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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Chapter 2: New Year’s Pig
Explanation and Analysis:
The predominant setting of The Bean Trees is Tucson, Arizona, where Barbara Kingsolver herself lived for 20 years. This lived familiarity infuses the narrative with a tangible, grounded sense of place. Kingsolver renders both the city and the surrounding Sonoran Desert with a mix of sensory detail and cultural observation, making the setting feel not just like a backdrop but an active influence on the characters’ lives.
For Taylor, Tucson represents a deliberate departure from her rural Kentucky origins, where she associates her upbringing with constricting social and gender expectations. The desert’s expansiveness and the city’s cultural diversity give her a space in which to redefine herself. Lou Ann articulates this cultural difference to her mother in Chapter 1:
She hadn’t wanted Lou Ann to marry Angel in the first place […] She disliked him because he was Mexican […] In Tucson […] there were so many Mexicans that people didn’t think of them as a foreign race. They were doctors, bank clerks, TV personalities, and even owned hotels.
Here, Tucson is depicted as a place where Mexican Americans are fully woven into the social and economic fabric, directly challenging the prejudices Lou Ann grew up with. The contrast underscores how setting shapes attitudes, and it reflects one of the novel’s broader themes—how place can foster openness or entrench division. For Taylor, this cultural integration mirrors her own willingness to embrace people from different backgrounds, most notably Estevan and Esperanza.
Kingsolver also uses Tucson’s physical landscape to mirror emotional states and thematic currents. In Chapter 12, Taylor’s gaze takes in the city from a vantage point that allows her to see its natural setting as both protective and revelatory:
The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain… was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.
The “cradle of mountains” conveys safety and permanence, a contrast to Taylor’s earlier rootlessness. The palm-reading simile imbues the landscape with a sense of fate and self-discovery, suggesting that the land holds clues to the characters’ futures just as a palm might reveal the lines of someone’s life. By linking the terrain to themes of destiny, Kingsolver weaves the setting directly into the novel’s exploration of personal transformation.
This dual vision of Tucson—as a multicultural city and as a desert basin shaped by geological time—allows it to function on multiple narrative levels. Socially, it is a place where Taylor can build a chosen family without the immediate weight of her hometown’s expectations. Physically, its desert ecosystem demands resilience and adaptation, qualities the novel’s characters must also cultivate. The interplay between these two aspects—the human community and the natural world—cements Tucson not only as a physical location but as an active force in the story’s development.
Related Themes:
Chapter 12: Into the Terrible Night
Explanation and Analysis:
The predominant setting of The Bean Trees is Tucson, Arizona, where Barbara Kingsolver herself lived for 20 years. This lived familiarity infuses the narrative with a tangible, grounded sense of place. Kingsolver renders both the city and the surrounding Sonoran Desert with a mix of sensory detail and cultural observation, making the setting feel not just like a backdrop but an active influence on the characters’ lives.
For Taylor, Tucson represents a deliberate departure from her rural Kentucky origins, where she associates her upbringing with constricting social and gender expectations. The desert’s expansiveness and the city’s cultural diversity give her a space in which to redefine herself. Lou Ann articulates this cultural difference to her mother in Chapter 1:
She hadn’t wanted Lou Ann to marry Angel in the first place […] She disliked him because he was Mexican […] In Tucson […] there were so many Mexicans that people didn’t think of them as a foreign race. They were doctors, bank clerks, TV personalities, and even owned hotels.
Here, Tucson is depicted as a place where Mexican Americans are fully woven into the social and economic fabric, directly challenging the prejudices Lou Ann grew up with. The contrast underscores how setting shapes attitudes, and it reflects one of the novel’s broader themes—how place can foster openness or entrench division. For Taylor, this cultural integration mirrors her own willingness to embrace people from different backgrounds, most notably Estevan and Esperanza.
Kingsolver also uses Tucson’s physical landscape to mirror emotional states and thematic currents. In Chapter 12, Taylor’s gaze takes in the city from a vantage point that allows her to see its natural setting as both protective and revelatory:
The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain… was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.
The “cradle of mountains” conveys safety and permanence, a contrast to Taylor’s earlier rootlessness. The palm-reading simile imbues the landscape with a sense of fate and self-discovery, suggesting that the land holds clues to the characters’ futures just as a palm might reveal the lines of someone’s life. By linking the terrain to themes of destiny, Kingsolver weaves the setting directly into the novel’s exploration of personal transformation.
This dual vision of Tucson—as a multicultural city and as a desert basin shaped by geological time—allows it to function on multiple narrative levels. Socially, it is a place where Taylor can build a chosen family without the immediate weight of her hometown’s expectations. Physically, its desert ecosystem demands resilience and adaptation, qualities the novel’s characters must also cultivate. The interplay between these two aspects—the human community and the natural world—cements Tucson not only as a physical location but as an active force in the story’s development.
Related Themes:
