Analysis Of The Bean Trees

The horrors of the real world are hidden from most young children up to a certain age, and for many people in the United States, these horrors are never revealed. In the novel, The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver the main character, Taylor, meets many people who have been mistreated and abused. Upon meeting these miserable people, Taylor goes to great lengths to help them. Many times, the human horrors remain masked to the eyes of other people in the world and nothing is done to change the situation. But, when people come to know about these horrific stories, they are able to empathise and many are willing to help.
The first experence Taylor has with someone who has gone through much pain throughout their life is when she meets Newt’s wife,

Here, Taylor was sitting in a car when a woman with a child opens her car door and says, “take this baby” (17). At first, Taylor is hesitant and confused on what to do, “I waited a minute, thinking soon my mind would clear and I would understand what she was saying”. Eventually, she ends up taking the baby (17). After some driving she was able to find a motel to stay in, and decided the first order of business was to give the bundled child a bath. Upon unraveling the swaddled child and removing “the pants and diapers” (23) Taylor saw “bruises and worse” (23). Before this moment Kingsolver did not even hint at the fact that Taylor was going to keep the child. But in this moment in the text, Kingsolver ensures that the reader knows that Taylor was going to keep Turtle and protect her. Taylor is shocked at the fact that she had “already burdened her short life with a kind of misery” (23) she could not imagine. As the book advances, there are many more situations in which Taylor helps people who are suffering. In one such instance, Taylor takes a lot of risk to help Estevan and Esperanza, undocumented immigrants from Guatemala. Taylor and the couple met through a mutual friend named Mattie, a car mechanic who Taylor looks up to. Mattie provides refuge for undocumented immigrants, and here Taylor realizes how badly the immigrants have been treated in the past. In talking with the couple she comes to know their child was “taken in a raid on their neighborhood in which Esperanza’s brother and two friends were killed” (136). Taylor is shaken by this, she describes this event as a “certain kind of horror is beyond tears” (136). The act of Taylor describing ‘tears’ in this situation really shows the reader how she feels. She compares tears to “worrying about water marks on the furniture when the house is burning down” (136). This quote really