THE ANTHROPOCENE AND BARBARA KINGSLOVER’S FLIGHT BEHAVIOR: A STUDY

The Anthropocene evidences a tension, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty in his paper ‘The Human Condition in the Anthropocene (2015)’ between two conceptions of the human: the Latin ‘homo’ and the Greek ‘anthropos’. Homo, the rational individual of humanism, acts purposefully, reasonably and socially, with a sense of justice. Anthropos, the human as species, acts blindly, from self-interest and with often ruinous cumulative force. The inability of homo to rein in anthropos affects nature in such a way as to occasion unforeseen climate change and migration of animals and insects. This failure of the homo to control anthropos and the consequences of this failure is foregrounded in Barbara Kingslover’s novel Flight Behavior (2012). Set in Appalachia the narrative centers on human drama with proportionately vital account of environments, and chronicles a community’s reactions to the surprising arrival of thousands of monarch butterflies. The novelist interweaves the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a housewife living with her husband and two children in Feathertown, a fictional town located in rural Tennessee, and dreaming to run away from the family, with the alighting of the monarch butterflies to ensure the survival and propagation of their species. Dellarobia’s struggle to deal with the consequences of her past decisions and the possibility of a new life with the coming of Ovid Byron parallels with the collective efforts of the butterflies to acclimatize in a new space. It is Ovid who opens up new vistas to Dellarobia whose ultimate coming-of-age opens up various options for her and her children. With this novel Kingslover enables readers to better understand and imagine the effects of climate crisis in their own time