This "gringa" woman interviews Dede in , and her questions provoke Dede to retreat into the past and remember the events that led up to her sisters' deaths. She is "such a thin woman with fly-about hair in her face. Minerva's friend and fellow revolutionary, who first explains to Minerva that Trujillo's regime is evil.
When they meet as children, she is "a skinny girl with a sour look on her face and pokey elbows to match. One of Minerva's friends at Inmaculada Concepcion, who is "pretty in an I-told-you-so way, as if she hadn't expected to turn out pretty and now she had to prove it.
Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator of the Dominican Republic from until his assassination in As described by Sinita to Minerva, "Trujillo became president in a sneaky way. First, he was in the army, and all the people who were above him kept disappearing until he was the one right below the head of the whole armed forces.
A schoolmate of Minerva, in whom Trujillo takes an interest. She becomes one of his many mistresses. She is "grownup-looking for her age, tall with red-gold hair and her skin like something just this moment coming out of the oven, giving off a warm golden glow. Rafael Leonidas Ramfis, Trujillo's son, a full colonel in the army since the age of four. When Sinita approaches Trujillo with a bow and arrow during the girls' performance, Ramfis jumps up and breaks her bow. The Mirabals' maid, who continues to work for Dede in She believes that she can commune with the three dead sisters, and she tells Minou what they say.
One of the Mirabals' cousins and Berto's older brother. Maria Teresa has a crush on both of them as a young girl. One of the Mirabals' uncles, who lives in La Vega. Minerva lies and says he is sick, and that that is the reason she has been sneaking out of school. Elsa's grandfather, who is in trouble with the police. Minerva goes to her first revolutionary meetings at his home with Elsa, Lourdes, and Sinita. A revolutionary orphan with whom Minerva becomes friends while she is at Inmaculada Concepcion.
Maria Teresa describes her as wearing "trousers and a beret slanted on her head like she is Michelangelo. Virgilio Morales, "a tall thin man" with thick, wire-rimmed glasses. When Dede and Minerva meet him, he has just returned from Venezuela, where he earned his medical degree. He asks Minerva to come away with him, and he sends her letters which Enrique Mirabal, her father, keeps from her.
The woman with whom Enrique Mirabal has been having an affair and with whom he has other children, including Margarita. The oldest of Carmen's children by Enrique Mirabal. When she visits Patria with a note from Maria Teresa, she has "a sweet, simple face and dark, thick hair held back with bobby pins.
The eyes, the brows, the whole look had Mirabal written all over it. Trujillo's secretary of state, whose real job is to round up young girls for Trujillo to take advantage of. He tries to seduce Minerva at the Discovery Day party. The governor, who suggests that Minerva allow Trujillo to sleep with her in order to save her father, after Enrique Mirabal is taken to jail.
He is "a tall, handsome man with a worried face. The mother of the Mirabal sisters, who defends her daughters with a passion. She often insists that wherever they go or wherever her husband goes, she is going, too. She dies twenty years after her three daughters. We're willing to bet that by the time you finish reading In the Time of the Butterflies , you'll have a new trio of heroines: Patria, Minerva, and Mate Mirabal.
The Mirabal sisters were fighters in the underground resistance movement, struggling against Trujillo's brutal dictatorship. Their bravery ended up costing them their lives, though. The sisters are inspiring in their heroism and courage—they made the ultimate sacrifice to try to effect change for their country. But what's the difference between just reading about them in history books and reading the novel? Well, that's exactly why we think you should care about Julia Alvarez's take on their biographies.
By recreating their diaries, letters, secrets, and memories, she gives the sisters personalities and voice. To put it briefly, she brings them to life. The stories start when the girls are young children and adolescents and follows them from innocence, when they don't even realize that anything might be wrong in their society, to their political awakening and the different ways they arrive at their path as revolutionaries. Each sister joins the revolution for her own reasons—interpersonal, values, faith—but they are all inspiring.
The novel shows how things like boyfriends, sisterly bonds, and a desire to live a moral life all come together to spur the sisters to build bombs, run guns, and plot assassinations. The sisters are heroic, but the novel also makes them into real people whose ideals are pure but whose motivations might be complicated.
It's nice to realize our heroes are human beings, sometimes. It can give us hope, or even inspire us to fight against social injustices ourselves. Never Stop Learning An awesome lesson page on the novel. Line It Up A timeline of Dominican history. Champion Interview with Julia Alvarez when she won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award.
Goosebumps jumped all up and down my bare arms. In the Time of the Butterflies. Plot Summary. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts.
The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on Time of the Butterflies can help. Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read.
The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. The dictator of the Dominican Republic from , and the antagonist of the novel. Trujillo seized power as the head of the army and then rules behind puppet presidents. His rule provides economic stability, but is also a time of murder, fear, and the dissolution of civil liberties. In the novel he appears during three confrontations with Minerva.
For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:. Chapter 1 Quotes. Related Themes: Dictatorship. Page Number and Citation : 10 Cite this Quote.
Explanation and Analysis:. Chapter 2 Quotes. Related Characters: Minerva speaker , Rafael Trujillo. Related Symbols: Portraits of Trujillo.
Page Number and Citation : 24 Cite this Quote. Chapter 3 Quotes. Related Characters: Mate speaker , Rafael Trujillo. Page Number and Citation : 39 Cite this Quote. Chapter 4 Quotes. Page Number and Citation : 53 Cite this Quote.
Chapter 6 Quotes. The floor remains empty as it must until El Jefe has danced the first dance. Page Number and Citation : 96 Cite this Quote. Chapter 10 Quotes. Related Characters: Patria speaker , Rafael Trujillo. Page Number and Citation : Cite this Quote. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. Chapter 2: Minerva, , , Patria, so she explains it to Sinita. She uses childlike terms, but explains At school she and her friends befriend and admire an older girl Every time Trujillo comes to town after that he stops by and visits Lina.
0コメント