59 pages • 1 hour read
The Butterfly Garden
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Themes
The Perverse Fascination with Control and Beauty
The Gardener, The Butterfly Garden’s despotic, beauty-obsessed villain, is hardly unique in the annals of fiction (or history). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 story “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” for instance, centers on a botanist who has imprisoned his beautiful daughter in a walled garden to raise her as a flesh-and-blood counterpart to the exquisite but deadly flowers he cultivates; like them, her body is (by design) deadly to all animal life, and the only cure for her poisonous touch is her own death. Another Hawthorne tale, “The Birthmark” (1843), features a scientist who becomes obsessed with removing a birthmark from his wife’s face, which he thinks spoils her otherwise flawless beauty; eventually, his chemical elixirs erase the offending blemish, but at the cost of her life. Likewise, the aristocratic narrator of Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “My Last Duchess,” jealous that his lovely young bride “smiled” at other men, has had her killed, and now savors her beauty solely in a large oil portrait that he keeps veiled by a curtain in his private art gallery, hiding her smile from all but himself.
As these works suggest, the psychological association between beauty or physical perfection and death is an age-old one. The beauty of a sunset or a perfect rose is both enthralling and poignant precisely because of its fleeting, transitory nature; William Shakespeare (and many others) wrote movingly about how “everything that grows / holds in perfection but a little moment” (Sonnet 15). The beauty of a living thing, then, must yield ultimately to time (and death), and therein lies much of its glory and its terror.
Whatever joy an observer takes in beauty, whether their own or another’s, is always tempered by a sad awareness that each passing second brings it closer to decay and death. By that token, a natural reaction to intense beauty is covetousness, the wistful desire to possess the beautiful thing fully and completely, for its brief day in the sun—protecting it from others and (if such were possible) from time and decay itself. So Browning’s Duke and the Gardener barricade their beautiful prisoners in walled fortresses, as if the gaze or touch of others might wilt or squander their beauty. For a time, their vampiric domination of these young women gives them an illusion of renewal, allowing them to forget the aging of their own bodies.
Their quest for absolute power over beauty leads, ironically, to their love objects’ death—the surest, most permanent means of control. Like a lepidopterist pinning a rare butterfly through the heart, these worshippers of beauty conclude that the only way to halt the faithlessness of time and youth is by stopping the flux of life itself. Like the Duke, who is jealous of all men’s eyes, the Gardener is jealous of time, which in due course will rob him of his captives’ flowerlike perfection. His solution is to seal them forever in an amber-like resin—coldly preserved, like a magnificent, if lifeless, objet d’art from the Duke’s collection. Exchanging the (fleeting) tactile pleasures of the Butterflies’ living flesh for the unfading visual splendors of their exquisitely preserved corpses, he achieves his ultimate, jealous control over their physical beauty—the one thing of value his meager soul can find in them.
The Power of Interpersonal Relationships in Surviving Difficult Situations
Inara and her fellow Butterflies share the bleakest of futures: perpetual confinement in a fishbowl-like prison hermetically cut off from the outside world, where they are subjected to regular sexual assaults by their jailor as well as torture (and possible murder) at the hands of his son Avery. The best many of them can hope for is to survive to the “expiration date” of 21, at which age the Gardener methodically entombs them in a plinth of clear resin, like an insect in a paperweight. Even surviving that long, however, requires a degree of sanity and equanimity that few could manage without the help of others. Because the Gardener expects not only obedience but cheerful stability from his captives, failure to “adapt” greatly limits their life expectancy. Therefore, to keep each other alive, Inara and the other Butterflies must pay close attention to each other’s feelings, foibles, and emotional states.
When Inara first wakes up after her abduction, her fellow prisoner Lyonette, who has been in the Garden for years, is close at hand with aspirin, a glass of water, and a cold damp cloth for her aching head. In the days that follow, Lyonette uses tenderness, patience, and humor to keep Inara relatively calm as she orients the newcomer to her bizarrely cruel new surroundings. After Lyonette ages out of the Garden and into the Gardener’s macabre gallery of murdered girls, Inara takes over her responsibilities, providing help and guidance for each new arrival. After a rough beginning, Inara warms to her new role, making the new girls’ adjustment to the Garden as smooth as possible, while not downplaying the Gardener’s psychopathic personality or lying to them about their chances of survival. Ironically, the Gardener even commends her for “tak[ing] such good care” (201) of his prisoners.
Throughout their captivity, most of the Butterflies ardently support each other; whether through comforting words and caresses or by making each other gifts, sharing books and songs, playing games (such as hide-and-seek), or—in the end—fighting to rescue each other from Avery and from the catastrophic fire that destroys the Garden. Part of their loyalty to each other is rooted in their own survival. Most of the Butterflies form strong emotional bonds as well, which become crucial to their emotional health. The ones who fail to maintain these bonds often come to a disastrous end, such as Maggie, who rejects others’ friendship and guidance, thereby dooming both herself and her twin sister; and Sirvat, the “odd,” solitary misfit, who suicidally sets fire to the formaldehyde stores, killing herself and many others.
