Question 1

Who were the real Mirabal sisters?

Accepted Answer

The Mirabal sisters — Patria Mercedes (born 1924), Bélgica Adela 'Dedé' (born 1925), María Argentina Minerva (born 1926), and Antonia María Teresa (born 1935) — were four sisters from the province of Salcedo in the Dominican Republic who became active in the underground resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship. Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa were assassinated on November 25, 1960, when their car was forced off a mountain road by Trujillo's secret police, the SIM; they were strangled and then put back in their car, which was pushed off a cliff to make their deaths appear accidental. Dedé, the only surviving sister, had not accompanied them on the journey that day; she spent the rest of her life as the keeper of her sisters' memory and died in 2014. The anniversary of their deaths, November 25, was designated by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In the Dominican Republic they are known as Las Mariposas — the Butterflies — their code names in the resistance movement.

Question 2

How does In the Time of the Butterflies handle the relationship between history and fiction?

Accepted Answer

Julia Alvarez was born in the Dominican Republic in 1950 and left as a child when her family fled the Trujillo regime; she grew up in the United States and learned about the Mirabal sisters as a teenager when she heard about them from a neighbor who had known the family. Her novel is openly fictionalized: she invents the sisters' inner lives, their conversations, and their private experiences, while staying close to the documented historical record for the public events. In her author's note, Alvarez acknowledges the tension between the documentary imperative to tell the truth about what happened and the novelistic imperative to imagine what it felt like from inside; she describes the novel as 'a fictional construction' that aims to 'give the story of these sisters a more personal, intimate shape.' The novel's use of four different voices — each sister narrates her own sections — is the primary vehicle for this personalization: it insists that the martyrs were not symbols but individual women with distinct personalities and distinct experiences of the same political situation.

Question 3

Why is the surviving sister Dedé a different kind of narrator?

Accepted Answer

In the Time of the Butterflies gives Dedé a different narrative structure from her three sisters: where Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa narrate in the past tense from inside their own experiences, Dedé narrates from a contemporary 1994 present in which she is being interviewed by a researcher and looking back at her life. This difference is not incidental: Dedé's survival is the novel's central moral problem, the question that her life has forced her to spend fifty years answering. She did not accompany her sisters on the night they were killed because her husband forbade her to continue her involvement in the resistance, and the question of whether she was right to obey him — whether she was a coward, a pragmatist, or simply a woman caught in an impossible situation — is the question that shapes her narrative. The contemporary frame also allows Alvarez to address the reader directly about the act of narrating: Dedé is telling a story to a researcher who is writing about her sisters, which makes explicit the problem of who tells the story of people who died and how the living can speak for the dead.

In the Time of the Butterflies Reading Order

Complete In the Time of the Butterflies Book List