In her postscript to In the Time of the Butterflies Julia Alvarez discusses her intentions in the novel. She says that she wanted to bring the story of Patria, Minerva, María Teresa, and Dedé Mirabal to the English-speaking public. All of the Mirabal sisters except Dedé rebelled against the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, and were murdered by Trujillo's men in 1960.

Alvarez seems to recognize that many people might take exception to her book, which fictionalizes the lives of the real Mirabal sisters. Alvarez is careful to point out that the work is not a biography. She says that the reader is not to perceive these characters and events as factual. Instead, she asserts that "what you will find here are the Mirabals of my creation, made up but, I hope, true to the spirit of the real Mirabals." She also contends that the reader will not find the "legendary" Mirabals who have become more myths than actual people. In fact, she intends for her novel to counteract such myths, which make people believe that the Mirabals' courage is inaccessible to ordinary people.

To accomplish her goals, Alvarez must maintain a difficult balance. She must convey her sense of the Mirabal sisters and their importance while not posing her account as anything but an imaginary reconstruction. Because this strategy has become more common with contemporary American novels, many readers are willing to accept the fictionalizing of factual events. Still, Alvarez must work to persuade readers that her version of events provides genuine insight. Therefore, she needs to "humanize" her characters without trivializing them, show their significance without glorifying them, and maintain consistent characters without relying solely on stereotypes.

Some critics believe that Alvarez has fallen short in these areas. Others, however, find her portraits compelling and inspiring. This debate revolves around Alvarez's narrative strategies and her ability to create characters. While the reader does not know if Alvarez conveys the spirit of the actual Mirabal sisters, her use of alternating first person narratives allows her to generate a sense of her characters' courage and the magnitude of their sacrifices, which, ultimately, seems her central aim.

Prominent reservations about Alvarez's novel involve her inability to create believable or engaging characters. For example, Barbara Mujica observes in her review for Americas that Alvarez's Mirabal sisters are "Smaller-than-life" and "are rather too formulaic and unidimensional to hold our attention." Isabel Zakrzewski Brown also comments in her article "Historiographic Metafiction in In the Time of the Butterflies" in the South Atlantic Review that Alvarez resorts to stereotypes in the novel. She reaches a somewhat different conclusion than Mujica, however, though her appraisal is still negative. Brown believes that Alvarez's stereotyped sisters "come together to form a perfect whole: the now legendary Mirabal sisters. Alvarez thus is unable to avoid the mythification process she had professed to elude." In his review "Sisters in Death," Roberto González Echevarría offers a criticism similar to Brown's in The New York Times Book Review, saying that Alvarez "did not escape the temptation to monumentalize" the Mirabals.

The degrees to which Alvarez stereotypes or glorifies her characters are valid concerns. One could contend, like Brown, that Alvarez reduces her characters to "the pious one, Patria; the pragmatic one Dedé; the rebellious one, Minerva; and the innocent one, Mate [María Teresa]." However, one must also take into consideration both Alvarez's own implicit commentary on such stereotypes and her efforts to show the characters' divergences from these patterns.

Alvarez uses Dedé's narrative, in particular, to show how the Mirabals have already been reduced to formulaic portrayals. While briefly describing her sisters to the American interviewer who visits her, Dedé employs a "fixed, monolithic language" that she always uses with "interviewers and mythologizers of her sisters." She realizes that her listeners want definitive characterizations that support their own simplistic notions of the Mirabals. To be heroic, it seems, the Mirabal sisters must not be complex. Still, even in her stereotyping Dedé provides germs of truth. Her summaries are necessarily shorthand versions meant to create an overall sense of her sisters.

Alvarez employs much the same strategies because even a long work of fiction cannot capture the sisters' full complexity. In fact, Alvarez ascribes to Dedé her own methods: working to inspire while also lending an air of normalcy to the Mirabals. Like Dedé, she grounds her depictions in her characters' daily lives and loves in order to foreground their humanity. In doing so, she reveals how these sometimes mundane details are a means of understanding the sisters' rebellions. Alvarez also employs the sisters' weaknesses, fears, and even their selfishness to emphasize their strength in overcoming these hindrances.

Minerva would appear to be the most challenging character to create because she is the most "mythologized" of the sisters. She is the one most identified with the resistance against Trujillo because of her beauty, her public rebellions, her conspicuous intelligence, and her leadership in the underground movement. Alvarez exhibits these same attributes in her Minerva, especially her vehement, outspoken hatred of injustice in any form.

