Coyote Beautiful: The Joy of Sisterhood in Barbara Kingsolver's ...

Taylor 157Coyote Beautiful: The Joy of Sisterhood in BarbaraKingsolver's ProdigalSummerMarsha TaylorIn her novel ProdigalSummer, Barbara Kingsolvercontinues to explore themes she has touched on inmany of her previous works: environmentalism,feminism, and the spiritual connectedness of all livingthings. In this novel, however, she brings all theseideas together to create a sort of womanist utopia inthe wilds of the Southern Appalachians, where menserve mainly as sperm donors, and women nurtureeach other's offspring like the noble packs of coyotesshe mythologizes. Before she became a novelist,Kingsolver was a biologist, earning a Master's degreein biology and ecology at the University of Arizona,and her biologist's view of humans is central to her.fictive vision. "We're animals," she once said."We're born like every other mammal and we live ourwhole lives around disguised animal thoughts"("Barbara Kingsolver Quotes"). As with the packpredators like wolves and coyotes, social bonds arecrucial to survival, and the most important bondsbetween her characters are those between mothersand their offspring and those between females.Kingsolver, to some extent, has explored thisterritorybefore. In her first novel, TheBeanTrees,twowomen without men, Taylor and Lou Ann, form ahousehold in order to parent their children, Turtleand Dwayne Ray. Taylor falls in love with Estevan, asensitive Central American political refuge, but giveshim up because she can't bear to hurt his sad wifeEsperanza, and Lou Ann hesitates to move in withher boyfriend Cameron, telling Taylor, "I toldsomebody that you and Turtle and Dwayne Ray weremy family"(309).In the sequel, PigsinHeaven,Tayloreasily leaves her slacker guitarist boyfriend to run offwith Turtle when she thinks the child might i>etakenfrom her, and rejoins her own mother, who has justleft her husband. True, Mama finds a new love, butconveniently it's Turtle's natural grandfather, whichallows the family to remain intact. In Animal Dreams,Codi is reunited with her high school boyfriend Loyd,

Taylor158Taylor 159but the strongest bond between them seems to be hermemory of their baby that she miscarried at 15, andshe is pregnant again at the end of the book. Anotherfinal plot twist finds her discovering that havingthought of herself all her life as an outsider in herhometown, with her now dead sister her only friend,she is really kin to almost the whole town. Thesepersistent themes echo primary truths of biology: theecosystem is more important than that of itsindividual components, and the strongest drive of anorganism is to pass on its genes. These ideas will findtheir fullest expression in ProdigalSummer.This "econovel," as Trudy Bush labels it in areview in The Christian Century, is made up of threeseparate but intertwining stories. In the first,"Predators," wildlife biologist Deanna Wolfe works tosave the coyotes which are extending their rangeeastward into the Appalachian mountains. Fortyish,divorced, childless and bitter, she encounters ahandsome young coyote hunter named Eddie Bondowith whom she shares a torrid summer of outdoorsex. At the end of the summer he leaves her. She isnot particularly sorry, since they had little in commonanyway, although she has convinced him to spare thecoyotes. However, she is pregnant, and theimpending birth of the baby draws her down theImountain to live with her father's former girl friend,Nannie Rawley, and thus away from isolation andtoward family and community.In the second story, "Moth Love," former mothbiologist Lusa Landowski loses her young farmerhusband, Cole Widener, to a tragic accident andinherits a struggling farm and a batch of hostilesisters-in-law, but ends up turning them into spiritualsisters and adopting the children of one of them.(Meanwhile she also saves the farm by converting itfrom tobacco to organic goat-raising.)Finally, in the third, and sweetest tale, "OldChestnuts," two feuding elderly neighbors, Nannyfrom the first plot line and Garnett Walker, whohappens to be the grandfather of the children Lusaadopts, fall in love, become less hateful, and arereunited with the families they thought they had lost,amidst much lecturing about the evils of pesticidesfrom Nanny and Garnett's quest to bring back theAmerican chestnut tree.As unlikely as this brief plot summary sounds,ProdigalSummer is an engaging, thought-provokingnovel of ideas that mostly works. However,Kingsolver's notions of the roles of the sexes are morefirmly fixed in animal biology than human emotion.In the world of the novel, the men, once they've

