Barbara Kingsolver is the author of many well-written pieces of literature including The Poisonwood Bible.

GCSE Religious Studies (Philosophy & Ethics)

Name: Kia Jaghmousana

Candidate Number: 70____

Word Count: 3000

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of many well-written pieces of literature including The Poisonwood Bible. This novel explores the beauty and hardships that exist in the Belgian Congo in 1959. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Told by the wife and four daughters of a fierce Baptist, Nathan Price, Kingsolver clearly captures the realities this family and mission went through during their move to the Congo. The four daughters were raised in Atlanta Georgia in the 1950’s therefore entering the Congo with preconceived racial beliefs, and a very different way of life than they would soon experience. Throughout The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver explores the importance and impact of faith, and a religion based on your own private beliefs. This religion is greatly affected by their time spent in the Congo, and to me, provides a strong link to how American society reacts to trouble, a nightmare intruding upon their American dream. Similar to The Thing They Carried, the book looks to make a political point, and comment on the situation without doing so too directly, but instead focusing more on the characters and its effect upon them. In studying the true depths and facets of each characters religious beliefs it is possible to draw connections to the society that Kingsolver is immersed in.

Orleanna Price, the wife and mother of this struggling family is a very honest woman, lacking some of the stronger religious background of which her husband possesses. Orleanna, struggles with the hardships of daily life; toting and disinfecting the family's water, scrambling to make ends meet and trying to protect her family from the myriad terrors of the bush. In my eyes, this is Kingsolver’s average Joe American, hard working, with strong Christian ethics and morals, yet not evangelical in her beliefs. She is quiet yet resilient and toils hard to achieve. Orleanna uses irony to describe the early days of her marriage. As she describes them, the days when there was still room for laughter in her husband's evangelical calling, before her pregnancies embarrassed him, before he returned from World War II a different man, a man who planned ''to save more souls than had perished on the road from Bataan.'' Her husband, Nathan Price, had escaped those miseries simply by luck, and knowing it curled his heart ''like a piece of hard shoe leather.'' As her husband continually preaches the good Lord’s word, she is faced with what seems to her to be the more important burdens of life, survival and keeping her family safe and sane. Bought out by the perils of the Congo, her survival and mothering instincts are far superior to the useless work done by that of her husband. She doesn’t appear to have nearly so strong of a religious background as her husband would have hoped for her, however, throughout the novel it is made quite clear that she is in fact a better person than her husband could have ever hoped to be. This strong work ethic coupled with a strong character whose heart is in the right place is the hard working American, one whose job might not be glamorous, but is vital to survival. This reflects the American dream, as even though these people do not achieve all the glory, their hard working endeavor is an integral part of the capitalist system, hers is a role of survival. Her daughter, Leah, captures her mothers religion very well when she says, “my father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldiers, while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.'' This quote is very true, as her father is the evangelical missionary leader who parades his religion around, as he craves for the reputation of being a “good person,” because he preaches the bible. Orleanna does nothing of the sort she worships the lord, because she believes in him, and his word, she does not praise him, simply to look good. As Mathew 6:1 states, “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven,” Nathan Price is very hypocritical as he does his good deeds to be noticed, while Orleanna does them out of faith and moral righteousness.
Rachel is the oldest of the four daughters, at 15 years of age, the whiny would-be beauty queen who "cares for naught but appearances," can think only of what she misses: the five-day deodorant pads she forgot to bring, flush toilets, machine-washed clothes and other things, as she says with her willful gift for malapropism, that she has taken "for granted," the bible and her faith were no where near the top of her list. Her only way of surviving in the Congo was simply to not adapt at all; as she says ''The way I see Africa, you don't have to like it but you sure have to admit it's out there. You have your way of thinking and it has its, and never the train ye shall meet!'' This quote not only applies to her views of the Congo, but also of her views on religion. While growing up with her father, her religion was forced upon her, as for their punishment the children were sentenced to “the verse”, in which they were required to right out one hundred lines direct from the bible by memory. She doesn’t seem to enjoy the idea of faith, but there is no doubt that she realizes it’s there. Rachel chose to live a very superficial life in the Congo, as she leaves behind not only a life in America, but her religion also. Jonathon Thomas said that “Rachel provides little to the novel except to provide a one dimensional example of Kingsolver’s apparent distaste for airhead blondes.” This to me is a generalization, as Rachel gives us an example of how people can refuse to adapt or change, but simply go along with the problem instead of trying to do anything about it, symbolic of Conservative Americans, scared of change, always harking to the past, something that racial discrimination in America today is based on.