Yet Alvarez also complicates Minerva's character by having her struggle to maintain her outward strength. After her prison sentence, Minerva lives in her mother's house. For a time, she feels overwhelmed and cannot uphold others' expectations of her. As she says, "My months in prison had elevated me to superhuman status." She then finds herself merely performing a role she cannot actually fulfill: "I hid my anxieties and gave everyone a bright smile. If they had only known how frail was their iron-willed heroine. How much it took to put on that hardest of all performances, being my old self again."

Though Minerva eventually regains her fortitude and fiery will, these moments allow the reader to see beneath her "heroine" status to a woman who longs for peace, comfort, and her children. They also allow Alvarez to demonstrate the process of creating and maintaining simplistic public personas. Minerva becomes a symbol even before her death, and the living woman must cope with this status and even perpetuate it for the benefit of others. Alvarez thereby uses Minerva in this instance to reveal the dehumanizing consequences of such processes, which can cut people off from sympathy and understanding.

Initially, the least appealing of Alvarez's characters is María Teresa, or Mate. The reader does not acquire a sense of intimacy with her, perhaps because her narrative is told through diary entries that are most often addressed to the diary book itself, which creates a distancing effect. In addition, the younger Mate lacks the more engrossing conflicts that her sisters possess in their narratives. Even when she joins the underground movement, her commitments seem more shallow than Minerva or Patria's. She joins largely because of her feelings for her eventual husband, Leandro Guzmán. Thus, she seems to romanticize her involvement rather than comprehend the true repercussions of her actions.

By making Mate more childish and less of an ardent revolutionary, Alvarez shows her as someone guided by impulse and heedless emotion. These features may reflect a stereotypical youthful impetuousness, but they also limit the reader's admiration for her, which, if intentional, is a risky strategy for Alvarez to adopt. Not until Mate enters prison does she begin to grow in stature. By having Mate record her fear, doubts, and suffering in her journal, Alvarez drives home the reality of the prisoners' harrowing situation and the strength it takes to endure in this environment. Thus, after Alvarez deflates Mate's "heroine" status, she allows her to mature, creating a far more compelling character.

On the surface, Patria might seem the most mundane of the sisters, since she married young and lived a common, domestic life. However, Alvarez uses these characteristics to shape Patria's motivations for joining the revolution. If one were to stereotype her, she would be "the maternal one," even more so than Brown's description of her as "the pious one." She is a passionate mother, and even her religion contains a profound element of maternal concern for others. She becomes an active member in the underground after witnessing a boy's death during a military attack and thinking, "Oh my God, he's one of mine!" She then takes on a tone of defiance as she contemplates the destruction of the people, her "human family." She prays, "I'm not going to sit back and watch my babies die, Lord, even if that's what You in Your great wisdom decide."

Unlike Minerva and Mate, most of Patria's rebellions are internal. She has sexual longings that contradict her outward piety, and, after her child is born dead, she loses her religious faith for a time but tells no one. In addition, though she joins the rebellion, she is not as vocal as her sisters. Through her portrayal of Patria's strong emotions and deep commitments to others, Alvarez poses her as resolved and motivated by powerful feeling. In these respects, Alvarez creates a consistent, engaging character who exhibits some elements of stereotyping but is not defined by them.

Of all the sisters, Dedé proves the most complicated and engaging. These features perhaps result from the fact that she is the surviving sister, the one who did not give her life for a cause. They also result from her role as the book's central narrator and Alvarez's depiction of the growth of her character since 1960. Even while her sisters are alive, though, Dedé exhibits personal doubts and makes mistakes that have more resonance because of her lack of heroic actions. Most overtly, she marries Jaimito though she is secretly attracted to another man, and, of the four sisters, hers is the only seriously unhappy marriage. In addition, she readily admits to putting up a cheerful front and, in 1994, closely examines her own motivations for her previous actions, which her sisters, of course, cannot do.

Through Dedé, Alvarez explores the failures of courage that kept so many people from opposing Trujillo. She also explores the capacity for courage that lies hidden in people until times of crisis. After her sisters' deaths, Dedé had to remain strong for her nieces and nephews, as well as for those who admired her sisters. She did so and became "the grand dame of the terrible, beautiful past." This role might limit her to being a formulaic "oracle" figure, but Alvarez effectively portrays Dedé's honest appraisals of her failures, her unwillingness to hide from her guilt, and her resolve to keep living and finding happiness. Thus, while she retains consistent features throughout the book, they do not undermine the vibrancy of her character.