The nurturing, sisterlike camaraderie Inara finds in the Garden mirrors, in a way, the belonging she found with her fellow waitresses in New York, who, trying to survive in the big city, shared everything: clothes, makeup, food, books, study sessions. In fact, her close bond with the older Sophia seems almost a premonition of her friendship with Lyonette; like the latter, Sophia helps Inara adjust to the challenges of her new life, as well as (coincidentally) preparing her for the horrors of the Garden, by sharing the story of her own kidnapping. Fleeing an abusive childhood, where no one protected her, Inara seems resilient from the start. Still, it’s doubtful that she could have survived the Garden, or even New York, without the friends she found there.
Biblical Allegory, Satire, and the Violence of Power
As a foundational text of archetypes about family dynamics, authoritarianism, and the dichotomy of good and evil, the Bible serves as a metaphorical backdrop for The Butterfly Garden. Dot Hutchison draws on biblical allegory to lend historical weight to her narrative and to offer a satirical critique of patriarchal violence and misogyny. Central to this allegory is the “Garden,” a nightmarish inversion of the Bible’s Garden of Eden, created by a megalomaniacal tycoon known as the Gardener. Styling himself as a godlike figure, the Gardener transforms his prison into a grotesque parody of paradise, populated by young women whom he reimagines as his Eves—his Butterflies. Through the tattoos that mark their bodies and the new names he assigns them, he asserts total dominion over their identities, treating them as his creations. Like a wrathful deity, he wields the power of life and death, systematically murdering each of his Butterflies when they turn 21, as if aging were a violation of divine law.
The Gardener’s obsession with controlling and destroying his Butterflies once they age out of his arbitrary benchmark of youth and beauty aligns with the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. Just as Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden is framed as a punishment for the inevitable act of seeking knowledge, the Butterflies’ deaths are cast as an unalterable fate tied to the passage of time. The Gardener’s legal surname, MacIntosh, underscores this connection, evoking the McIntosh apple—a likely allusion to the forbidden fruit of Eden. Yet, while Adam and Eve’s fall has been mythologized as humanity’s original sin, the Butterflies’ only transgression is the natural process of growing older, a reality punished by a patriarchal worldview that equates women’s worth with their youth and beauty.
The Gardener’s actions embody a millennia-old pattern of patriarchal violence, in which women are stripped of autonomy and reduced to objects of male control. His belief in his own benevolence, even as he perpetuates violence, reflects a historical tendency to justify oppression through self-serving ideologies, often bolstered by religious dogma. Hutchison’s depiction of this warped morality serves as a commentary on how patriarchal power has been sanctified throughout history, often in the name of divine will.
The biblical allegory extends beyond the Garden to the Gardener’s family, whose dynamics further satirize the destructive nature of patriarchal rule. The violent rivalry between his sons, Avery and Desmond, draws on multiple biblical narratives, including the stories of Cain and Abel, the Prodigal Son, and Absalom’s rebellion against King David. Avery’s jealousy toward Desmond and his eventual attack on both his brother and father allude to when Adam’s eldest son Cain, enraged by God’s favoritism toward his younger brother Abel, murders Abel out of jealousy. This is referenced by Avery’s climactic rant against Desmond and the Gardener: “You gave him everything! […] Your precious Desmond […] I’m your son too, your firstborn. I’m the one you’re supposed to be proud of” (257), after which he shoots Desmond and his father.
Earlier, Avery’s protest that Inara has been “given” to his brother rather than to himself—“Why does he get to have her? He’s never helped you bring anyone in […] but you give her to him like a fucking bride and I’m not even allowed to touch her?” (209)—parallels the Prodigal Son’s older brother, who argues that his seniority and hard work for his father make him more deserving of the “fatted calf” than his younger brother, who has long been absent from the family farm. Lastly, Desmond’s defiance of his father by reporting him to the police, spurred by Avery’s abduction and rape of the 12-year-old Keely, mirrors the biblical story of Absalom, King David’s favorite son, who raises a rebellion against his father after his older brother Amnon rapes their sister.
Through these recontextualized biblical archetypes, Hutchison exposes the petty, rapacious nature of patriarchal conflicts that prioritize power and dominance over morality or justice. The Gardeners’ household becomes a microcosm of larger historical patterns, where male aggression and entitlement perpetuate cycles of violence and oppression. As the Bible observes in Ecclesiastes, “There is no new thing under the sun.” Hutchison’s novel resonates with this sentiment, portraying the Gardener’s crimes not as aberrations but as extensions of an enduring legacy of misogyny rooted in the same mythological frameworks that have shaped cultural and religious narratives for centuries.
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