Time Of The Butterflies Character Analysis

Alvarez presents a series of ironic situations to make candid observations about how women are just as capable as men to do what society defines as “men’s” work. In The Time of the Butterflies is set in the era of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, where the Mirabal sisters assist in organizing a rebellion against the regime and are soon known as the “Butterflies.” Despite the bravery they demonstrated, the Mirabal sisters were ordinary wives and mothers who did not take the passive role of a woman but instead rose above their titles. When the Mirabal sisters try to convince sister Dedé to join them in the revolution, Dedé expects charismatic and passionate Minerva to speak up but instead hears littlest sister Mate do so, the little sister
Patria notices how “on that very rocker where [she] had nursed [her] babies that [she] saw [her] sister Minerva looking through the viewfinder of an M-1 carbine—a month ago [Patria] would not have known it from a shotgun” and how “in the pretty script [she and Mate were] taught by the nuns to writing out Bible passages” they recorded their assortment of guns (Alvarez 167-168). Alvarez combines very feminine activities with what society would define as “manly” and too violent for women to be a part of—being knowledgeable in munitions and possessing them—to illustrate the influence of courage, especially being a woman who is expected to be passive and weak and is pregnant. Alvarez also expresses the irony of women themselves hindering their own success apart from men, such as through submissive sister Dede Mirabal who “considered...politics...something for men” and followed her non-revolutionary husband (Alvarez 70, 172). Alvarez suggests through Dede that women who stick to their social role as the passive and subservient