From beginning to end, Alvarez presents herself as an advocate for the Mirabal sisters. As a result, she cannot completely escape the charge that she glorifies their lives, nor can one deny the stereotypical elements of her characters. These deficiencies do not compromise the strengths of her book, however. She creates enough believable moments to evoke genuine emotional responses, particularly in her treatments of Patria and Dedé, and to emphasize the humanity of these women and their families.

She also implicitly raises the question of who has the right to speak for the Mirabals. Dedé is the keeper of the family flame, but she does not presume to become her sisters' mouthpiece. The Mirabal family servant Fela, however, believes that the dead sisters speak through her, and Alvarez herself gives the sisters distinctive fictional voices. Thus, Alvarez highlights how people, including herself, use the Mirabal sisters for their own purposes. Through Dedé's comments on speaking to interviewers, Fela's activities, and her own postscript, Alvarez highlights the constructed nature of her characters. Yet, she also stresses the need to construct them in order to inform others and enrich people's lives, whether it be those in the novel or Alvarez's own readership. And her constructions are compelling enough to inspire many to share her assertion "Vivan las Mariposas!" or "Long live the Butterflies!" Therefore, by her own yardstick, Alvarez's novel is a success.

Source: Darren Felty, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000. Felty teaches English at Trident Technical College in Charleston, South Carolina.

November 25th is observed as International Day Against Violence Toward Women in many Latin American countries. That was the day in 1960 when three young sisters who had been fighting to overthrow a brutal dictatorship in the Dominican Republic were assassinated. Known as the butterflies (originally their underground code name), the Mirabal sisters became beloved national heroines. They and their era are the subject of Julia Alvarez's devastating, inspiring book.

Good novels with political themes are a rare treat. Here we have not one but two: along with Butterflies comes Mother-Tongue by Chicana poet Demetria Martinez, winner of the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction. Her story of a young Chicana who falls in love with a Salvadoran refugee tortured as a counter-insurgent in his own country, now exiled to the U.S., is haunting and simply beautiful.

Both authors have interwoven political and personal themes with powerful effect. Both books center on young women maturing, and celebrate women. Both reveal powerful links between the spiritual and the political. Both follow a journal structure, with different voices speaking at different times. Both are treasures.

Also, both books are written by Latina women and thus form part of the flowering of fiction, poetry, essays, and plays by Chicanas and other Latinas here over the past decade. Opposing this creative explosion has been a Euroamerican tendency to find our history, mores, language, most artistic expression, and all but the fair-skinned just too alien. The problem lies not only in institutional racism; it's also the cultural and spiritual borders imposed by the dominant society. To cross, you need much more than a green card.

In the worlds of film and television, cultural gringoism is almost pathetic. During the last few years alone, one Hollywood movie after another—from House of the Spirits to The Perez Family—has found it necessary to have stars of European background play Latina/o characters. The sound of Meryl Streep repeatedly mispronouncing her husband's name, Esteban, may rasp in my ears forever. Television doesn't even bother to whiten; it just makes us invisible. As for the print media, they may publish reviews of art, theater, dance, films, and books with Latino themes—but how many Spanish surnames can you find among the reviewers? And of these, how many are even vaguely progressive?

In the world of literature, Latin American writers (for example Isabel Allende and Carlos Fuentes) have been the ones to slip over the border most easily. In general, Chicano or other homegrown Latino writers have been quietly labeled a bunch of lightweights.

Mainstream recognition did not begin at all until the discovery that the Chicano world could be colorful, amusing, exotic, quaint, magical. Rarely was that world projected as full of anger at racism, struggles for justice, or revolutions of the body and spirit. It's better to be cute than political, individual than collective-minded, and you should pray to be compared with Like Water for Chocolate.

Now come the new books by Julia Alvarez and Demetria Martinez, both with radical themes that include criticism of U.S. policy and Anglo values. They have had flattering reviews, but profound political or social questions raised in each book go ignored: most critics seem happier with the romancing.

Julia Alvarez's book is a fictionalized biography that moves its characters forward in the shadow of impending doom, yet never victimizes, never negates human complexity. Las mariposas—the butterflies—were born to semi-rural comfort, servants, and a convent education. Their background did not suggest that one by one they would become involved in the underground movement against dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. But they do, each in accordance with her own character and within her world of parents, lovers, husbands, and children. The transformation of the sisters—Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa—shows how a person can become a traitor to her class. How concessions that seem trivial may lead down one road and a refusal to make such compromises can lead down its opposite. How rebels are not always born but can be made.

You suspect Minerva will be the first when, in front of a crowd, she slaps Trujillo for sexual harassment (and then leaves the party with her family before Trujillo has left, which is literally against the law). It's not such a big step from there to running guns.

