59 pages • 1 hour read
Dot HutchisonThe Butterfly Garden
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Butterflies
The novel’s dominant symbol and motif, butterflies represent fragile, ephemeral beauty, as well as the pathological need to control others. As the Gardener tells Inara on their first meeting, butterflies are, “like most beautiful creatures, very short-lived” (59). A connoisseur of beauty who seems obsessed with its inevitable decline and decay, the Gardener has fixated on butterflies as an embodiment of both natural beauty and mortality that he thinks lies within his power to preserve, thus conquering decay and death. Butterflies typically live about 2-4 weeks, but butterfly collectors (such as the Gardener’s father) seek to preserve their beauty after death by killing them in their prime and mounting them in climate-controlled display cases.
After the loss of his vast butterfly collection to a fire, the Gardener’s father lost his savor for life and shortly died; thus connecting the perishability of butterflies, in the Gardener’s mind, with mortality itself. His mingled sense of beauty and mortality is also linked with the fleeting sensual pleasures of life itself, notably sex: Instead of collecting actual butterflies like his father, the Gardener symbolically transforms kidnapped girls into butterflies by tattooing elaborate butterfly designs on their backs over several weeks, in a parody of the chrysalis process.
For a certain period, the Gardener imprisons the young women he has “collected” in a hermetically sealed greenhouse, along with actual butterflies, where he wields complete control over their lives, which includes subjecting them to regular sexual assaults—his favorite means of savoring their youthful beauty. As with any collector, however, he must make sacrifices to keep his “possessions” in peak condition: Like his father, who pinned his (living) specimens through the heart to preserve them, the Gardener kills his beautiful captives on their 21st birthdays, sealing their embalmed corpses in clear resin for his continued delectation. Thus, besides being symbols of short-lived beauty, the novel’s Butterflies—imprisoned, tattooed, raped, and then murdered—manifest, in its most extreme form, the pathological urge to control others and to treat them as personal possessions.
Edgar Allan Poe
The novel’s heroine Inara, a bookworm in her spare time, solaces herself in times of stress or trauma by reciting from the works of the 19th-century American poet Edgar Allan Poe, whose “morose,” dreamlike poems and stories (“The Valley of Unrest,” “Fairy-land,” “The Tell Tale Heart”) “distract” her from the horrors of her imprisonment in the Garden. Noticing this affinity, the Gardener presents her with a gift-wrapped edition of Poe as partial apology for his son’s sadistic branding of her. There are also subtle allusions to Poe’s stories and poems scattered throughout the book, such as the restaurant called Evening Star, which is the title of a poem by Poe. Aside from their palliative effect on Inara, Poe’s works share thematic parallels with the world of the Garden because many of his protagonists, not unlike the Gardener, experience morbid obsessions and delusions that lead to tragedy.
In “Berenice,” for instance, the story’s anti-hero aestheticizes his cousin’s teeth, to the point of robbing her corpse of them while in a trance; and in “The Oval Portrait,” an artist obsessed with capturing the “living” image of his wife’s beauty contributes, through neglect, to her death. As these macabre stories (and many of his other works) suggest, Poe himself had an obsession with the tragic deaths of young, beautiful women, which he regarded as “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, p. 163. April 1846). Poe’s own wife, whom he married when she was 13, died at the age of 24. In The Butterfly Garden, Poe’s romantic, often macabre works serve a dual purpose, as character development for the somber Inara as well as literary subtext for the Gardener’s brand of murderous romanticism.
Arts and Crafts
In The Butterfly Garden, Inara expresses regret that, unlike some of her fellow captives, she has never had “talent nor interest in creating things” (105). Her main distraction is reading, which for her lacks the transportive and social satisfactions of making art of her own, as Evita, Lyonette, and Bliss do. Evita paints rocks from the pond in dreamy colors. Lyonette, whose artist father designed carousel horses, taught herself to make whimsical origami sculptures as a way of keeping herself grounded, and of comforting other captive girls. To commune with her father’s memory, she creates an elaborate carousel out of paper, based on her father’s designs; and after her death, Bliss pays tribute to her by molding a replica of her origami carousel out of polymer clay. Bliss, a master of clay-working, uses her talent to make gifts for the other girls, including animal figures, chess sets, and flower crowns. She also uses her art as an outlet for her violent thoughts, as when she makes clay figures and then destroys them: a salutary catharsis in a prison like the Garden.
In The Butterfly Garden, art functions both as a means of escape and as an exercise of power, allowing the prisoners, all of whom are living under a death sentence, to transmute their surroundings in accordance with their own vision, leaving a semi-permanent vestige of themselves behind. However, the Gardener, shows the dark side of the creative imagination with his highly accomplished tattoos of butterflies, which he uses to assert his abusive control over his captives by “marking” them as his. These tattoos signal the transmogrification, in his mind, of teenage girls into short-lived insects to be used and abused at his pleasure. His artistry, though also an expression of escapism and power, enables his worst misogynistic fantasies, creating a dreamworld for himself that becomes a deadly nightmare for his victims.
