Thesis Statement: Flight Behavior's verbal-visual configurations compress and miniaturize the novel's thematic principal preoccupation: The effects of the deterritorialization of place. Its eco-ekphrases explore how multispecies communities, which can resist the logic of human exceptionalism and its consequences, climate change and biodiversity loss, are formed.
Elucidation of Thesis: The verbal-visual configurations in Flight Behavior function as icons, codifying the novel's intervention in the American cultural imaginary. These compressed thematic emblems create space for reflection on the part of the reader, making implicit ethical appeals... and Ecological Imperative and cultural ecology?
Like Hummingbird Salamander and Bewilderment, Flight Behavior explores the relationship between personal and collective transformation, asking, "what conditions are necessary to create change?"
multiple, interconnected ethical appeals: Principally: Recognize the entanglement of human and nonhuman life. Secondarily: Recognize that the deterritorialization of place brings both "threat and chance." (Do not see it in Manichean terms).
Flight Behavior's eco-ekphrases, pictorial models, and borderline ekphrases have multiple valences. On the one hand, they consistently dynamize the narrative [cite Yacobi and others], galvanizing internal reactions in the protagonist, Dellarobia Turnbow, or between characters. However, they also occasionally function as sites where the narrative is (briefly) paused [cite Rippl somewhere], offering the reader a moment of reflection. That is, the novel's eco-ekphrases compress and miniaturize the novel's thematic preoccupations, presenting ideas and motifs as verbal-visual configurations.
Bewilderment is stuck mourning an old world, but both Flight Behavior and Hummingbird Salamander conclude with a (cautiously) optimistic evocation of a world reborn.
Butterfly Venus Eco-ekphrasis
Knitted Butterflies Borderline Ekphrasis
TV Interview Iconic Shot Eco-Ekphrasis
Billy Ray Hatch TV Ekphrasis
Knitted Monach Potholder Borderline Ekphrasis
One frequent component of Flight Behavior's eco-ekphrases is the manipulation of scale. They compress and miniaturize the novel's thematic preoccuation, the ambivalent consequences of the deterritorialization of place.
One consequence: a heightened awareness of a geographic and economic divide. Rural, poor, uneducated Appalachia contrasted with affluent, educated cities. A type of Othering.
One consequence: Increased mobility spurs increased exchange of information, catalyzing creation of multispecies communities to contest climate change and biodiversity loss.
Butterflies come to town and, in turn, lots of different groups of humans come to town: Scientists, tourists, three types of activists.
Dellarobia very aware of prejudice against 'hillbillies.' This prejudice is transmitted through television: her experience watching a program that "archly twists comedy and news" demonstrates that this is all too real.
This geographic and economic divide threatens multispecies communities. For example, threat present when Hester confused about purpose of knitted butterflies. Also present in exchanges between Dellarobia, graduate students, Ovid, and Juliet.
Novel narrated by heterodiegetic narrative, in 'close' third-person perspective. Reader has access to Dellarobia's thoughts and feelings.
Theme: Climate change and biodiveristy loss cannot be untangled. Both linked to the deterritorialization of place.
She imagines herself, her family, and her neighbors through the eyes of others, as lesser-than hillbillies. Novel frequently reminds reader of this with pictorial models of television, such as reality TV shows.
The manner in which the media tells Dellarobia's story, ignoring the butterflies to focus on Dellarobia, is literally what the eco-ekphrasis depicts: butterflies in the background.
Also gives reader information about Dellarobia's character: she sees herself in a precarious position (in part because she has no family of her own). She feels at the mercy of what Cub's family and her neighbors think of her.
Also a moment where she feels manipulated and misunderstood; a variation of what she identifies with Billy Ray Hatch.
Explores novel's presentation of TV media: not part of multispecies community because they ignore climate change and biodiversity loss. Nonhumans only valued as aesthetic or economic objects, not in their own right.
Deterritorialization of Place: Place loses its prominence in meaning-making practices such as communal and personal identity formation. Television and other new media play a significant role in this process.
Dellarobia and butterflies literally in contact. Butterflies keeping Dellarobia aloft? Allegory for entanglement of humans and nonhumans (principal appeal). On level of plot, butterflies bring both "threat and chance" to Dellarobia, threatening her old way of life but giving her the chance to develop a new one.
This ekphrasis dramatizes how one aspect of the deterritorialization of place, tribalism (?) threatens another aspect, the affordance to create multispecies communities. Lack of respect and empatht endangers ability to work together.
Brief ekphrasis of photographs of flood in Michoacán, Mexico helps visualize the consequences of climate change and the deterritorialization of place: disasters, habitat loss, and consequent biodiversity loss.
Implicit in my argument here is the assumption that the deterritorialization of place is one of the main drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss. I will need to find sources to establish the validity of, at minimum, the correlation between these things. (thinking of Great Acceleration...)
Human Exceptionalism generally implicit, not explicit. Exceptions: Well-meaning Feathertown citizens like the mayor and the pastor. "'The trouble with that [...] with what those guys are saying about the butterflies is that it's all centered around what they want'" (356?)
"The yuppies watched smart-mouth comedians who mocked people living in double-wides who listened to country music. The very word Tennessee made those audiences burst into laughter, she'd heard it" (228).
Mayor and Chamber of Commerce: Economic benefits
Pastor: aesthetic validation of Prosperity Gospel
TV Interview broadcasted nationally and then distributed internationally online. Without deterritorializing new media, multispecies community could not be formed.