The highly religious Patria seems least likely to join the movement but she does, after witnessing a hideous government massacre of peasants. Her long journey from traditional Catholicism to revolution—a journey made by many priests also—is a major theme in this book, as in Latin American liberation theology.

María Teresa, the youngest and least political or even spiritual, first declares that love of a man goes deeper for her than some higher ideal, but she, too, joins. Only Dedé, the fourth sister, following her conservative husband's wishes, does not join the others in their new life, in prison, and in death.

As a result, Dedé lives to tell the sisters' story and how they were ambushed driving back from a visit to their husbands in prison. On a winding mountain road along the north coast of the Dominican Republic, their jeep is stopped and they are shot to death. The press reports how the bodies of the famous beautiful sisters have been found with their jeep and driver at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff—clearly the victims of an "accident". But the Dominican people know better; they know.

Within a year Trujillo was overthrown, but this didn't lead to a society of the sisters' dreams. Instead it was more killings, hapless new rulers, and the rise of "the prosperous young", living in luxury where guerrillas had once fought. "Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?" asks the survivor Dedé, who takes center stage in the last pages of the book, grappling with guilt and grief. Her question can resound with U.S. movement activists from twenty-five years ago as precious victories of that era undergo reactionary assault today.

In the same mood, Dedé describes how, at an event honoring the sisters, she thinks of the younger people: "to them we are characters in a sad story about a past that is over". But not quite, Dedé tells an old friend: "I'm not stuck in the past, I've just brought it with me into the present. And the problem is not enough of us have done that".

Julia Alvarez, now a professor at Middlebury College, was brought to the U.S. at age ten by her family to escape Trujillo's repression. After her first successful book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez faced a huge challenge in telling the story of the butterflies. The Mirabal sisters are revered in the Dominican Republic; their family home is a shrine, where Patria's wedding dress lies on the bed ready to wear, and the braid of young María Teresa's hair rests under glass. To write a book about such icons could mean trouble, controversy.

Sure enough, some Dominicans have berated Alvarez for daring to humanize the sisters, and for other supposed crimes. Most of this seems to come down to petty jealousy, perhaps with a dash of wounded macho, toward someone who left the country and "made it" in the U.S. Reviewers in this country have displayed similar emotions, as in the major New York Times review, which bristled with hostility and leveled totally absurd criticism like, "There is indeed much too much crying in this novel".

Not that the book is perfect. It tells us almost nothing about the issue of color and the particularities of Afro-Dominican experience. And it somewhat veils the issue of class. But nothing makes me less than joyous that Julia Alvarez wrote this book, telling a story unknown to most people in this country.

Activists and progressives can also contemplate the author's own, last message about the butterflies: "by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women".

Source: Elizabeth Martínez, in a review of In the Time of the Butterflies, in The Progressive, July 1995, p. 39.

Hispanic writers in the United States have published several novels of unquestionable merit, the most recent success being Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban". Most deal with the pains and pleasures of growing up in a culture and a language outside the mainstream. If becoming an adult is a trying process under ordinary circumstances, doing so within varying and often conflicting expectations can be even more bewildering and alienating. It makes growing up, which is by its very nature self-absorbing, doubly so. A person can emerge not a harmonious blend, but simultaneously two (or more) selves in conflict. This predicament is much more dramatic when people speak two or more languages, for the inner life can be like a United Nations debate, complete with simultaneous translations and awkward compromises.

All this is, of course, the stuff of literature, which is why it has become the central concern of Hispanic writers in this country. It was the explicit theme of Julia Alvarez's delightful first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and it is the subtext of her second, In the Time of the Butterflies. But by dealing with real historical figures in this novel, Ms. Alvarez has been much more ambitious than she was in her first, as if she needed to have her American self learn what it was really like in her native land, the Dominican Republic.

On the night of Nov. 25, 1960, Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal—three sisters returning from a visit to their husbands, political prisoners of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo—were murdered by Trujillo's henchmen. This was one of those appalling atrocities that galvanize opposition to a murderous regime and signal the beginning of its demise. Indeed, Trujillo was slain six months later, and the Dominican Republic began a tortuous and tortured attempt at democracy. The Mirabal sisters, already admired for their resistance to the Trujillo regime before they were murdered, became part of the mythology of the Dominicans struggle for social and political justice, and the day of their death is observed in many parts of Latin America today.

