In the Time of the Butterflies

In her work, The Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez tells of the Mirabal sisters' death as narrated by Dede and told to her by various people. There existed different accounts of their death even by...

The oldest three of the Mirabal sisters were very close in age. Patria, the oldest, was born in 1924. The most religious of the three women, she seemed destined to enter the convent, but...

Butterfly season varies depending upon what part of the world is being talked of. For example, butterfly season in the New England region of the United States is in their summer during July to...

Minerva is arguably the lead protagonist of the novel and shows many acts of bravery and courage throughout the novel. As a young woman she defiantly slaps Trujillo for what she considers...

Julia Alvarez deploys vivid imagery in the descriptions of the Mirabal sisters’ Dominican home. To create these images, she often uses similes and metaphors. Another literary device is dialogue....

In Chapter 6, Minerva discovers that her father has a mistress and four other daughters. She also finds that he has been hiding letters to her from Lio. When she confronts him, her father defends...

Chapter 9 in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies describes Dede's final interaction with her interviewer, as well as her final decision to not join the underground movement. As all of...

Enrique Mirabal died as a result of his harsh treatment in prison and his failing health owing to the heart attack he had there. Though he doesn't die until 1953, this family still says that it's...

In Julia Alvarez's book, In the Time of Butterflies, there are several symbols. First, as noted in the title, butterflies are significant. (This supports the theme of "change and transformation.")...

In the novel In the Time of the Butterflies, Dede is the middle sister in the Mirabal family unit of four sisters. Unlike her outspoken and revolutionary sisters, Dede is a play-it-safe kind of...

Maria Teresa changes throughout Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies from an individual who values material goods and popularity to someone who values love for her family. This...

Chapter 1 of In the Time of Butterflies contains a lot of descriptive details that reveal hidden meanings and predict what is to come later in the novel. For example, in the beginning of the novel,...

Dedé's father is a wealthy farmer and landowner who also runs a general store. Despite his wealth, Papa is actually quite a generous soul, which sets him apart from the economic and social elite of...

1. In Chapter Five the girls, Dede and Minerva, finish their work at their father's shop and head to Tio [Uncle] Pepe's where they will play volleyball with their friends. But, Minerva has invited...

The title In the Time of Butterflies comes from history. The Dominican Republic was ruled by a ruthless dictator, Rafael Trujillo, from 1930 to 1961. He was brutal and greedy beyond words; however...

There are several characteristics of the butterfly which make it a potent symbol for the Mirabel sisters. As they face the violent consequences of a brutal dictator's rulership, as well as strife...

Minerva's chapters are as follows and here is a significant quote & analysis from each. Pages numbers will depend on whatever edition you have. (Mine is the Plume paperback edition. Those...

Rain is used as a symbol of tragic or disastrous events, or as a foreshadowing of doom. The first scene in which it is mentioned is at the end of Chapter 1, "a clear moonlit night before the...

In the Time of the Butterflies is a historical fiction novel written by Julia Alvarez. The narrative centers around a fictionalized account of the Mirabel sisters, four revolutionaries and...

If you look back carefully at Chapter Five of this amazing novel, you can see that the animosity that exists between Dede and Minerva has its roots in the conflict they have over a man. When...

The unsettling realization about Virgilio, nicknamed Lio, that Dede comes to is that he is really a Communist. Lio is "a radical young man" who, for a period of time, was a close friend of the...

In Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, Maria Teresa, "Mate", the youngest of the butterfly sisters, matures from innocent child, preoccupied with pretty, trivial things, to brave freedom...

Dede is the oldest and only surviving Mirabal sister. For much of the time, it seems of the four daughters, Dede is the least committed to the revolution. Dede "had always been the docile middle...

Minerva is the narrator of the novel. She knows that the dictator Rafael Trujillo demands absolute loyalty and subservience from every Dominican. In his thirty years in power he had built up a...

Dede is at first very suspicious of the American interviewer. She has been enduring the questions about her sisters, "Las Mariposas" (the butterflies) for over fifty years (1943-1994,...

