Women In The Butterflies

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In the times of the Butterflies Speaking to the interview woman, Dede addresses the theme of the role of women: "‘back in those days, we women followed our husbands.' Such a silly excuse. After all, look at Minerva. 'Let's put it this way,' Dede adds. 'I followed my husband. I didn't get involved." She is aware that she is using it as an excuse for not supporting her sisters, something for which she still feels guilty. As her three sisters come down the path, Dede uses a simile that hearkens back to the conceit of life as a thread, an image that has been running through the novel: "It was as if the three fates were approaching, their scissors poised to snip the knot that was keeping Dede's life from falling apart." This sense of dread…show more content…
After Minerva and Maria Teresa are taken away to jail in the capital, "Dede fought down the sob that twisted like a rope in her gut. Violent imagery permeates in most chapters as well, drawing attention to the tension that hangs in the air for the Mirabal family. As a narrator, Dede's use of exclamation reflects her exasperation with her sisters as well as her growing sense of panic. When Maria Teresa asks her to join their revolutionary cell, Dede says it is "As if they were inviting her to join a goddamn volleyball team!" This simile is meaningful since it was the volleyball game of their youth that first drew a line in the sand between Dede and Jaimito and Minerva and Lio, the revolutionaries. The theme of courage is apparent at the end of this chapter, when Dede lies in bed tempted to "just let go," meaning to stop trying to maintain her sanity. But she talks herself out of it, thinking, "Courage! It was the first time she had used that word to herself and understood exactly what it meant." The theme of Trujillo being juxtaposed with…show more content…
Maria Teresa's style of punctuating her diary narrative with exclamations continues throughout this chapter. In Chapter 10, Patria compared Captain Pena to the devil, but now that he has maneuvered things so that Minerva and Maria Teresa could be released from prison, he is compared to God. While Minerva compares Captain Pena to God in that he hands down commandments, she also breaks from the theme of comparing Trujillo to God and instead compares him to the devil. The most turning point is when Dede becomes nervous about all of her sisters traveling together to visit their husbands, and her warnings serve as foreshadowing for their deaths. When they laugh at her warnings and she gets upset, Minerva says, "Come on, Dede. Think how sorry you'd be if something should happen to us and you didn't say goodbye." But before they leave, she cries out her real fear: "I don't want to have to live without you." The reader knows that is her fate exactly: to live after her sisters die as martyrs, and thus to tell their story. Another instance of foreshadowing occurs after Tio Pepe reports what Trujillo said at the gathering at the mayor's house. Minerva thinks, "As we stood in the dark a while longer, calming ourselves, I had this eerie feeling that we were already dead and looking longingly at the house where our children were growing up without us." The
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