In an epilogue, Ms. Alvarez, who was 10 years old when her family came to the United States in the year the Mirabal sisters were assassinated, runs through the usual commonplaces about the freedom of the historical novelist in the handling of facts, and expresses her desire to do more than merely add to the deification of the Mirabals. In fictionalizing their story she has availed herself of the liberties of the creative writer, to be sure, but alas, I am afraid she did not escape the temptation to monumentalize.

Ms. Alvarez's plan is flawless. As she proved in her first novel, she is skilled at narrative construction, though she lacks a compelling style and her English is sometimes marred by Hispanisms. (Once we accept the idea of English-speaking Mirabals, there is no reason for them to have accents.)

In the Time of the Butterflies opens with a thinly disguised version of Ms. Alvarez, an Americanized Dominican woman who wants to write something about the Mirabals and is looking for information. She visits the family home, now a kind of shrine, run by Dede, the surviving fourth sister, who had remained at home that night, and who expectedly, is tortured by guilt and haunted by the burden of memory. Dede's recollections and musings open and close the novel, nicely framing the action.

The core of the book is made up of chronological reminiscences by the murdered sisters from childhood to the time of their brutal demise. Because we know their fate in advance, everything is colored by sadness and anger. The Mirabals are a traditional provincial Dominican family, portrayed in cliched fashion—a middle-class rural clan anchored by the inevitably philandering but supportive patriarch and the warm, caring and wise mother. Happy, bourgeois families like the Mirabals were, for many years, the heart of the Trujillo dictatorship's support.

As Ms. Alvarez tells their story, the Mirabal sisters are drawn into politics by Trujillo's intolerable wickedness rather than by any deeply felt or intellectually justified commitment. The sisters appear on the whole to be reactive and passive. Their education in religious schools, and their chaste and rather naive development into womanhood take up too many tedious pages. Probably to heighten the evil import of Trujillo's deeds, the Mirabals are portrayed as earnestly innocent and vulnerable, but that diminishes their political stature and fictional complexity.

Ms. Alvarez clutters her novel with far too many misdeeds and misfortunes: rape, harassment, miscarriage, separation, abuse, breast cancer. Are the sisters victims of fate, Latin American machismo, American imperialism or only the particularly diabolical nature of Trujillo's dictatorship? Eulogy turns into melodrama and history becomes hagiography. There is a touch of the maudlin even in the title—the Mirabals were affectionately known in their lifetime as the mariposas, the butterflies. There is indeed much too much crying in this novel.

Hispanic Americans today have "old countries" that are neither old nor remote. Even those born here often travel to their parents' homeland, and constantly face a flow of friends and relatives from "home" who keep the culture current. This constant cross-fertilization makes assimilation a more complicated process for them than for other minority groups. This "living origin" is a determining factor for Hispanic writers in the United States, as William Luis, a professor of Latin American literature at Vanderbilt Umversity and the leading authority on this phenomenon, has pointed out. This is why the most convincing parts of In the Time of the Butterflies have to do with Dedé, the survivor, and her anguished role as memorialist, which in turn becomes Ms. Alvarez's role. It is here that we best understand the depths of Ms Alvarez's despair and the authenticity of her effort to represent the inner drama of her conversion to an American self.

There is for Hispanic writers in the United States the added burden of a very active popular literary tradition in Spanish, including some of the most distinguished names in contemporary world literature: Carlos Fuentes Mario Vargas Llosa Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz. In its concern with history and dictatorship, In the Time of the Butterflies seems to be echoing García Márquez, and the emphasis on a clannish rural family is reminiscent not only of that modern master but also of his disciple Isabel Allende.

But the actual history in In the Time of the Butterflies is very blurry. I find no connection between the specific dates Ms. Alvarez gives to mark periods in the Mirabals' lives and either Dominican or broader Latin American history. Serious historical fiction establishes links between individual destiny and pivotal political events. It shows either the disconnection between the individual and the larger flow of sociopolitical movements or on the contrary the individuals as a pawn of history. In either case there is irony, but in this novel the reader is not made aware of a broader, more encompassing political world.

In the Time of the Butterflies reads like the project the Americanized Dominican woman at the beginning of the novel ("a gringa dominicana in a rented car with a road map asking for street names") would have come up with after pondering the fate of the Mirabal sisters from her perspective as a teacher on a United States college campus today. Had Julia Alvarez concentrated more on her dialogue with Dedé she would have produced a better book. It would have had the touch of irony provided by the realization that the gringa dominicana would never really be able to understand the other woman much less translate her.

Source: Roberto González Echevarría, "Sisters in Death," in New York Times Book Review, December 18, 1994, p. 28.