The Butterfly Garden

The novel’s dominant symbol and motif, butterflies represent fragile, ephemeral beauty, as well as the pathological need to control others. As the Gardener tells Inara on their first meeting, butterflies are, “like most beautiful creatures, very short-lived” (59). A connoisseur of beauty who seems obsessed with its inevitable decline and decay, the Gardener has fixated on butterflies as an embodiment of both natural beauty and mortality that he thinks lies within his power to preserve, thus conquering decay and death. Butterflies typically live about 2-4 weeks, but butterfly collectors (such as the Gardener’s father) seek to preserve their beauty after death by killing them in their prime and mounting them in climate-controlled display cases. 

After the loss of his vast butterfly collection to a fire, the Gardener’s father lost his savor for life and shortly died; thus connecting the perishability of butterflies, in the Gardener’s mind, with mortality itself. His mingled sense of beauty and mortality is also linked with the fleeting sensual pleasures of life itself, notably sex: Instead of collecting actual butterflies like his father, the Gardener symbolically transforms kidnapped girls into butterflies by tattooing elaborate butterfly designs on their backs over several weeks, in a

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