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As for the youngest, 5-year old Ruth May, she brightly tries to make sense of the exotic new world in which she finds herself, even as she makes friends with the children of Kilanga. Through her games of “Mother May I?” she becomes accepted and loved by the Congolese people, and for this reason the other members of the family seem to be jealous of her; for in her childish ways she seems to be the only one accepted by the Congolese people. Ruth May, is the innocent whose words betray the guilty; she is the catalyst that splits the Price family apart. Her religion is found in her innocence, which protects her from the hardships around her. At five years of age, she doesn’t fully understand the bible, or the messages conveyed within it, but God is clearly present in her free-willed spirit that allows her purity to bless those around her. She provides an equivalent to the hippy, a prominent part of American society in the 1970’s. Her free spirited nature is much the same as the free willed hippy, she in non-confrontational, mixes well with the other children, as well as one with nature, until it strikes at her at her death. When met with the hardship of the families move to the Congo, she initially is oblivious to the problems, as she is the only one who can truly fit in and enjoy herself. This reflects her religious faith, as she has little idea of religion she does not feel bound or oppressed by it, neither does she feel strongly faithful, she is simply oblivious. As she plays her childish games, it is as if the Congolese can feel her altruistic spirit therefore they choose to accompany her, when they wouldn’t give any other whites a chance to prove themselves. Ruth May is symbol of how God works in the lives of those who do not have the opportunity to reject him, for out of ignorance only they do not follow him.

