Talking Back to El Jefe: Genre, Polyphony, and Dialogic Resistance in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies

Dominican American author Julia Alvarez's novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) is based upon the well-known Dominican story of the Mirabal sisters. With the code name of "Las Mariposas" or "The Butterflies," these three women joined an underground movement in the late 1950s against President Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship and became well known for their bravery and inspiration to others. However, in 1960 Trujillo's henchmen killed Patria, Minerva, and Maria Theresa Mirabal by ambushing their car on a mountain road as they returned from visiting their husbands in prison. Although officially reported as a car accident, the murder was exposed, and the sisters consequently gained the status of martyrs, earning a profound respect among the Dominican people that continues today, (1) Because Julia Alvarez's family emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States in 1960, when she was ten years old, as a result of her father's own dangerous involvement in the underground movement against Trujillo, she had long been fascinated by the legend of the Mirabals. When Alvarez discovered in the early 1990s that a fourth Mirabal sister, Dede, was alive in the Dominican Republic, she interviewed her, and In the Time of the Butterflies grew out of that experience. The sisters' mythic status in Dominican culture posed a challenge for Alvarez: how to characterize these women in a compelling way by giving insight into their differing personalities and providing motivation for their choice to become involved in the highly dangerous underground movement against Trujillo. Relying on a technique used in her other works of fiction, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), [??] Yo! (1997), and In the Name of Salome (2000), Alvarez structured the novel with multiple narrators, the first-person voices of Minerva, Patria, and Maria Theresa narrating chapters in each of the work's three sections. The leading chapter in each section of the novel is narrated in the third person by Dede through the metafictive frame of her interactions in the present with a writer who, like Alvarez, has come to the Dominican Republic to interview her. In addition to its multiple temporal frames, Alvarez's text subsumes other genres and extraliterary material. Parts of the novel devoted to one sister are subtitled as if to stand alone as short stories while the portions narrated by another are composed as diaries that include letters, newspaper clippings, drawings, and diagrams. These techniques succeed in providing an intimate, immediate sense of the lives of these legendary figures, and, as Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez has noted, the novel's form may be considered to display the antihegemonic qualities of much Latin American feminist writing. (2) However, the formal and narrative strategies of this work also have particular significance in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the novel. This essay will explore how In the Time of the Butterflies coincides strongly with the Russian philosopher's discussions of the genetic characteristics, polyphonic discourse, and dialogism of the novel. This last quality is especially true of Alvarez's text, for it contains voices that speak back to and engage in dialogue with the "official" language of Trujillo's regime, which is voiced by various characters, including Trujillo himself, throughout the novel. More significantly, however, this novel's Bakhtinian form and discourse enact the central themes of Alvarez's book. In the Time of the Butterflies can be seen to resist both a monolithic genetic category and a single, authoritative narrative voice in its "centrifugal" or fragmented tendency. These qualities render the form and discourse of the text itself metaphoric of the novel's central thematic focus: the Mirabal sisters' work of resistance against a totalizing, "centripetal" force, the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. (3) Alvarez's novel may initially be seen to lend itself to a Bakhtinian reading by its congruence with his concept of that genre. …