Summary
As interest in the butterflies increases—in large part due to a newspaper running an article on the monarchs and Dellarobia’s vision—Hester’s dislike for Dellarobia intensifies. The newspaper article emphasized Dellarobia’s vision and religious powers, labeling her “Our Lady of the Butterflies.” Cub, on the other hand, likes the new attention that Dellarobia is receiving.
The women return to their work with the wool and yarn, this time working on dying the yarn. Dellarobia is frustrated at the fact that Crystal appears to be helping very little, but neither Hester nor Valia steps in to support Dellarobia when she tries to confront Crystal. The women discuss an upcoming visit of Pastor Ogle instead, debating what food to serve him. After a couple of argumentative jabs back and forth between Crystal, Hester, and Dellarobia, Hester and Dellarobia fight about Dellarobia’s newfound fame. Dellarobia, angry, exclaims that it’s Cub and Bobby’s fault that she’s suddenly gained so much attention. She storms out, and Crystal follows her.
Dellarobia and Crystal return to Dellarobia’s house in order to pick up Preston from the afternoon school bus. They discuss Dellarobia’s position in the church; Crystal reveals that some are starting to say that Dellarobia is a saint—a fact that also angers some, since Dellarobia isn’t considered “all that churchy.” Dellarobia reveals to Crystal that Hester had previously kicked Dellarobia out of the church’s Wednesday discussion group. They discuss the crowds of visitors that have started to show up at the mountain. Despite her initial awe, Dellarobia has not returned to the mountain since, especially after Hester took over managing the visitors.
After picking up Preston, who demands to see the butterflies, Dellarobia takes Preston to the mountain. When they come back to the house, they find a family of three—the parents of one of Preston’s classmates and their daughter—standing on their front steps. Dellarobia invites the family in and they tell her they want to see the butterflies. The family is from Michoacan, Mexico, and they tell Dellarobia that the butterflies are native to their village. The daughter, Josefina, explains that they had to flee Michoacan after flooding destroyed their village a couple of months ago, forcing all of its residents to flee. Dellarobia, disturbed and curious about the village and its demise, has Josefina write down the name of the town before the family leaves.
A few days later, a man named Ovid Byron unexpectedly arrives at Dellarobia’s home, asking to see the Turnbow farm so that he can see the butterflies. Dellarobia is struck by Ovid, a tall, light-skinned African American man who appears to be around forty years old. After a strange conversation wherein the two discuss the meanings of their names, Dellarobia points him toward the high road over the mountains. Once Ovid leaves, Dellarobia calls Dovey and excitedly tells her about the stranger and how she had invited him to dinner.
When Cub comes home and hears about Dellarobia’s invitation to Byron, he reacts poorly, criticizing Dellarobia for inviting a stranger into their home. However, Ovid soon arrives, and all three begin to discuss the butterflies. Dellarobia explains how the butterflies have suddenly shifted their migration patterns away from Mexico and landing in Tennessee, where the Turnbow farm is located, instead. Ovid tells the family that he is an entomologist who teaches at a university in New Mexico. He exclusively studies monarch butterflies; the key focus of his research has become the change in migration of monarch butterflies after environmental and weather disasters struck Mexico. The Turnbow farm, he explains, is the first location in recorded history where the butterflies have congregated outside of Mexico.
Dellarobia and Cub give Ovid permission to stay on their property. Two weeks after their first introduction, Ovid sets up a camper van and brings in three students to help him with his research: Pete, Mako, and Bonnie.
Hester drops by the house. She begins to interrogate Dellarobia about Ovid, asking whether he’s Christian and telling Dellarobia that both she and Bear disapprove of Ovid’s presence. Hester, in an unusual demonstration of emotion, begins to cry. Bear signed a contract with the loggers allowing them to cut down the trees no matter what—an act that Hester now feels is going against God’s will following Dellarobia’s sighting.
Sometime later, Pete, Mako, and Bonnie take Dellarobia out to the mountain. Bonnie asks Dellarobia for help counting the butterflies that have started to die by totaling the insects on the ground. Dellarobia finds one monarch that is tagged, which lets the researchers know that someone else had been trying to keep track of the butterflies. Pete and Ovid explain to Dellarobia that in recent years, the range of monarch’s flight paths has expanded as climate warming impacted seasonality. Dellarobia feels hesitant about this conclusion, wary of theories about climate change. She asks why the researchers treat the migration pattern’s change as something negative, since they seem so beautiful, to which Ovid responds that “terrible things can have beauty,” hinting at the potentially disastrous consequences a shifting norm in nature can have.
