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Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver is a world renowned American novelist, poet, and essayist. She has written many literary works including, but not limited to, controversial subjects such as politics, nature, and social issues. Kingsolver’s many unique experiences in life have made her the author she is today and ultimately inspired her to write The Poisonwood Bible; one of the most complex and controversial novel out of all of her works.
Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland on April 8, 1955. Shortly after her birth, Kingsolver’s family moved to an alfalfa farm in Carlisle, Kentucky, where she spent the majority of her early youth. In 1963, Kingsolver’s parents, both prominent healthcare workers, moved the family to Léopoldville, Congo (now Kinshasa, …show more content…

In 1988 Kingsolver wrote and published her first book, The Bean Trees, while pregnant with her first daughter, Camille Hoffman. Due to Kingsolver’s building frustrations with the United States’ involvement in the first Gulf War, she moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year. Soon after she and her daughter returned to the United States, Kingsolver and Hoffman divorced. In 2004 Kingsolver moved to a farm in Washington County, Virginia with her second husband, Steven Hopp, and their teenage daughter, Lily Hopp, where they currently live to this day.
In 1998, Kingsolver published The Poisonwood Bible. The Poisonwood Bible was born from Kingsolver’s long standing fascination with politics, culpability, and her firm belief that what happened in the Congo in 1961 is one of the most significant political conflicts of the 1900’s. Kingsolver wanted to remind the world that every industrialized country, despite their constant denial, has reached their current success through doing horrific deeds to smaller, less fortunate countries by using the Price’s experience in the Congo as an …show more content…

Kingsolver’s first goal of the Poisonwood Bible is proposing how an individual could make peace with the aftermath of their worst mistakes and flaws, as shown through the voices of the Price girls. Kingsolver’s decision to leave Nathan Price voiceless represents the seemingly untouchable arrogance and offensiveness of large powers that drag peaceful innocents into conflict for their own gain. Nathan has no voice because Kingsolver wanted him to be viewed from the outside. Nathan is the uncontrollable darkness that festers in humanity; he is the crimes of a previous generation that are inherited by a new, unsympathetic one that is helpless to change its past and must come to terms with it. Therefore Kingsolver’s main goal of the Poisonwood Bible was for different generations and their individuals to question their preexisting beliefs and spark moral conversations and debates amongst each

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390 Words | 2 Pages

The Poisonwood Bible explores multiple different meanings ranging from love and loyalty, to ignorance and political oppression. While it is a story of the journey of the Price family in the Congo, Kingsolver uses these narratives to draw a bigger picture of the geopolitics that are at play in the Congo. I think the overarching theme of the novel is ignorance and its opposite: empathy. We follow the journeys of ignorant characters such as Rachel and Nathan Price and are given a parallel with the journeys of Adah, Leah, and Orleanna. However Kingsolver showcases the realities of life here or beyond by the end of the novel where it is clear that none of the characters we met at the beginning would end up with lives that fulfilled all their dreams

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583 Words | 3 Pages

While some readers consider Rachel Price’s static character nothing more than a pointless trope, it is clear that Kingsolver has carefully crafted Rachel’s accounts of her experiences in the village of Kilanga to subtly illuminate the deeply engrained racism present in the minds of the white missionaries living in Congo at the time, a result of hundreds of years of European colonization and degradation of Sub-Saharan

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766 Words | 4 Pages

In the beginning of the novel, Kingsolver indicates significance of family through the main character Taylor. She mentions that “...[she] stamped [her] foot and told [her] own mother not to call [her] Marietta but Miss Marietta… so she did from

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826 Words | 4 Pages

Title The title The Poisonwood Bible is very fitting. The poisonwood tree is described as “The tree that was plaguing us all to death” (29). Just as the painful, venomous and hazardous if mishandled poisonwood tree is, so is Nathan Price's theology. He mistranslates key words and therefore the biblical message doesn't make sense to the people to whom he preaches (73).

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2021 Words | 9 Pages

In Barbara Kingsolver’s work, The Poisonwood Bible, Nathan Price is a character which responds to injustice in some significant way. Out of all the other characters, Nathan is the one who responds the most to an act of injustice by going on a campaign halfway around the world to somehow repay his obligation to God. He plans to do this by spreading Christianity, or at least his version of Christianity, to the native people of the Congo. The whole reason for him doing this is that he believes being wounded and leaving battle right before the rest of his company dies is an act of injustice and feels as if though he should have died there with his men. Nathan feels like he is a failure and is guilty for not dying with his brothers on the battlefield.