        Leah, a feisty tomboy, pledges herself to her father's mission in the face of mounting opposition. She tries with all of her might to be accepted by her father, until she finally realizes what kind of a person her father truly is. Leah's struggle then becomes the challenge to rebalance herself morally when she finally comes to the realization that her father is simply “an ugly man.” She sees that her father’s ''blue eyes with their left-sided squint, weakened by the war, had a vacant look. His large reddish ears repelled me. My father was a simple, ugly man.'' Within her earlier years she practiced her religion in many of her father’s ways, however, as she realizes her fathers true spirit she wanders from this path and chooses to practice her religion, as she feels necessary. Leah not only becomes wed to a Congolese man, Anatole, but to the continent itself; however, she does not fail to come to the conclusion that, ‘‘everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. Especially here.'' Although she sees many problems within the Congolese nation she remains there, because of her love for Anatole. It is in this way that she practices her faith, through the eyes of her father; many problems with the Baptist religion were presented to her, however out of her love for God she remained a very religious person. Leah’s religion is a clear example of what faith should be, undying regardless of the difficulties that may stem from that choice. By the end she has not only lost her faith completely, but replaced it with faith of a new kind, her love for Anatole. “I felt the breath of God go cold on my skin.” Leah utters this as she rows with Anatole across the river and away from the driver ants, in Book Three. Amid the tumult of escape, Leah and Anatole continue an ongoing discussion of race and justice, and Leah finally suffers her ultimate crisis of faith. Moments later she replaces her old faith with a new one, murmuring Anatole's name over and over feeling that, "it took the place of prayer." Her love for Anatole becomes her new anchoring force, taking the place of her father and his simplistic vision of God. Though it is Anatole who goads her here into admitting that life is not an equation with deeds on one side and reward and punishment on the other, his last small pushes are really superfluous. Leah's crisis has been building steadily, egged on by her observations in Kingala and Leopoldville, as well as by her eye- opening philosophical discussion with Anatole. However, it takes the mortal tumult caused by the driver ants to finally sever her desperate ties to a belief in a just and comforting God. Convinced that they are all about to die, she no longer has the will to force herself to believe in something she has probably not truly believed in for many months.
        Adah, damaged since birth and unable (or unwilling) to speak, records her observations of her family with a shrewd poetic intelligence; she is a verbal gymnast, a dedicated diarist, and a profound skeptic. Adah feels somewhat jealous and irritated with her twin sister, Leah, as she describes how she got her condition. “Oh, I can easily imagine the fetal mishap,” she says, “we were inside the womb together dum-de-dum when Leah suddenly turned and declared, Adah you are just too slow. I am taking all the nourishment here and going on ahead. She grew strong as I grew weak. (Yes! Jesus loves me!) And so it came to pass, in the Eden of our mother’s womb, I was cannibalized by my sister.” Her condition is hemiplegia, which simply means that she is paralyzed on one half. While referring to her father she feels as if he viewed her condition as, “God’s Christmas bonus to one of his worthier employees.” For Adah, adaptation comes in the form of unforgiving self-discovery, the realization that ''even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.'' Adah chose to remain mute within the earlier years of her life, therefore creating her own beliefs from the beginning, she was never forced to agree with her father; for they didn’t believe she possessed the verbal abilities to do so. However, she was very intelligent and religious, as she refers to the bible within many of her entries in The Poisonwood Bible. Adah chose to make a dedicated commitment to Christ within the earlier stages of her life, a commitment that stayed with her eternally.
        Nathan Price narrates nothing, and yet his character is very clearly defined and developed through the females in his family. He is a fiery evangelical missionary, very similar to, Roger Chillingworth, the coldhearted, and judgmental villain of Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter." Nathan is the representative of Western arrogance and blindness. He is the United States government, the Belgian colonialists, and every misguided missionary who sought to efface old traditions without trying to grasp them. Both characters believe themselves to be very holy in spirit, when in reality they are closer to the gates of Hell than the Serpent in the Garden of Eden is to sin. In my eyes Nathan represents Communism, not literally, but in a broader sense he can be seen to be a symbol of this. He is a fanatical extreme, something which threatened America and most of the West in times of crisis. His insistence that his way is better and attempt to convert represents that of many extremist parties the world faced post war. No matter how well intentioned these plans may have been, they were impractical, and the public didn’t want to accept them, they were still tenacious and ambitious in their plans, and this is reflected in Nathan. Although the Congolese people are reluctant to abandon their traditional deities (and fearful of baptizing their children in the crocodile-infested waters of the nearby river), Nathan vows to convert them. He proves equally oblivious to the welfare of his own family when he refuses their entreaties to leave, even in the face of illness and escalating violence against whites. This is a lot like another book on American society, and more specifically the American dream, Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. It could be said that the tale of Nathan runs parallel to that of Willy Loman. Willy has a fanatical belief in the American Dream, much like Nathan’s deluded passion in The Good Book. When Willy’s illusions begin to fail under the pressing realities of his life, his mental health begins to unravel. The overwhelming tensions caused by this disparity, as well as those caused by the societal imperatives that drive Willy, form the essential conflict of Death of a Salesman. This is much like the story of Nathan. His illusions of being a successful missionary become more twisted as it goes more and more wrong, and yet he refuses to realize the truth. This is the character of America who remains blind to the problems they face, regardless of what comes crashing around them, this is the character who places all his faith in one place and follows it with a violent passion, tunnel visioned to what goes on around him, becoming more and more withdrawn into his illusions as the situation goes wrong. Indeed he will end up sacrificing the life of one of his daughters, as well as the value of his own, to his self-righteous beliefs. As Nathan’s faith was superficial and to the benefit strictly of himself he was denied the bliss of a life with Christ.
        The Congolese People also portrayed a very dedicated view of religion. As Nathan committed his entire life to converting them to his God, he failed to realize that they already did believe. For the Congolese were a faithful nation, they just were oblivious to the actual being of “God.” This was an idea Nathan Price could not comprehend, for the Baptist faith was the only faith he had ever been presented with, or given the knowledge of. The Congolese People simply knew God by a different name, many different names actually, but all of them combined created the same image of what Nathan Price believed in, God. These people helped to show the different forms of which our God takes on, many cultures may appear to be non-believers but in reality each society’s God aims for the same goals.
        As this novel is told entry by entry, narrated by the women of the family a clear picture of life in the Congo is very accurately represented as well as the influences of faith on each character. Leah clearly points out, “We've all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa, one way or another." Each of us, she adds, "got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here." This is true of each and every character throughout the novel, as their faith is altered and influenced by the events within their stay in the Belgian Congo. Kingsolver presents to her reader many separate versions of faith, from Nathan’s forever devoted, to Orleanna’s incredibly subtle but morally strong. This reaction to their faith in the Congo is also representative of the development of American society and the way it deals with its problems, with the different reactions and adaptations either succeeding of failing. While reading the passages narrated by the women of the family it is realized, that without your own personal beliefs a life filled with success is unfathomable.

Bibliography:

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Bible