanza and Turtle exhibit, contrasting with the signs of emotion and connection that they exhibit when they begin to heal.

“I didn’t want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose. If the truth was a snake it would have bitten me a long time ago. It would have had me for dinner.”

Taylor’s language often employs colloquialisms and idioms like these because of her upbringing in rural Kentucky. In this instance, Taylor plays on the common expression to express an obvious truth, “if it was a snake, it would have bitten me,” but hyperbolically exaggerates the idea further, showing that she was so unaware of global injustice that the snake could have eaten her entirely.

“The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.”

This description of the Tucson desert uses personification, assigning the landscape the humanlike qualities of a hand with lines on the palm. By imagining the natural environment as a human, Barbara Kingsolver draws attention to how the kinds of successful adaptations found in animals and ecosystems can also help human society. The stream beds of the desert are compared to heart lines on a palm, associating water with emotional renewal.

“When I was young and growing a lot, and Mama couldn’t feed me enough, she used to say I had a hollow leg. Now I felt like I had a hollow everything. Nothing in the world could have filled that space.”

Using colloquial language and expressions, Taylor compares physical hunger to the emotional emptiness she feels after the attempted assault on Turtle. This language of emptiness versus fullness connects to the broader symbolic importance of gardening and vegetables. The novel characterizes this melancholy as more of an absence of feeling than the presence of a strong negative emotion like sadness or anger.

“What I’m saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do.”

Taylor’s frustration with the world uses repetition to convey the totality and universality of her claim. She repeats “nobody” and “anybody” to imply that her statement is absolute and all-encompassing. However, her statement is also ironic, because she and her chosen community do feel sorry for others and work to help them. Her disillusionment leads her to ignore the presence of compassionate people in her own life.

“Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

This simile compares depression and sadness to disease in the human body. While it can be cured in the same way as a cold—with care and time—sadness can grow over time and therefore requires a more intensive intervention in order to heal. In Taylor’s case, her melancholy subsides only when she takes action to ensure Turtle’s future well-being and therefore finds a way to understand her own role as a mother.

“In Arizona, things didn’t rot, not even apples. They just mummified. I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.”

When visiting the Lake O’ the Cherokees, Taylor’s narration connects water with spiritual rejuvenation. While she has learned to adapt to Arizona’s dry climate, returning to Turtle’s ancestral lands and to an environment closer to her own home provides them both with comfort. This metaphorically indicates the value of connecting to one’s ancestry and history, signifying the spiritual damage historically done to Indigenous peoples when they’re forced to relocate or flee from their homes.