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118 Words | 1 Pages

The resiliency of Taylor 's mother and her commitment to Taylor, as well as her indifferent attitude toward men, represent Kingsolver 's feminist

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1462 Words | 6 Pages

In the novel, The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, a missionary family travel to the African Congo during the 1960’s, in hopes of bringing enlightenment to the Congolese in terms of religion. The father, Nathan, believes wholeheartedly in his commitment, and this is ultimately his downfall when he fails to realize the damage that he is placing upon his family and onto the people living in Kilanga, and refuses to change the way he sees things. However, his wife, Orleanna, and her daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May, take the Congo in, and make the necessary changes in their lives, and they do this in order to survive with their new darkness that they are living in. Curiosity and acceptance help the ones with curious minds,

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566 Words | 3 Pages

Sam Weller begins by introducing Ray Bradbury and his first prominent novel, Fahrenheit 451. Weller describes the book as “the story of the near-future society” and categorizes alongside other dystopian literature such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. The article sounded like any other analyses of the book, until the author made an unexpected statement: Sam Weller had personal relationship with Ray Bradbury. Here was Sam Weller, a man who worked for 12 years as Bradbury’s “authorized biographer”, sharing his thoughts about his subject and the novel. The main issue in this article is that Fahrenheit 451 has been widely praised as “one of the great works of anti-censorship”, until in

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Some have named Ray Bradbury “the uncrowned king of the science-fiction writers” because of his imagination and beautiful way of making Fahrenheit 451 come to life. The book Fahrenheit 451 is one of the first books to deal with a future society filled with people who have lost their thirst for knowledge and for whom literature is a thing of the past. The author mainly portrays this world from the point of view of Montag, a man who has discovered the power that knowledge contains and is coming to grips with the fact that it is outlawed. However, the reader also gets to see what life is like for one of the people content in living a life lacking in independent thought and imagination through his wife, Millie.

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1181 Words | 5 Pages

Barbara Walters’ career brings words such as “legendary”, “pioneering”, and “inspirational” to mind. She was more than just any other pretty person that was on a TV screen. “Walters was born September 25, 1929, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts”(world book). From an early age, she had been surrounded by celebrities, many people say this attributed to her relaxed manner while she interviewed people. Her father, Louis Edward Walters, had opened a string of nightclubs called the Latin Quarter.

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The beginning of the book starts off as a conflict regarding the family mission. As Nathan Price was trying to convert the people of Africa to Christianity religion, his objective wasn’t

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1049 Words | 5 Pages

Throughout his narrative, Douglass’s descriptions of the white slaveholders expose the Christian hypocrisy found in the American slave system. Douglass first does so by exposing how the lesson taught by Christians to help those in need is contradicted by the experiences Douglass has especially with hunger. Douglass reflects on these experiences when he states that for the “first time during a space of more than seven years” feeling the effects of the “painful gnawing’s of hunger…” (54). This event shows the Christians’ lessons of selflessness and kindness is hypocritical as they treat their fellow humans as subhuman. The Christians at the time rely on scripture to make a case for slavery in America.

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879 Words | 4 Pages

Betty Smith was one of the most influential writers of her time, and her works impacted American culture in several ways. Betty Smith was born on December 15, 1896 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In Jones’s article (1994), Jones describes Smith’s childhood as “a childhood and youth at once poor in material terms, but rich in experience.” Smith’s father was an actor, but died when she was young, leaving the

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485 Words | 2 Pages

he Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver focuses on both real life and fictional events and tells the story of the Price family’s experience in the Congo. Kingsolver makes good use of foreshadowing to dramatize the tragic incidents that occur in Africa. Orleanna Price is the most reliable narrator in the novel and is used to foreshadow future events and to explain various aspects of the past. In the first chapter, Orleanna maps out all the major events that will occur throughout the book.

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1373 Words | 6 Pages

As a college student, Emily Vallowe wrote a literacy narrative with a play on words title: “Write or Wrong Identity.” In this work, she told the story of how she believed her confidence as a writer developed; however, she was becoming dubious as to her distinctiveness as an author. Although I have never been a self-proclaimed wordsmith as Ms. Vallowe obviously had been for years, I related to her journey. Not only did she grow up in Northern Virginia like I did, she never considered herself an inept writer—a possibility that I could not fathom about myself. Then, at some point, we both began to question our own ability and to question who we really were.

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