Taylor 160passed on their genes, are expendable, just as anyindividual creature is expendable for the greatergood. Thus, pregnant Deanna hungrily devours theturkey Eddie has shot for her (out of season), musing. Eddie was right, they'd done no damage toanyone's childhood here -Turkey paternity was the hit-and-run kind.But she wondered what mark this grandmale had left on his mountain. She hopedthe last of his genes were warm in a nestbeing brooded somewhere. (315)In the same way, of course, Eddie is only Deanna'stemporary mate. When she thinks of his leaving, shereminds herself of the rules of the natural world, herfield of knowledge,"Creatures lived and mated and died, they came andwent, as surely as summer did. They would go theirown ways, of their own accord" (365).Lusa's dead husband Cole plays an even moremarginal role, since he does not even father a child.However, what's important is the continuation of thespecies, here the Widener family. Cole's role wasmerely to bring Lusa, a nurturing female, to the.Wideners. She realizes that her in-laws are so hostileto her because they fear she will remarry and pass theWidener land on to another man's offspring. SheTaylor 161reconciles with them and fulfills her maternalinstincts by not only adopting dying Jewell's childrenbut changing her and their names to Widener. Shepersuades Jewell to give her the children by arguing,"You've got five sisters. I'm the only one withoutchildren" (380). When Jewell protests about the namechange, Lusa answers, "I'm married to a piece of landnamed Widener" (383). The children's father, Shel,Garnett's black sheep son, having deserted the familyyears before, conveniently agrees to sign the adoptionpapers and disappears.True, not all the men in the novel are absentfathers. Lusa's own dad sounds as if he's been a goodone, but he is mentioned only briefly, as was 'Deanna's father, who's dead, and old Garnett's sonleft him, although perhaps the old man's selfrighteousnessdrove him away. However, thecharacters in the novel who really matter are thewomen. Early on, Deanna explains why coyotes areso hard to wipe out....only the alpha female would bearyoung... the other adults in the pack wouldforego reproduction. They'd support thealpha instead, gathering food, guarding theden, playing with the pups, training them toforage and hunt after they emerged with

Taylor 162their eyes open. If their parents got killed,the pups would hardly suffer for theirabsence - that was the nature of a coyotefamily. (57)This is exactly what the Widener sisters and Lusa dofor Jewell's children, what Nanny has done forDeanna, and what she will do for Deanna's baby.Not only do Kingsolver's women nurture theyoung; they nurture the land and its creatures.Deanna's last name is Wolfe, and as she points out,the coyotes she protects have crossed with greywolves. She created her job after seeing a pair ofmiserable coyotes caged in a city zoo, and she feels anaffinity for them that goes beyond scientific interest.When she finds a litter of coyote pups, she thinks ofher father and wishes she could tell him about them,and "What she craved to explain was how much theyfelt like family" (203).Likewise, Lusa is horrified at her countryneighbors' hostile attitudes toward nature, asrevealed in the local newspaper:It was the county Extension agent who wrotethis awful column called "Gardening inEden," whose main concern, week afterweek, was with murdering things. It stirredup her impatience with these people whoTaylor 163seemed determined to exterminate everyliving thing in sight. Grubbing out wildroses, shooting blue jays out of cherry trees,knocking phoebe nests out of the porcheaves... these were the pastimes of ZebulonCounty. (32-3)When Lusa takes over the farm, she bans weed killerand commercial fertilizer, and she justifies her goatraisingby calculating that there will be far fewer goatdeaths than the countless bug deaths conventionalfarming would have produced. And Jewell marvelsat the bounty of her organic garden, "It looks like awoman's garden, some way. It doesn't look like otherpeople's gardens" (375).. However, probably the woman closestto anearth-mother figure is Nannie Rawley. Nevermarried, she bore a daughter, Deanna's half-sisterRachel who died as a child, and she becomes asubstitute mother for Deanna. She grows organicapples, and Garnett several times calls her a witch. Ina letter to him in the midst of their feud, she takesexception to his anthropocentrism andfundamentalist Christianity:Everything alive is connected to every otherby fine, invisible threads...

