The Butterfly Lion

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Lion

In the novel, the lion carries several meanings. For Bertie, the animal he rescues and lives with is the embodiment of loyalty and friendship—but also of the loss of the wild that comes with domestication. For Monsieur Merlot, the white lion is the exotic product of South Africa that he can exhibit for money—one of the many ways colonialism extracts resources from vassal states. For the military brass whom Bertie convinces to allow the lion to come with him to England, the lion is a living symbol of Britain’s might—a creature that is associated with courage and bravery and a symbol of the British monarchy that has been on crown heraldry since the 12th-century reign of Richard the Lionheart—whose nickname also comes from this animal’s reputation. During WWI, the lion was used in British military recruitment posters depicting the lion standing up to the tyranny of Germany.

The lion’s white color is significant as well. Traditionally, white is associated in Western culture with innocence and purity. The white lion is innocent when he is with his mother in the South African veldt. Once the lioness is killed, the cub loses its innocence in attempting to survive in the wild—Bertie and his mother find it so muddy that it takes five washes to get its coat back to its original white color. However, by cleaning off the animal, they impose a kind of artificial and permanent innocence onto the lion, removing its ability to hunt or live in the wild.

As a motif, the lion motif reinforces the novel’s didactic moral: Hard times must be endured with hope. Lonely and isolated, Bertie finds companionship in the white lion that represents enduring friendship. When the lion is not with his companion, he is much diminished: The lion cub is starving and withered when separated from Bertie, and similarly, the adult lion is near death in France when Bertie finds him. When Bertie and his lion are reunited, the lion heals and they resume their relationship as if time has not passed. When Bertie and Millie spend 20 years after the lion’s death making a monument in the hillside, they are memorializing the hope and loyalty the lion embodied.

Walls: Cages and Confinement

Walls and fences are motifs in The Butterfly Lion meant to demonstrate how children are kept unnaturally confined in childhood. This is done to protect the children, but the stifling nature of the confinement instead results in deep isolation and loneliness.

As a child in Africa, Bertie lives behind high fencing, but he longs for the wild: “Whenever his mother was well, he would beg her to take him outside the compound” (24). However, she too is a prisoner of the compound, so “[w]eek in, week out, Bertie had to stay behind the fence” (25). Once Bertie is in England, he finds that walls exist there as well: “He was no happier shut inside the walls of his cathedral precinct than he had been before” (73).

Likewise, the walls around Millie result in a lonely and isolated childhood:

Whilst Bertie was growing up on his farm in Africa with his fence all around, I was growing up here at Strawbridge in this echoing cold cavern of a house with its deer park and its high wall all around. And I grew up, for the most part, alone (58).

Both Bertie and Millie are isolated and alone because of the walls that confine them.

When Bertie and Millie escape their walled compounds, defying the rules and limitations imposed on them by unfeeling and often cruel adults, they find companionship. Bertie finds and rescues the white lion cub, saving it from a pack of hyenas when he disobeys his father and leaves the farm. Millie finds Bertie by taking her kite out to Wood Hill, and by meeting him every Sunday in contravention of her governess’s rules. Michael too escapes the oppressive atmosphere of his school, seeking the freedom not to be bullied and stumbling onto the spirit of Millie.

Bells and Butterflies: The Passing of Time

In the novel, butterflies represent the brevity and beauty of life. Bells, in contrast, represent how that beauty is contorted unnaturally by the confines of society. These two motifs operate in juxtaposition, each offering a foil for the other.

In The Butterfly Lion, the butterflies show that life is short, but can be filled with beauty: “Butterflies live only short lives. They flower and flutter for just a few glorious weeks, and then they die” (7). In the final scene, Michael returns to the hillside, where “[t]he sky around me was filled with butterflies” (128), and he understands that all life is finite. On the hillside covered in butterflies, he promises to keep the legacy of The White Prince alive.

In contrast, bells mark time in an artificial way. Bertie’s understanding of this abomination appears in a letter to Millie about college life: “There were bells, he wrote, always bells—bells to wake you up, bells for meals, bells for lessons, bells, bells, bells cutting his days into thin slices” (73). Bertie doesn’t want his existence to be measured by this human construct that doesn’t take into account his preferences and needs and instead treats all the students as identical. Bertie prefers the freedom of a life outside this overly strict system; his decision to enlist is in part motivated by the need to get away from the regimented schedule that feels like a dissection of “his days into thin slices.”