Analysis Of The Poisonwood Bible By Barbara Kingsolver

Moving schools is a dramatic change for any child but moving across the country is live changing for any family. In the fictional novel “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver introduces a dysfunctional family clinging to a piece of thread in the outskirts Belgian Congo jungle of death. A Baptist preacher from Bethlehem, Georgia takes his wife and four daughters into the Belgian Congo jungles in Africa to serve as missionary family without knowing what’s lies in store for them. Through the novel they face many obstacles to test the integrity of their faith. Although the family is able to pass the obstacles by death and the separation of the Price family. All characters experience dramatic changes due to living years in the Congo and each

Orleanna Price was once a carefree child heading into a future without predicting her downfall in The Poisonwood Bible. She grew up around surrounding nothing but The Great
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Depression. Growing up without a mother at a young age in the case of Orleanna can mental scare you and affect the individual to become. “He taught me how to cook, and otherwise let me run wild with my cousins”(Kingsolver). Having only a father as a parent made her a wild child because she didn’t have the maternal love or the tough love of a mother to tell her from wrong and right. Even though her Aunt Tess was a mother figure to her when she needed her but never quite knew what areal mother was. In way Orleanna needed a mother to observe how her mother would have raised her and she could have raised her children better leaving Nathan much sooner.
A mother is the figure who protects her child from harm and has the strict hand in the household,
Orleanna wasn’t privileged to experience it and her father allowed her run around wild. “So long as I was surrounded only with what I knew, that’s what life had to offer and I

Thus, making her strong minded to survive in the Congo due to that she already lived a harsh life. She was able to make the best of her childhood despite her surrounding of the Great Depression seeing homeless people even the possibility of not having enough to eat.
Therefore, Orleanna was able to relate to the Congo people having so little because she struggled through the same circumstances.
Everything changed when she meet Nathan Price, a young preacher who soon would be the cause of her downfall. What Orleanna thought was love wasn’t because Nathan’s purpose for courting was to save her soul. In the novel Nathan became the antagonist of the story because he turned into the poison turing the Bible into his instrument of death. Nathan’s culture was to preach the word of God so upon meeting Orleanna he felt the desire to inbred in her the Bible by reading books from the Bible on everyday date they went. Thus causing Orleanna to follow his
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