Carolyn Chute, "The Beans of Egypt, Maine"

            In a class discussion on the novel, someone noted a connection between the Roberta Bean’s children and the puppies beneath the house. This point was particularly poignant, considering our previous link between those and poverty and an animalistic quality. Carolyn Chute employs animal imagery and metaphors to underline the de-evolutionary nature of the poor, and—in the context of Egypt, Maine—the way they trap those around them.

            The novel opens with Earlene’s statements about her life, leading into a discussion of the Beans. She explains that “Daddy says the Beans are uncivilized animals. PREDATORS, he calls them” (3). This first introduction to the Beans conditions the reader to understand their character in a certain light. As the novel progresses, one attribute links all the unnamed Beans and their blank faces together: “their fox-color eyes” (11). Whenever Earlene begins to describe a Bean, she mentions their fox-color eyes, and this becomes a recurring symbol not only for their appearance, but as a statement about their nature as people living in rural poverty. The choice of “fox” as a color description is intentional, for the animalistic quality of their living condition filters through their entire being.

            In addition to the fox-colored eyes as indicative of their animalistic behavior, the puppies beneath the Beans’ house parallel to Roberta Bean’s children, demonstrating how Earlene—as well as other non-Beans in this small town—will inevitably succumb to this level of existence and become animal-like themselves. In the scene where Beal brings Earlene to the crawl-space beneath the house, it’s dark, dark enough to need a flashlight, underlining the idea that the process by which Earlene degrades into this form of poverty is something she is unaware of, and cannot foresee. They “hear squeaks… [and] there’s a low growl… the thump of a tail” (78) before Earlene can decipher what is living below the house. Without warning, the puppies “charge toward me, flying at my face. They box at me with their little feet. They pass over me from all directions… seems like fifty of them” (78). Earlene is overcome by the puppies, and can’t control them as they bound toward her to “lap and suck my eyes” (78-79). When she says, “they are everywhere, dragging me down” (79), the connection is clear; like the puppies, the Beans swallow Earlene with their poverty, with their animalistic existence.

            Robert Bean’s babies themselves serve as a microcosm of the Beans, the rural poor, the animalistic humans who can scarcely survive. Around Roberta’s legs, “they come to stand in the bedroom doorway, five nearly look-alike babies in diapers and crinkly plastic pants” (106). The babies are nameless, faceless, a herd of animal-like creatures that flock around their mother. They “scuttle to their mother’s legs, bunch up handfuls of their long johns” (107). Like the Beans at large, they are numerous; it doesn’t matter so much who they are, but their presence is overpowering and encompassing. Through the fox-color of their eyes, the metaphor of the puppies, and the herd of Roberta’s children as a microcosm of the Bean clan, Carolyn Chute illustrates the animalistic nature of the poor and the inescapable cycle of confined, rural poverty.