In The Time Of The Butterflies

Butterflies and Hibiscus Flowers: the Transformation to Womanhood during Times of Violence The transition from childhood to adulthood is never easy. For the characters in Julia Alvarez’s book In the Time of the Butterflies and Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus, the struggles to grow into one’s self are even starker in worlds of brutality and strife. As both works of historical fiction and coming-of-age narratives, these stories stray from the typical coming-of-age tropes and discuss topics of violence, rebellion, and the struggles women face in patriarchal dominated societies. In the Time of the Butterflies, the Mirabal sisters’ transition to womanhood is anything but easy. These women are confronted with the oppression regime of Rafael Trujillo,
These sacrifices can be seen throughout the book in the characters as they all make sacrifices for the cause. In some ways, all of the sisters have to give up aspects of family life. The revolutionary sisters Minerva, Patria, and Mate, give up raising their children in order to have a better world for them, but Dede gives up being in solidarity with her sisters as she does not want to lose her husband and children. Patria, gives up having a normal life and keeping her children out of the line of fire. However, she realizes the importance of the cause and exclaims that she is “not going to sit back and watch [her] babies die” like the boy on the mountain. Patria is motivated by her grief of losing a child as she feels she must protect her remaining children from the horrors of the regime. This is one of the ways that Alvarez explains the transformation from Patria’s initial self during her early years as a child and mother, to where she grows into the rebel she was meant to become. The other sister, Mate, gives up her education as she is drawn into the cause during her years in college as she finds the box of guns. She emerges from the naivety of her college years to the revolutionary by giving up her preconceived notions of Trujillo as she comes to also realize the secrets of Trujillo’s regime like her sister Minerva. Minerva makes a sacrifice in that she has to relinquish time spent with her children whom she loves in order to create a better world for them to come of age in. She ends up giving her children away to her sisters, even if it “hurt[s] her to make this sacrifice she was convinced she needed to make” (Nunez, 155). Arguably, Minerva sacrificed the most out of the sisters, as she had to give up motherhood, her dreams of becoming a lawyer, and the continuing education. Even though