Butterflies Dede Sacrifice

In Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies Dede’s three best friends are dead. She has to figure out a way to carry on without them no matter how much she misses them. These three best friends of course are her sisters who fall victim to the regime of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Before their deaths, Dede cannot imagine a life apart from her sisters, but Dede realizes that she can keep her sisters alive by becoming a living martyr for them by keeping their memory going and carrying on their legacies. This unusual suffering is one where Dede gives up her whole personal life so much that it is now less about her and more about her deceased sisters. Dede is a martyr for her sisters who sacrifices her own life through taking

care of her sisters’ children, doing interviews to keep their spirit and their message alive, and living without them.
The first way that Dede proves that she is a martyr is how she raises her sisters’ children. Raising children who are not your own is a major loss of time, but Dede embraces this sacrifice for the sake of her sisters. Dede brings up the children as well as she can, raising them as she would her own children. One instance of this is how Dede encourages them to be religious, and makes them go to church. Another thing that she does to help raise the children right is that she does not tell the children about the country and the men that played a large role in killing their mothers. She does this so that they do not grow up with hate in their thoughts and actions. In this aspect, she is successful as she thinks to herself: “But all this is a sign of my success isn’t it? She’s not haunted and full of hate. She claims it, this beautiful country with its beautiful mountains and splendid beaches…”(319). Dede also makes sure that the children know what their mothers were truly like. She tells the children how their mothers were normal, imperfect people in order to prevent them from thinking that their mothers were gods. Raising children is a great forfeiture of many aspects of one’s life. It takes a remarkable amount of time and effort, and Dede makes this sacrifice for her sisters, which is one reason that she is a martyr for them.
The second way that Dede suffers for her sisters is that she must carry out her their legacies through interviews.

Unsurprisingly, these interviews take up large amounts of time and get very repetitive which is a large sacrifice for Dede. Dede portrays several things about her sisters in these interviews, the first of which it their bravery. One example of this is when she tells about how Minerva stands up to Trujillo when he is sexually harassing her. Dede talks about how her sisters fought in the revolution just to show how incredible their dedication is. This is best seen in how she tells the reporter about how Minerva and Mate refuse a pardon in prison to fan the flames of revolution. The last part of these interviews that Dede must offer up for her sisters is the sheer number of them. The interviewers have pestered her for thirty-four years, yet she still does them on her sisters’ behalf. Dede thinks to herself, “Oh dear, another one. Now after thirty-four years the commemorations and interviews have almost stopped… Every year as the 25th rolls around, the television crews drive up. There’s the obligatory interview.” (3). Dede is a martyr in this peculiar way: speaking for her dead sisters, and carrying out their legacies. This task presents itself to Dede so often that has become a hassle for her, yet she still does it for the love of her

sisters.
The last and greatest suffering Dede must endure is living without her sisters.

Being born less than a year apart from two of one’s siblings, and having a younger sibling-older sibling bond with the other draws Dede very close to her sisters. As a result, she spends much of her time with her sisters and loves them dearly. This is best illustrated when Dede attempts to stop them from going out on the trip through the mountains to visit their husbands. It would be unbearable for Dede to live without her sisters, yet when they die, she must carry on. This in and of itself is a huge sacrifice. The second hard part about Dede outliving her sisters was how she agonizes over how she did not join the revolution and help them. She must spend the rest of her life thinking to herself: “Why them and not me.” Dede dies to herself, and cannot contain her sorrow when she mourns the gruesome deaths of her sisters. It is very difficult for her to keep this emotion from boiling over. Dede thinks to herself at the end of the novel: “…maybe it was for something that the girls had died.”(310). It was at this moment that Dede’s yoke becomes lighter, and she realizes that living without her sisters was a worthy

sacrifice.
Dede is a martyr, but she is not the regretful one. This martyrdom of performing her dead sisters’ tasks displays true bravery. Dede does not back down from any of these tasks and she completes all of them. Overall, these sacrifices add up to show that Dede’s life is mostly about her sisters. When things get tough for her, and she is tired of doing interviews, she thinks of her sisters and muscles through. Without this motivation Dede would grow weary of the tedious tasks she does in memory of her sisters and give up. This is truly how Dede cedes her life: by losing her life and making it about her sisters’ lives after their passing. In many ways, Dede suffers more than her sisters. While her sisters have a more intense, shorter time of suffering, Dede’s is long and drawn out because she must think of them when she carries out their legacies and has to deal with the grief of losing them.