Turtle

Character Analysis

We never learn much about the origins of the child who becomes a Turtle. (At least, that's what her name becomes. And we thought Taylor was getting better at names post-Missy!)

Anyway, when the mysterious aunt figure puts the kid into Taylor's car, she tells Taylor that nobody who "matters" even knows that the child is alive. In other words, nobody like the police, or any hospital with records (1.105). All Taylor learns is that the child was born in a Plymouth (1.97), and that her birth mother is dead (1.105).

It isn't long before Taylor discovers that the child has been badly abused. As Taylor gets her undressed for a bath, she finds "a bruise twice the size of my thumb" on her arm, and more bruises on her legs…"bruises and worse" (1.148-49). Yikes. The little girl's injuries are so nasty-looking that Taylor doubles over with nausea when she sees them. She tells us: "Nothing, not Newt Hardbine or anything else I had ever seen had made me feel like this" (1.150).

By the end of Chapter One, here's what little we know: the child is Cherokee, her mother is dead, somebody has abused her viciously, and her aunt has given her away—possibly in an attempt to free her from whomever is abusing her. We don't know who her abuser is, if she has any other family who could take her in, what her name is, and why she reminds Taylor so much of turtles.

Baby Names (and Reptile Names)

When Taylor drives away with the infant girl in her passenger seat, the child's name is the last thing on her mind. Later, she decides to call the child Turtle, "on account of her grip" (3.4):

"The most amazing thing was the way that child held on. From the first moment I picked it up out of its nest of wet blanket, it attached itself to me by its little hands like roots sucking on dry dirt. I think it would have been easier to separate me from my hair." (1.144)

We never thought of turtles as attaching little hands to, well, anything. But semantics aside, let's just pause for a second and dwell on the descriptive language that Barbara Kingsolver musters in this passage. These three sentences make use of both of the novel's central symbols for family and mother-daughter relations:

1. birds/nests, and
2. roots/vines.

Well played, Barbara: well played.

Moving on! Later, as Taylor and Turtle settle into life in Tucson, Lou Ann tries to discover the child's legal name. One afternoon (guess what month it is), she notices that Turtle looks up whenever she hears the word "April." After trying it out a few times, Taylor gives in and concedes that the child's biological family probably called her April.

Does that make her change her ways? Nope. Since she and the little girl have both gotten used to Turtle, Taylor decides to call her April Turtle. But that takes too many syllables to say so she sticks with Turtle for short.

So let's get into that name in a bit more depth. Although Taylor claims to have chosen the name "Turtle" because of the child's tenacious grip, the name has metaphorical significance as well. When Taylor first accepts the child, the little girl makes almost no sounds ever. Some of the novel's less pleasant characters take this as a sign of her mental abilities. As Taylor says, "Mrs. Hoge hinted in every imaginable way that she was retarded" (3.4). Not the nicest implication of turtle.

After Turtle is attacked in Roosevelt Park, she slips into another long period of silence. This time, Taylor learns that these silences are actually states of catatonia that have been brought on by trauma (12.68). Now, if we as readers think of these states as periods in which the little girl draws into herself, as if into a kind of numb and resilient shell, then it's easy to see how the name "Turtle" also captures the child's tendency to withdraw due to trauma. A shell doesn't have to be on your back to give protection.

"Thriving" in Tucson

For the first few months that Turtle and Taylor are together, Taylor assumes that the child is roughly one to one-and-a-half years old. Turtle barely makes a sound throughout the first few weeks that Taylor has her, and Taylor later learns that this is state called "catatonia" (12.68). No, it has nothing to do with cats.

And then there's the question of how old the kid is. She's tiny and hardly speaks. So why wouldn't you assume she's still pretty young? But when Taylor finally takes Turtle to the doctor for a check-up—about five months after she first decides to keep her—she learns that she was wrong. After running some tests, Dr. Pelinowsky shows her why:

"'These are healed fractures, some of them compound,' he said, pointing with his silver pen. He moved carefully through the arm and leg bones and then to the hands, which he said were an excellent index of age. On the basis of height and weight he'd assumed she was around twenty-four months, he said, but the development of cartilage in the carpals and metacarpals indicated that she was closer to three." (8.144)

There's a shocker. Turtle is probably a full year older than they had assumed, and both Taylor and Dr. Pelinowsky are startled to discover that. He tells Taylor: "[s]ometimes in an environment of physical or emotional deprivation a child will simply stop growing, although certain internal maturation does continue. It's a condition we call failure to thrive" (8.146).

Taylor replies that Turtle is "thriving now" (8.147), and Dr. Pelinowsky agrees. Not only is Turtle getting bigger, she's also talking more and more, and can list all of her favorite vegetables and legumes. (Including the bean trees, even though they're not actually bean trees.)

By the end of the novel, not only can Turtle rattle off the names of various plants and foodstuffs like it's nobody's business, she can also communicate to Taylor that she once saw her birth-mother's body being buried in a cemetery (16.46).

In turn, this new knowledge gives Taylor—and we readers—a new understanding of Turtle's fascination for seeds. The understanding that something can be planted (or "buried") and then produce new life is clearly of interest to the young child who once watched a loved one being lowered into the ground. Hey, that's pretty deep!