In chapter five Dede narrates to the interviewer(1994) a story concerning Virgiho Morales (Lio). She was romantically interested in Lio during his youth. After that, the story goes back to 1948....

As a young girl of 10, Maria Theresa keeps a diary as a way to record her personal secrets, as many young girls do. In another diary she records her college years, and in a third her six months in...

On April 11, 1960, Maria Teresa is tortured at La 40; in undated journals between the 10th and the 16th, she recovers from her ordeal. When Maria Teresa is incarcerated by the Servicio de...

You might want to look in the first Chapter and at Dede's reminiscence of the family time together in the garden at night. There is one excerpt from this chapter that really helps to set the scene...

"El Jefe" wasn't just a physical entity; rather, the Dominican people considered it a metaphysical force that could be conjured up by simply thinking a non-approved thought. "God...

During her last year at Immaculada, Minerva befriends Hilda, a "really rude" young lady who "wears trousers and a beret slanted on her head like she is Michelangelo". Hilda lives in town but...

At the beginning of Chapter Seven (1953-1958), Maria Teresa is very depressed, writing "I feel like dying" because she has been mourning the death of her father. On December 31, she starts her...

In chapter 9, Julia Alvarez writes: So when she saw her three sisters coming down the path that afternoon, she felt pure dread. It was as if the three fates were approaching, their scissors poised...

In my opinion, Patricia is the character that goes through the most dramatic changes in the novel. Patricia changes from religious, to being in love, to losing a child, to losing her faith, to...

The chapter concludes with: “A dark night was falling, one of a different order from the soft, large, kind ones of childhood under the anacahuita tree, Papa parceling out futures and Mama fussing...

Because this novel is written in a way that uses all four sisters' voices as individual narrators of their part of the story, you could examine the difference in tone between the four sisters. The...

Maria Teresa writes, "I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country. "'And it isn't that already?'...

In the Time of the Butterflies discusses not only the fact that the sisters stood up for what they thought was right, but also the various processes they each went through to get to that place....

This novel has a unique structure in that the first chapter is told in the present day from the voice of Dede, the only surviving Maribel sister who reflects back on the past and on her sisters'...

Chapter 11 covers the time period from March to August, 1960 and is narrated by Mate. She and Minerva are in a cell with twenty-four women. The two sisters turn down the pardon that's offered to...

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, or El Jefe, used brutal tactics to rise to power in the Dominican Republic and stay there for over thirty years. Tens of thousands were murdered under his dictatorship and...

Under house arrest, Minerva tries to settle her nerves and adjust to life back at home. She and her sisters can only leave the house with permission from Pena, a SIM guard, and regularly go only...

Although it might seem that the revolution causes the dissolution of Dede's marriage, I think that in reality it merely exposes weaknesses that are there already. As Dede muses in Chapter 1,...

The use of the moon symbolically seems to indicate the level of violence at each stage in this incredible novel. The moon seems to act as some kind of gauge of the level of safety or danger of the...

Dedé spends a great deal of time trying to keep her sisters’ memories alive. Recall how at the beginning of the story, she shows pictures of her sisters to the interviewer and recounts stories...

In Chapter 5, Dede first realizes the full extent of Lio's revolutionary ideology. Mate reads from the newspaper that "there had been a demonstration at the university, led by a bunch of young...

What's so interesting about Alvarez's choice to alternate chapters from the different points of view of the three butterfly sisters is that, although the stories are fictitious (though inspired by...

Each of the four sisters in Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies loses their innocence and/or faith in the early chapters of the book. Prior to each sister’s realization, each...

There are numerous "man vs. society" conflicts in Alvarez's novel. Of course, there is a free society vs. a dictatorship, ie, Trujillo's reign vs. the "movement" for freedom...

When Minerva says that she "got free" when she went away to boarding school, she is referring to feeling liberated from the restrictiveness of her household. As a bright, inquisitive, and defiant...