The next day, while doing some Christmas-present shopping, Dellarobia and Cub argue about Bear’s decision to continue with the logging. Dellarobia accuses Cub of failing to ever stand up to his father, desperate to try and save the butterflies that she’s grown so attached to as a sign of hope and beauty. As they walk through the store, the couple continues to argue and Dellarobia grows increasingly frustrated over the fact that they can’t afford anything and over Cub’s own lack of knowledge about what the kids are interested in.
Dellarobia and Cub continue to argue, fighting about almost everything—from the price of each item they pick up to Bear’s decision to continue logging, as well as Preston’s education, which Dellarobia feels is severely lacking.
Later, with Dovey’s encouragement, Dellarobia decides to throw a Christmas party against Cub’s wishes. She invites Ovid and his research team, even going so far as to scrounge up some cash for a Christmas tree and using the leftover dollars to fold origami butterflies as decorations. When Cub comes home, he angrily demands to know what Dellarobia is doing, but she avoids the question; the chapter ends on a cliff-hanger.
Analysis
Dellarobia, Cub, and Bear’s relationships to the butterflies—and all that the butterflies represent, holding unique meaning for each member of the Turnbow family—become even more complicated with the arrival of Ovid Byron and the new information he tells them about the butterflies. These chapters introduce one of the novel’s central themes: climate change. The butterflies are typically found in Michoacan, Mexico, which Dellarobia first learns after meeting the Mexican family that comes to her house. However, a devastating flood demolished the village, forcing both the family and the butterflies to migrate and settle in Tennessee.
Although Dellarobia views the butterflies as a beautiful phenomenon, Ovid’s reaction to the butterflies suggests that their presence on the Turnbow family’s farm is far more sinister—not a miracle, but a sign of the rapid, drastic changes that a warming climate will bring. This uncomfortable truth alludes to the larger changes that the novel begins to explore as it depicts climate change’s effects. As an individual, Dellarobia loves the butterflies and what they signify for her (primarily, her decision to remain faithful to Cub). But on a larger scale, the butterflies are not a positive sign—in accepting Ovid’s explanation, Dellarobia must let go of her own individual attachment to them.
As Dellarobia and the graduate students get to know each other, stark cultural differences between life in Appalachia and the life that the students lead begin to manifest. For example, Bonnie does not understand how the butterflies have become such a phenomenon for the church, and when Dellarobia tells her that the church has over three hundred members, Bonnie is surprised. Dellarobia, on the other hand, wonders what kind of church college students go to, which demonstrates how her worldview is largely structured around the church as a central communal point. Likewise, Dellarobia must explain to Mako how she learned to sew, a task that for Dellarobia is just a regular part of her life, but one that Mako approaches as fascinating and unknown to him. For Mako, the manual labor of learning how to sew was never necessary, whereas for Dellarobia, tasks around the home that involve physical labor are ingrained within her day-to-day life.
These differences in life experience and privileges between Dellarobia and Ovid’s group lead Dellarobia to feel frustrated with her own domestic position. After helping Ovid and the graduate students catalog butterflies, she feels even more tied to the insects, since she has learned to appreciate them both as a vision of beauty and as a scientific occurrence. The graduate students also allow Dellarobia to witness relationships that she has never been able to have, such as the platonic friendship between opposite sexes that she sees Mako and Bonnie have. After watching Bonnie and Mako conduct research together, Dellarobia realizes how much she yearns to “be with men without being with them,” meaning that she desires to be alongside men without feeling the need to flirt or present herself according to the “oppressive rules of sex” and gender norms. As a housewife, Dellarobia is locked into a set of behaviors, manners, and rules that she must follow within her home and around her family, community, and children. Ovid and the graduate students begin to wear down those boundaries, allowing Dellarobia to see another life that she yearns for.
Dellarobia’s frustration also extends to the financial circumstances in which she and Cub find themselves. The scene that occurs in the store, as Dellarobia and Cub wander the aisles and argue about the price of every single item, demonstrates just how pervasive their anxiety about money is and just how little money they’re scraping by on. Their lack of money in part stems from Bear and Hester’s refusal to equitably share the profits from the farm, even though Dellarobia and Cub do a majority of the work to keep the farm running. Cub, however, refuses to confront his parents, and Dellarobia grows even angrier with his passive avoidance.
