ABSTRACT
Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a story of migrations. The butterflies that provide the narrative pulse at the heart of the novel are climate refugees who have been forced from their Mexican habitat into a remote region of the Ozarks. But the novel also deals with the migration of ideas across the human umwelt. Dr Ovid Byron knows the origins of his names, how they have migrated across centuries and continents as their connections to the past and their literary and cultural significance continued to evolve. The small-town protagonist of the novel, Dellarobia, who named her daughter Cordelia, has less clarity as to her context. She knows her daughter was named for something famous, but does not recognize the allusion to King Lear. Even undetected, the play continues to travel through our umwelt and generate unexpected meaning. This chapter takes an ecocritical approach in performing an analysis of these parallel migrations and discussing how animals can reflect our complete interdependency with the material world.
