Identity and Animalism in "Beans"

As Abby noted in one of her posts on Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, the novel is by no means a pleasant read.  Instead, we as readers are largely, if not entirely, isolated from the type of rural poverty depicted in the novel and become squeamish and uncomfortable with the Bean's and the totality of their family's perversion and decay. 

Like we readers, the novel's [essentially] central character Earlene is likewise intrigued and simultaneously disgusted by her neighbors, the Beans.  With an almost pornographic fascination, Earlene, at least initially in the novel, watches the Beans and their poverty-stricken lifestyle from the protective enclosure of her living room.  However, as the novel wears on, Earlene's obsession with the Beans begins, and then totally, becomes participatory, as she essentially transcends the glass of her living room window and becomes a part of the Bean clan. 

Despite the inexplicable lure of the Beans, Earlene maintains her attitudinal position that the Beans are a bestial family prone to wild, predatory, and animalistic ways that belong to a sub-human level of civilization.  This internal position becomes even more problematized as she joins their family while still maintaining this sentiment.  Like many of the novels we have read this semester, the comparison of the lower class to animals is highly present in The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Through the narrative perspective of Earlene, it is interesting to note how, in maintaining her disdain for the Beans, she seems to suggest that as a spectator to poverty, she is subconsciously lured in by the animalism while consciously repulsed by the juxtaposition of their lifestyle to her own. 

Ultimately, I think that Earlene and her subtle, subconscious descent into poverty and her becoming a part of the lifestyle she abhors testifies to the dominance of poverty on its surroundings.  The Beans, unlike Earlene, are largely unaware of their options for economic salvation (school, transplantation, welfare, work, etc.), and so in their maintenance of economic destitution, the permanence of their squalor becomes contagious, infecting Earlene.  In her total isolation with the Beans, Earlene finally succumbs to the Bean's predation, if not consciously than certainly on a subconscious level, suggesting that poverty entraps not only those who are born into it but those who live passively alongside it as well.