SparkNotes - The Poisonwood Bible: SparkNotes Literature Guide

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Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland. Soon after her birth the family moved to rural Kentucky, the culture and landscape that informs much of her writing. As a child Kingsolver wrote stories and essays, but it never occurred to her that she could write for a living. In rural Kentucky work focused mainly on survival, and a career in fiction seemed frivolous. In addition, as Kingsolver has explained in interviews, all the writers she read were old, dead men, and she could not conceive of herself within their ranks.

In the early 1970s, Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana. There she formally studied biology, but received an education of much wider breadth. Joining anti-Vietnam protests and studying Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir, she developed a taste for social activism that has never left her. She also discovered writers who mix literature with social and political advocacy. Doris Lessing's Children of Violence novels, in particular, opened her eyes to what was to be her true calling: trying to change the world through fiction.

Still, after graduating in 1977, Kingsolver did not jump into a writing career. Instead she pursued a graduate degree in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona at Tuscon, and also spent two years living in Greece and France, during which time she supported herself through a number of odd jobs ranging from archaeologist to X-ray technician, housecleaner, and biological researcher.

After completing her graduate work, Kingsolver took on a job as a science writer for the University of Arizona, a position that soon led to a career in scientific journalism. While publishing features in such magazines and newspapers as The Nation,The New York Times, and Smithsonian by day, Kingsolver was also writing fiction at night. Her first novel, The Bean Trees was published in 1988 to critical acclaim, and was followed soon after by Homeland and Other Stories (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tuscon: Essays from Now and Never (1995), and Another America: Outra America, a collection of poetry published in 1992. Each of these works has a deep social message, though in the novels the political messages are indirect and secondary to the more intimate, family-centered stories. For example, Kingsolver describes the plight of Central American refugees in The Bean Trees, the travails of young American idealists who go to work with the Sandinista government in Animal Dreams, and laws concerning the adoption of Indian children in Pigs in Heaven. It was not until The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998, that Kingsolver, who works tirelessly as a human- rights and environmental-rights activist, finally moved her political message to the foreground of her fiction.

The Poisonwood Bible is a departure from Kingsolver's previous fiction not only in moving politics to the foreground, but also in its setting. Whereas her first three novels are set in the American Southwest, The Poisonwood Bible takes place deep in the African country of Congo. Kingsolver spent two years in the Republic of Congo at the age of seven and eight, when her parents worked there as health care officials. She religiously kept a diary of her experiences in Africa, recording with wonder how completely different this culture was from all she had previously known. She was struck in particular by the fact that the people around her could live perfectly happy lives in the absence of the amenities that she considered necessaryelectricity, running water, and plumbingconcluding that what was right in one location was not even necessarily good in another. This is a theme that finds prominent place in The Poisonwood Bible. It was not until years later, though, that Kingsolver learned what had been going on in the Congo at the time of her stay there during the early 1960's. The United States had secretly sabotaged the Congo's hard-won shot at independence by masterminding a coup that would end in the assassination of the elected President Patrice Lumumba and the installation of the dictatorial and thieving military leader Joseph Mobutu in Lumumba's place. Outraged by what she considered devastating acts motivated purely by greed, Kingsolver formed the idea to write a novel exposing and dealing with this crime. It was not until thirty years later that she finally felt prepared, emotionally and professionally, to undertake the project of exploring the question of how we can all, as citizens of the United States, deal with our complicity in these egregious events.

In 1959 an overzealous Baptist minister named Nathan Price drags his wife and four daughters deep into the heart of the Congo on a mission to save the unenlightened souls of Africa. The five women narrate the novel. From the outset, the attitudes of the five women cover a wide spectrum. The mother, Orleanna passively accepts the turn of events, as she passively accepts everything her husband tells her. Fifteen-year-old beauty queen Rachel resents her separation from normal teen life. Five year old adventurer Ruth May is both excited and frightened. Fourteen-year-old Leah, who alone shares her father's ardent religious faith, is enthusiastic. Leah's twin Adah a cripple and mute by birth, but also a brilliant observer, merely views the move, as she does all of life, with a wry and cynical detachment. One thing that the women share, however, is the unwavering faith that they are carrying with them a culture far superior to the one already existing in the village of Kilanga, and that they will therefore instantly be masters of their new domain.

It does not take long for this faith to begin to waver. The first sign that they have miscalculated the superiority of their way of life comes when Nathan attempts to plant a vegetable garden. His "demonstration garden" is intended to both provide food for his family, and to instruct the natives in simple agricultural principles that might save them from malnutrition. However, though his garden grows lush and huge, none of his plants ever bear fruit. It takes him several weeks to realize that his plants cannot bear fruit here, because there are no African pollinators suited to North American vegetables. The next, and much larger, blow comes when their live-in helper, Mama Tataba becomes so enraged at Nathan's insistence on baptism for the villagers that she deserts them. As Mama Tataba explains in her final burst of anger, the villagers will never agree to being dunked in the river because a crocodile recently ate a young girl in that very river.

Though the women are shaken by these events, and slowly affected by the culture around them, Nathan remains steadfast in his original goals. He refuses to give up the attempt to baptize the villagers, or to bend his will in any way. When the only English-speaking member of the village, the handsome young school teacher, Anatole, informs Nathan that the chief, Tata Ndu, looks askance at his proselytizing, and fears that a move toward Christianity will spell the moral decline of his people, Nathan becomes outraged and throws Anatole out of his house rather than trying to gather more insight from him into the traditional religious life of the village. Even when their situation becomes mortally dangerous, Nathan clings tenaciously to his mission. Though little progress is being made in Kilanga, tremendous shifts are taking place elsewhere in the Congo. As the Underdowns, the Price's contacts to the Mission League, inform them on a surprise visit, Belgium is about to give the country its independence; a popular election will be held to select the new ruler. The Underdowns warn the Prices that they must evacuate the country, as purges of all Westerners are expected to take place once independence is won. Though his wife and daughters plead with him to heed this suggestion, Nathan refuses. The day that the evacuation plane arrives, and Nathan forbids his family to board, Orleanna crawls into bed and finds herself unable or unwilling to get up.