Summary
Dellarobia Turnbow, a twenty-eight-year-old housewife, marches up a hill to meet a young man and start an affair with him. Dellarobia is deeply unhappy in her marriage and, having left her children with their mother-in-law, climbs to the top of a pasture to survey her family’s land beneath her. She feels a mix of guilt and excitement and recalls how she and her husband, Cub, came here to pick raspberries while she was pregnant with her daughter, Cordelia.
As she walks towards the place where she and Jimmy—the man she intends on starting an affair with—have arranged to meet, she continues to consider the potential consequences of the affair, focusing on memories of her children and husband. Jimmy is young, twenty-two, and a “telephone man” who lives with his mother.
Suddenly, Dellarobia sees what appears to be a fire making its way through the trees. On closer inspection, the breathtaking blaze reveals itself to be millions of monarch butterflies, whose appearance gives the trees an illusion of being on fire. Dellarobia, in awe at the sight of the butterflies, decides that cannot meet Jimmy, taking the butterflies as a sign to return home. She returns to her home, a worn-down, small ranch house with a neglected yard, still filled with complex feelings of amazement and regret.
In Chapter 2, two weeks later, Dellarobia, her mother-in-law, Hester, and four other women begin the task of shearing their lambs to gather their wool. The women—Hester, Dellarobia, the Norwoods, Valia Estep, and Valia’s daughter Crystal—gossip about another neighborhood family, the Cooks. Dellarobia notes Hester’s ability to dominate and command the conversation—a quality that makes Dellarobia feel shameful and humiliated. Hester is also fiercely religious and Dellarobia frequently disagrees with her interpretations of the Bible and the way Hester uses religion to judge others around her.
As the women work, Dellarobia continues to feel guilt over her desire to cheat on Cub. She considers all the times she had crushes on other men over the past few years but realizes that rather than dreaming about other men, she now feels haunted by the sight of the fiery valley she saw the other night.
After finishing the shearing, Dellarobia’s best friend Dovey calls her. The two women commiserate over their respective frustrations at being trapped either at work or at home. Dovey tries to ask Dellarobia what happened with the affair but Dellarobia tells her she can’t explain. Later, Dellarobia finds Cub collapsed with exhaustion from all of the shearing. He tells her he’s sick of farming, a trade that Cub inherited from his parents but struggles to manage because of how labor-intensive it is. Cub tells her that there’s a possibility that the farm will be foreclosed, a fact that his father had kept secret from him until the last possible moment; in order to get some money to pay the bank back, Cub was forced to sell part of their land for trees to a logging company. Dellarobia is upset, feeling betrayed and devastated over the loss—especially because she feels that Cub’s father, Bear, should have taken care of the debt, rather than forcing it onto his son.
Dellarobia realizes that the logging company is planning on logging the mountain where she saw the “lake of fire”—the monarch butterflies. She convinces Cub, Bear, Hester, along with the Norwoods and their wives, to go up to the mountain, hoping to show them the blazing trees, omitting the fact that she had seen them before and instead telling them she had a vision. As they cross over the peak, they see the explosion of monarch butterflies. Bear tells the group that he’s going to spray the butterflies with DDT in order to get rid of them. Cub resists and Dellarobia is surprised by his choice to argue against his father.
The next day, Dellarobia goes to drop Preston and Cordie off at Sunday school and goes to church with Cub and Hester. She listens as the pastor, Pastor Bobby Ogle, delivers a sermon, but feels distracted; Dellarobia considers herself much less religious than Hester and Cub, and feels ambivalent about church. When Pastor Ogle asks everyone to tell of any miracles that have happened in the past week, Cub stands up and tells everyone about the butterflies, repeated Dellarobia’s lie about how she had originally seen them in a vision. Everyone breaks out in applause, causing Dellarobia to feel uncomfortable and almost faint. She sees Hestor’s disapproval and jealousy over the fact that Dellarobia has now become the central religious figure of praise within the Turnbow family.
Analysis
The novel’s initial chapters introduce the complex family dynamic that Dellarobia finds herself trapped in by way of her marriage. Her mother-in-law, the fanatically religious Hester, wields great power over their community through her presence in the church and her commanding personality. Dellarobia feels resentment towards both Hester and her father-in-law, Bear, especially due to the way that they have shifted their farm onto Cub, leaving him with a litany of financial problems as well as a labor-intensive, exhausting lifestyle that he can’t escape.
Cub and Dellarobia’s responsibilities managing the farm are just one contributing factor to the web of frustrations that Dellarobia feels as a housewife. The farm is financially struggling, a fact that Bear conceals from Cub until the final moment right before the bank threatens to foreclose the farm. Bear decides to solve this by selling part of the farm to a logging company, which in turn threatens the monarch butterflies that Dellarobia saw. Dellarobia is also frustrated by the family’s quality of life; as she returns to the house after deciding to remain faithful, she can’t help but look upon the dilapidated yard, tiny home, and rusting cars with contempt.
Tensions between Hester and Dellarobia come to a peak during the final scene of Chapter 3, which also highlights the novel’s thematic fixation on religion and its role in communities. Dellarobia senses that Hester is angry after Dellarobia is praised by the church members for his supposed “vision”—Hester desires to be the center of attention within the church, hoping to position herself as the most righteous woman in the community. Dellarobia inadvertently gaining a new role as the church’s central figure creates irony: a woman who repeatedly confesses to not feeling strongly faithful has become the beacon of piety—a role she only gains by lying and concealing her adulterous desires.
Over the course of the first three chapters, we are introduced to Dellarobia through her intimate, third-person-limited point of view. Although she doesn’t narrate directly through the “I,” as in the first person, the novel uses the third person to give the reader a comprehensive understanding of Dellarobia’s thoughts, motivations, and perspective. This point of view is crucial in allowing the novel to establish ironies like the difference between Dellarobia’s public position within the church and her interior motivations, which have nothing to do with religious visions or faith.
The novel also utilizes secondary characters to further enhance its portrait of life in impoverished Appalachia. Crystal, a young woman close to Dellarobia’s age, acts as a foil for Dellarobia; both women have two children and are stay-at-home mothers. Crystal, however, struggled with alcoholism, and still continues to demonstrate fits of violent behavior and unhappiness. Dellarobia, on the other hand, does not externally manifest her frustration—even though she does experience a similar level of discontent. Instead, Dellarobia maintains a level of secrecy around her frustration and at first attempts to find relief through adultery before witnessing the monarchs.
