The iconic opening lines of these three classic novels begin with flowers: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925), The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970), and In The Time of The Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (1994).
The opening lines are auspicious introductions to floral motifs and symbolism that are deeply a part of each narrative. For example, the flowers that appear in Mrs. Dalloway are primarily cut flowers, and the way characters interact with cut flowers is a stand-in for how they interact with femininity.
In The Bluest Eye flowers make symbolic statements about beauty standards. This novel, which examines the way white Eurocentric beauty standards take root in or are weeded out of Black characters’ lives, uses the language of flowers with such specificity. Native flowers and flowers growing unrestricted in soil, like the forsythia, lilacs, wild roses, and milkweed at the MacTeer’s home, symbolize how natural beauty and Blackness are embraced in the MacTeer’s home. At Geraldine’s home, there are potted bleeding hearts and anonymous artificial flowers in the interior decor. The flowers tell us that beauty standards in that home are a little toxic (bleeding hearts are poisonous), highly restrictive (potted plant roots are confined to the pot), and very curated and stylized (the artificial, lifeless flowers in the decor). Then there’s The Lake District where white, wealthy homeowners grow some flowers that have no contact with the land and its soil. These would be the threatening crocuses growing in decorative wheelbarrows. The white homeowners also design gardens with “calculated disorder, hiding cunning symmetry.” The flowers in The Lake District communicate how the beauty standards in the white community are unnatural, and rely on facades, deception, and control.
In In the Time of the Butterflies, the characters who stay home and tend family land (through gardening or farming) instead of actively joining the resistance against Trujillo end up creating critical safety nets for those who join the underground. The farmland Patria’s husband stewards, for example, becomes a hiding ground where weapons caches get buried under crops. The gardens that Dedé painstakingly tends become the only safe place to talk and conspire at their homes. The large gardens can’t be bugged and spies on the property can’t hear conversations in the protective embrace of the gardens.
Let’s Look at The Opening Lines
Cut Flowers in The Opening Line of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
LitCharts has a summary of the flower symbolism in the novel.
Marigolds in The Opening Line of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
“Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall 1941.”
Bird of Paradise in The Opening Line of In The Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
“She is plucking her bird of paradise of its dead branches, leaning around the plant every time she hears a car.”
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