Connection To Historical Events
The idea behind In the Time of the Butterflies originated in the 1960s when author Julia Alvarez was in the Dominican Republic. The Mirabal sisters had been murdered just three months after their father got involved with the underground against Trujillo.
A motif of the novel is the ruinous effect that dictatorship can have on a nation and its citizens, emotionally and physically. Over his 30-year reign, Trujillo killed 50,000 Haitians and Dominicans. One of the focuses of the novel was his agenda to kill or eliminate blacks who occupy one-third of the Island of Hispanola, or Haiti, while the Dominican Republic, which occupies two-thirds of the area of Hispanola, contains a population of 75% mixed background.
Read more about this topic: In The Time Of The Butterflies
Famous quotes containing the words connection, historical and/or events:
“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody’s mom in that she knows what’s best for us. But if you look at the historical record—Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages—you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)