Kingsolver links the metaphorical potential of textile craftwork--the transformatoin of 'raw' yarn into a finished textile--with a caterpillar's biological metamorphosis into a butterfly. This counters the logic of the narrative of human exceptionalism, undermining a dichotomy between intentional tool-use (culture) and intention-less biological processes.
In this chapter, I build, primarily, off of the arguments of Silvia Mayer (2016) and Nathaniel Otjen (2022). Mayer argues [...]. Otjen, on the other hand, suggests that biodiversity loss and multispecies communities in Flight Behavior have not been thoroughly explored by eco-critics, despite their unmistakable presence in the novels. While both discuss several of the many verbal-visual configurations in the novel, their foci lie elsewhere. In this chapter, I aim to fill in this gap, exploring the role of verbal-visual configurations in Flight Behavior from an intermedial perspective.
In Flight Behavior, the England-based WOMYN Knit the Earth group travels to the Turnbow farm, camping there and knitting butterflies to raise awareness of their plight. While the knitting women are members of a transtemporal feminist community (cf. Sutter forthcoming), they are also members of a multispecies community, resisting the narrative of human exceptionalism and its consequences, climate change and biodiversity loss.
They perform their membership in a multispecies community by demonstrating the intensity of their commitment to the cause: They camp on the mountain, despite torrential rain, they post lots of pictures of their work, garnering attention and support from across the world, and the butterflies they knit are time-, skill-, and knowledge-intensive objects.
However, Kingsolver does not naively portray the alliance between the Turnbow women and WOMYN Knit the Earth. As always, class and geographical difference threatens to undermine the multispecies community. Ultimately, the four women are able to maintain the their (unspoken) alliance, despite a near-miss encounter with Appalachian Othering.
Conclusion: Ultimately, the borderline ekphrasis and the stenographic, many to one ekphrasis of photographs posted online reminds, like the other ekphrases, of the ambiguity of the deterritorialization of place, the twinned "threat and chance" (Mayer 2016) that it brings. On the one hand, without the new media that broadcast both Dellarobia's story and the WOMYN's photographs, forming this multispecies community would be impossible. On the other hand, their interaction is a meeting point of different cultures from different places, and that is not risk-free. The same media that alerted the WOMYN of the butterflies' plight in the first place could also have inculcated them with stereotypes about Appalachia and Appalachians.
Has no explicit connection with biodiversity loss, nor with multispecies community. Dellarobia reads it in personal terms, at first, as a great Christmas gift for her son. The potholder also triggers imaginative imagery: Dellarobia imagines the woman who made it. Dellarobia's own feelings, of entrapment and helplessness, are externalized onto the imagined Chinese woman.
However, the conclusion of the borderline ekphrasis enacts in miniature what will occur at a more significant point, later in the novel: female solidarity through needlework, despite cultural difference.
In Flight Behavior, unlike the other novels analyzed here, the eco-ekphrases do socio-cultural work, not epistemological work.
Though this chapter focuses primarily on two eco-ekphrases, an ekphrasis, and a borderline ekphrasis, I draw attention to the novel's preponderance of pictorial models by weaving them into the argument where necessary. I present the pictorial models this way because their principal function, as Yacobi points out (1995), is to quickly give the reader information about a character or remind them of a theme or motif.
Allegorically, the Butterfly Venus digital artwork draws on the cultural heritage of its source material, Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Botticelli's artwork is often interpreted as a hymn to love or to sexual reproduction; in other words, it celebrates the creation of something new. Kingsolver's digital ekphrasis, I argue, also celebrates the creation of something new: In place of love or sexual reproduction, the image allegorizes the creation of a multispecies community, where human and butterfly work together to resist the logic of human exceptionalism and its material consequences, climate change and biodiversity loss.
Another level of allegory: When the Butterfly Venus goes viral, another new thing is created: Dellarobia is transformed from a person of local and regional interest into a person of national and even international curiosity. The televised interview and the photograph catalyze Dellarobia's personal transformation.
Dellarobia's initial reaction to the image, digesting her near-nudity, thanks to digital editing techniques, symbolizes Dellarobia's fear of exposure to the outside world. First, it was to her family; then, only local, to her church; now, in the aftermath of the interview, it is national and even international.
[In terms of intermedial theory,] Kingsolver's choice of an ekphrasis that adapts and reworks a canonical artwork, transforming it both in medial terms and in terms of its content, while still alluding to the artwork that inspired it, is an adaptation in the sense that Bruhn and Hart (2020) define it. Kingsolver portrays a nascent multispecies community--Dellarobia and the butterflies--adapting from one medium, television, to another, digital artwork. Through its transformation and subsequent virality, it reaches many, many more people than Dellarobia or the news story could. In this way, the multispecies community narrative adapts to a new medial environment to survive and, in this case, thrive.
Pictorial model: Hillbilly Channel and Redneck Survivor
Provides a concrete, vivid example of how the deterritorialization of place effects Dellarobia: the butterfly is made in China, but is shipped across the United States, overseen by a company with its headquarters somewhere unknown, far away. The complex entanglement of global and local is dramatized through the knitted potholder.
Television the most commonly referenced visual media, emphasizing its influence on Dellarobia and on Appalachia, the novel's setting.
Multispecies Community: Dellarobia earnest question, "Who does a species belong to?"
is answered indirectly by the novel itself. Its depiction of a multispecies community suggests that the answer is 'no one.' That is, the butterflies ought not to be seen as property, valued solely through their utility to humans, but rather as needing and wanting creatures in their own right.
Try to read two "iconic" images against each other: one a vision of interspecies harmony, the other has nonhumans as background.