Seeds of Change: Critical Essays on Barbara Kingsolver

Gardens of Auto Parts: American Western Myth and Native American Myth in The Bean Trees

Gardens of Auto Parts: American Western Myth and Native American Myth in The Bean Trees Catherine Himmelwright Outside was a bright, wild wonderland of flowers and vegetables and auto parts. Heads of cabbage and lettuce sprouted out of old tires. An entire rusted out Thunderbird, minus the wheels, had nasturtiums blooming out the windows like Mama’s hen-and-chicks pot on the front porch at home. A kind of teepee frame made of CB antennas was all overgrown with cherrytomato vines. —The Bean Trees unkyards and gardens: How could two such diametrically opposed worlds flourish together? Seemingly, one would preclude the possibility of the other. Abandoned wrecks would jeopardize new tomatoes, while spilled oil would poison the fertile ground, debilitating the delicate burgeoning of a squash blossom. How can anyone tend a garden in the midst of rusted auto parts? How can growth occur in the midst of abandonment? In the mythology that surrounds the American West, one of the primary expressions of the Western experience has been the male’s desire to move. Whether by horse, pioneer wagon, raft, or even later by car, action typifies the male Western hero, who feels a powerful desire to hit the open road. Action and adventure are tied tightly to the need to be mobile. Adventures do not happen at home; you have to go find them. In contrast, women have been connected rather loosely to the male Western archetype despite their presence on the frontier. As opposed to symbols of movement , the female experience has been firmly rooted in the image of the garden. Annette Kolodny has perhaps furthered J Catherine Himmelwright 28 this construction the most by exploring women’s idealization of the garden on the frontier. She states in The Land Before Her that women gained access to the West by connecting themselves both literarily and figuratively with the garden. Embodying both the characteristics of the natural and procreative , gardens evolved into symbols of the home. Cultivating a garden in the West provided women a claim or admittance into a masculine world, if only to a portion of the experience. As a garden must have constant attention, motion is difficult for those who garden. Women, therefore, gained access to the frontier yet were excluded from the adventure that men sought. Despite the obvious oppositions, Barbara Kingsolver finds a way to bring them together in The Bean Trees. Merging these characteristics: the desire for movement and the desire to tend a home, Kingsolver is able to express a female voice that has heretofore been lost or subsumed by the white male experience. In many ways, Kingsolver creates a character who becomes that individual Kolodny speaks of at the end of The Land Before Her, for Kingsolver’s main character becomes both “adventurer and domesticator” (Kolodny 240). By combining these two figures, Kingsolver fashions a new American mythology that unites both male and female imaginative constructs . The attempt is not an easy one, as access to the West has almost always been achieved, whether the individual is male or female, through white masculine constructs. In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins points out the difficulty women have had in gaining admittance to this masculine world, especially access to the role of the hero. Although Tompkins deals chiefly with the genre of the Western, she does question the type of connection women have to the genre as a whole. Her findings reveal the female desire for this access through their own attempts to “imagine” themselves within the Western. Tompkins found that some women found imagining inclusion impossible, but for those who could, awkward manipulations would take place in order to create a place for the female within this world: One friend said she loved “Bonanza” so much that she had to invent a female character so that she could participate as a woman. . . . Another friend told me she could identify with male heroes but only the nonwhite, non-WASP ones, Tonto and Zorro. (16) Clearly, the struggle to find inclusion in this myth of adventure is difficult; still the passage demonstrates women’s desire to claim in some “real” sense the ideology represented in our imaginative construction of the American 29 Gardens of Auto Parts West. Yet how does one write about a female’s experience in the West? The West has become so “masculinized” in connotation that the very word evokes images of the male. Thus, finding negotiated space from which to express the female experience in the West is difficult...