A Lesson in Public Humanities: Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

Written By Derek DiMatteo

December 17, 2024

By Derek DiMatteo

Figure 1. Book cover of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior (2012).

Barbara Kingsolver comes to novel writing with a degree in biology, background that supports her ability to communicate scientific concepts such as climate change and butterfly migration patterns language at once simple and elegant. Kingsolver describes her novel as being about how people feel about climate change, and more broadly about how people can receive the same set of facts but come to different beliefs. Both subjects remain as relevant in 2024 as they were when Flight Behavior was published in 2012, seven years after Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness and smack in the midst of the rise of “alternative facts” and post-truth politics.

I suggest that Flight Behavior is a kind of lesson in public humanities work because the novel seems written to appeal to readers across the political spectrum. In particular, the novel seems attuned to the cultural divide between the coastal elites and so-called flyover states or those living in rural areas such as Appalachia, where the novel is set. Kingsolver deftly avoids stereotyping her characters while directly tackling stereotypes of both academics and rural people. And she allows her characters to grow and change in believable ways, not only her main character Dellarobia but also secondary characters such as her husband Cub and her mother-in-law Hester.

The narrative takes an almost Rogerian approach to its environmental advocacy by establishing common ground with the average American reader, especially female readers, who might identify with the main character Dellarobia and who might be drawn into the romantic aspects of the story. Initially, a plotline of illicit romance and family drama dominate the narrative: will Dellarobia cheat on her husband Cub? Will Cub’s parents ever treat him and Dellarobia like adults? Readers are drawn into the relatable family dynamics and small-town social scene. However, the romance plotline’s climax serves as the pivot into the novel’s larger plotline about climate change, as explored through the appearance of an enormous flock of migrating Monarch butterflies on Cub and Dellarobia’s farm.

The novel offers a lot of food for thought. It is multilayered, exploring ideas such as: the tension between the miraculous and the catastrophic when interpreting events; the psychological mechanism by which panic or fear for our children’s future leads to denial; the notion that a herd is the sum total of its past decisions; the (in)ability of academics to communicate in plain language to the general public; and the conflict between audience ratings and the press’s responsibilities to the public. Among many others. And yet Kingsolver manages to communicate complex concepts easily to readers, in part due to the strategic use of metaphors and similes.

My favorite examples of the novel’s use of similes are the conversation between Dellarobia and Ovid about the difference between cause and correlation (pp. 243–244) and the one between Dellarobia and Cub about how the butterflies wound up on their farm by mistake due to climate change:

“It’s like if every Friday you drove to Food King, but then one Friday you did the same as always, followed the same road signs, but instead of Food King you would up at the auto parts store. You’d know something was mess up. Not with you necessarily, but something out of whack in the whole town.” [p. 260]

The butterflies migrate based on instinct and environmental conditions, so when external conditions change, the butterflies end up someplace different. And if that new place does not have the optimal weather conditions for the butterflies to winter over, and the right flowers for them to feed on in the spring before they fly north again, then they could be wiped out.

The novel generated a lot of discussion among the book club members, and our reviews were all positive. I would highly recommend the novel, and I felt it explored a different set of questions than other eco-fiction we’ve read in the book club so far, such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy or Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.

References and Resources

Derek DiMatteo
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Bioengineering and the Generational Link in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake