The Butterfly Garden

MacIntosh, known simply as the Gardener for most of the narrative, is The Butterfly Garden’s main antagonist and the mastermind behind the novel’s many kidnappings and murders. A wealthy, middle-aged businessman with an erotic obsession with butterflies, the Gardener has built a huge, greenhouse-like fortress (the Garden) in the wilds of western Maryland, where he imprisons teenage girls he has abducted. The Gardener inflicts a ritualistic series of abuses on his captives, the first of which involves “marking” them as his property with a large, exquisitely detailed image of a butterfly on their backs, which he expertly tattoos himself. He then gives them a new name of his own choosing, followed by a sexual assault—the first of many during their years-long captivity. Obsessed with youth, no less than with beauty and sex, he kills his captives on their 21st birthdays, drugging them and replacing their blood with formaldehyde. Lastly, he puts their corpses on display in resin-filled cases, perfectly preserved. By this, he convinces himself that he is doing his Butterflies a supreme favor, by immortalizing their short-lived beauty at the height of its perfection.

Though he is guilty of rape and mass murder, the Gardener’s villainy is depicted as disturbingly complex and ambiguous. Warped by self-serving delusions of his own benevolence, he seems largely weak and pathetic, rather than genuinely evil. Unlike his older son Avery, he is not actively sadistic, and he tries to make his prisoners’ lives as comfortable and pleasant as possible, even providing them with painkillers and the occasional party. In his own mind, he is an idealist and altruist, devoted to the cause of beauty and deeply mournful of the ravages of age. On some level, he sincerely believes that his Butterflies, once their beauty begins to fade, will cease to lead worthwhile or productive lives. He has convinced himself that killing them is some sort of rescue: He has narcissistically projected onto them his own, sexually driven value system, which prizes only girls of a certain age. 

Hence, he can grieve, even weep, for his captives’ deaths, as something preordained by fate, though he is solely responsible for their murders. Meanwhile, he pampers his still-youthful Butterflies with the sheltered life that he imagines is ideal, even paradisial, for them: a sort of greenhouse Garden of Eden, with himself as God. Like God’s, his will is absolute and can never be questioned, least of all by himself. As Inara notes, he has absolutely no “self-awareness” and believes only what he wants to believe. Nor does his arrest, or the immolation of his private paradise, crack his delusions: The novel offers no suggestion that he ever has an awakening of conscience.

Avery, the Gardener’s older son, is the novel’s secondary antagonist and the most physically threatening character in The Butterfly Garden. Sadistic, murderous, and narcissistic, Avery has absorbed the darker aspects of his father’s delusions but not his romantic leanings: Like the latter, he believes the Butterflies exist for his own pleasure, but unlike his father, he feels no obligation for their comfort, happiness, or survival. He too is a serial rapist but does not delude himself that his assaults are acts of “love”: Typically, he binds and tortures his victims, sometimes to death. The Gardener’s abuse of the Butterflies has a complex, almost idealistic side because he sees them as precious symbols of fleeting beauty to be cherished and protected—at least until adulthood. To the dull-witted Avery, however, the girls are sexual objects to be tortured and raped, nothing more. Unlike his father, Avery makes no age distinction between victims, blithely abducting and raping a 12-year-old girl. As such, he represents a brutally “honest” version of his father, i.e., the predatory, murderous egotism that lurks behind the Gardener’s delusional self-image of a benevolent patriarch.

Avery’s sadism against the Butterflies, which sometimes climaxes in murder, greatly worries his father, who frequently bans him from the Garden. These exiles, however, are never permanent because the enticements of the Garden and its prisoners are virtually the only leverage he wields over his impulsive, ungovernable son. Petulantly aware of his father’s disapproval, Avery is also jealous of his younger brother, Desmond, whose sensitivity and intelligence has made him his father’s favorite and heir apparent. This element of sibling rivalry, which has echoes of the biblical stories of Absalom, the Prodigal Son, Jacob and Esau, and Cain and Abel, leads to Avery’s kidnapping of the preteen and his act of murderous violence against his father and brother, which in turn culminate in his own death and in the destruction of the Garden.

Desmond, the Gardener’s younger, college-age son, serves as a morally ambiguous catalyst in The Butterfly Garden. Far from a hero, he nonetheless is instrumental in the downfall of the villainous Gardener: After breaking into the Garden, his involvement with his father’s prisoners, especially the heroine Inara, disrupts his family dynamics and leads to the destruction of his father’s demonic regime. Lacking his older brother’s sadism and predatory instincts, Demond is still, as Inara states, his “father’s son,” due to his susceptibility to self-delusion and willful blindness. For instance, despite overhearing his father’s detailed confession of his cold-blooded murders of his captives, Desmond continues to delude himself that his father cares only for the girls’ welfare and has altruistically taken them in to provide them with an idyllic (albeit sequestered) life. For six long months, despite Inara’s continual pressure on him, he continues to vacillate, claiming that calling the police would destroy his family’s “legacy” and kill his sickly mother. 

Meanwhile, comparing himself to Avery and the Gardener allows Desmond to flatter himself, by contrast, as a “good” person who would never rape or torture anyone and who loves his parents—and even loves Inara, descrying no conflict between his tender feelings for her and his passive collusion with her jailors. Ignoring the immense power disparity between himself and Inara, he has convinced himself that they share a love relationship. Ironically, his largely repressed knowledge that Inara is actually his captive also keeps him from going to the police: On some level, he fears that freeing her might surrender his access to her forever.

Not subject to his father’s delusions of semi-godhood, or his brother’s insensate viciousness, Desmond nonetheless aids and abets both of them with his moral weakness and narcissistic self-regard. As such, he represents his father’s nobler but still deluded qualities: his feelings of affection, compassion, and protectiveness for the Butterflies—whom he believes love him back—which however do not extend to freeing them or even allowing them to live past the age of 21. A signature moment is when Desmond uses his virtuoso skills on the piano to calm the homesick Tereza, saving her life, though only for the short term. Desmond and Avery, in a sense, embody the contradictory halves of the Gardener himself: i.e., deluded empathy, sensitivity, and artistry on one side; and naked cruelty, murderousness, and rapacious lust on the other. Ultimately, the grisly excesses of the other “half” finally puncture Desmond’s bubble of self-serving delusions and push him to a momentous decision: After Avery’s horrific rape and abduction of a child, the true obscenity of the Garden can no longer be opposed or wished away. After some goading by Inara, he finally summons the courage to call the police.