Taylor 164If God gave Man all the creatures of thisearth to use for his own ends, he alsocounseled that gluttony is a sin He didnot mean for us to satisfy our every whimfor any food, in every season, by tearingdown forest to make way for field, rippingup field to make way for beast, andtransporting everything we can to places itdoesn't belong. (216)It's easy to see a religious undertone in the novel,and Kingsolver, who has described herself as apantheist, makes clear connections between human'srelationships with the earth and her spiritual beliefs.The novel also, interestingly, echoes the LandEthic of pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold, asexpressed in his seminal work, SandCountyAlmanac.Peter Wenz, in his article "The Land Ethic in BarbaraKingsolver's ProdigalSummer" explains that inLeopold's view "the ecosystem has value over andabove, and in most cases more than, the value of itsindividual components." Thus, the individual turkeyis more valuable as Deanna's dinner, and Lusa'svalue is not in herself, but as the preserver of theWidener land and genes. Deanna's opposition tocoyote eradication also reflects Leopold's concept ofthe biotic pyramid.Taylor 165The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layerrests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants,a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and soon up through the various animal groups tothe apex layer, which consists of the largercarnivores...Proceeding upward, eachsuccessive layer decreases in naturalabundance. Thus, for every carnivore thereare hundreds of his prey, thousands of theirprey, millions of in~ects, uncountable plants.(Leopold 252)As Deanna explains to Eddie, killing carnivoresproduces over-population of prey species, throwingeverything out of balance. Kingsolver then extendsthis pyramid concept to support organic farmingwhen she has Nannie argue with Garnett against theuse of pesticides, pointing out that they kill predatorinsects in proportionately greater numbers than preyinsects, thus actually increasing the overall insectpopulation.However, Wenz points out that Kingsolver takesLeopold's biology, which does not address issues ofgender, and puts a decidedly feminist spin on it. Thisis definitely an eco-novel, and definitely a feministnovel, but is it ecofeminist? Wenz argues that it isnot. He explains

Taylor 166A major contention of Ecofeminism is thatsexism and anthropocentrism are mutuallyreinforcing. People associate women withnature and reinforce their denigration ofwomen by associating women with alreadydenigrated nature. In turn, they reinforcetheir anthropocentrism through associatingnature with already denigrated women.However, in ProdigalSummer, the women are strongerthan the men. Nanny's strong arms lift Garnett out ofthe ditch when he's felled by a snapping turtle. Cole,the baby of the family, is coddled by his older sisters.Of Jewell's children, the tomboyish girl is the strongerand protects her shy brother. Deanna can live alone inthe wilderness, and Lusa can wrestle down a goat.Nature is strong too, and though originallydowntrodden, women and nature both triumph, andthey triumph through making connections andalliances. The coyotes are spared because Deanna hasconvinced Eddie they deserve to be, and she comesdown from the mountain bearing new life, to rejoinhuman society. Lusa saves the farm by marketing hergoats for the festival feasts of all three of the world'sgreat religions, which just happen to all coincide withthe vernal equinox. But she could not have pulled itoff without the help and support of her once hostileTaylor 167in-laws and old man Garnett, who turns out to befamily, too, and the local goat expert. And finally,Nannie and Garnett stop feuding and start helpingeach other. He gives her shingles for her house, and itturns out that she actually has two living chestnuttrees which can provide seed for his breedingprogram, and which, by shedding pollen, might havealready been doing so, thus bringing the return of theAmerican chestnut a little bit closer. As he muses,"He thought he'd been working all alone. You justnever know" (427).When the two, having fallen inlove, embrace at the end of their final chapter, theirrelationship will bring all the characters together inone family, as the three seemingly separate plot linesall converge, and the reader realizes that they havebeen intersecting all along. In the novel, as Nannyhas said of nature, everything is connected.In the very last scene of the novel, the protagonistis not Deanna, Lusa, or Nanny, but a female coyotewho makes her way down from the mountain on tothe Widener farm. She is cautious, but she finds nothreat, and she continues into what will be her newterritory. The coyote, like Deanna in the openingparagraph, appears to be alone. But just like Deanna,and all the other characters, human and nonhuman,

.Taylor 168she is not. Kingsolver chooses to close her novel withthe same words with which she opened it:Solitude is a human presumption. Everyquiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot,a tug of impalpable thread on the webpulling mate to mate and predator to prey, abeginning or an end. Every choice is a worldmade new for the chosen. (444)Works CitedBush, Trudy. Review of Prodigal Summer. The Christian CentUry 22 Nov. 2000.Kingsolver, Barbara. Prodigal Summer. New York: Harper Collins, 2000._' "Barbara Kingsolver Quotes". 4 March 2005.Leopold,Aida.A SandCountyAlmanacwith EssaysonConservationfrom RoundRiver.New York: Ballantine, 1970.Wenz,Peter S."TheLand Ethicin BarbaraKingsolver'sProdigalSummer".EthicsandtheEnvironment8.2(2003)106-125.