The content of the form of Julia Alvarez s In the time of the butterflies

Abstract

In the Time of the Butterflies is a novel by the Dominican-American writer Julia Alvarez on the life and death of the Butterflies, Las Mariposas, codename of the Mirabal sisters in the national underground movement that fought against the dictatorial regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The novel is an attempt to re-member the sisters assassination under the dictator s orders, a story that has never been officially told. This dissertation aims to expose how literary form and political content are related in this novel. It argues that the blurring of three distinct literary genres historiographic metafiction, autobiography and the bildungsroman reflects the questioning of the boundaries between private and public, personal and political, self and other, individual and collective, literature and history, fact and fiction as well as history and subjectivity. It also tries to show how the problematizing of these dichotomies de-naturalizes received notions of identity, history and nation