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The Poisonwood Bible By Barbara Kingsolver

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Recommended: The poisonwood bible literary criticism

Giving up everything is what The Poisonwood Bible is all about. Written by Barbara Kingsolver, a family of five moves to the Congo for missionary purposes. As the evangelical father makes the trip a living nightmare for the family, they grow into the ways of the Congo. Sacrificing basically their whole lives for their fathers religious purposes, the family breaks apart, all going their own ways. Kingsolver makes sure that every character gets a chance to tell their story as the live in the Congo. Sacrifice is the surrendering of a possession to offer a God. In the beginning of the book, the mother Orleanna Price, tells her story of the guilt that she is feeling from losing her child. She explains everything she has sacrificed to make her husband’s …show more content…

Morrow4 After Nathan, Orleanna decides that she will never love again, as she says to anyone who asks, “Nathan Price was all the marriage I need(531).’’ She gave up so much of life to Nathan that she has nothing left to give anyone else. Choosing to leave Nathan and her love life behind in the Congo shows how much respect she actually has for herself and her children. It showed she had to strength to put her children before her own love life. Kingsolver made Nathan leave her husband to show how extreme Nathan Price went into converting the Congolese people into civilized, Christian citizens. One last and most important thing that Orleanna has given up in the Congo, is her sanity. Orleanna Price will never be the same person after leaving the Congo with one child, losing one to death, and leaving the other two behind. Along with basically losing all but one child, she also loses her husband to the man above. Anyone would be different after all of that. Although anyone would probably go crazy after all of that, Orleanna stayed calm and kept to herself. It could be because she has nothing to say but it would most like be because of religion. She

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That if none of us confessed it, we could hold back the curse that was going to be our history.” (Kingsolver 438) regarding Ruth May’s death, and shortly afterward flew away from the Congo to another part of Africa with Eeben Axelroot. Adah went home to America with Orleanna, and Leah hopped back and forth between America and the Congo with her husband and children. After Ruth May’s death, Orleanna never saw her entire family together again until after her family shrank down by one living Nathan. After the exile of Nathan was confirmed to be permanently over, Orleanna went back to the Congo and met with all three of her surviving daughters.

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Adah Price: an embodiment of the Congo. In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Adah Price serves as an embodiment of the Congo before and after imperialism. By having Adah symbolize the Congo, Kingsolver emphasizes her message of the society’s lack of understanding and discrimination of different cultures and ideals: and idea still prevalent today with the rise of islamophobia across America. To begin, Adah’s initial purpose in the novel is to serve as an embodiment of the pre-imperialism Congo. Kingsolver quickly introduces this as even Adah herself remarks, “When you do not speak other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded” (Kingsolver 34).

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The book Poisonwood Bible, written by Barbara Kingsolver, is about gender roles put on men and women and the oppression of women, in the Congo and in the American culture. This is shown throughout the book when Reverend Nathan Price believed women had to be conservative, and if they were not, God would punish them. Women and young girls do most of the work while men and boys can hunt and play. Both the Congolese and the American culture believe women do not deserve and education.     From the time the Price family had landed in the Congo, Nathan Price had portrayed that the Congolese were sinning and needed to be converted.

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In The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver creates a character Orleanna Price who was semi-voluntarily exiled to the Congo. She was exiled from a happy life due to her marriage to Nathan Price, she was exiled from both America and Americans when she moved to the Congo, and she was exiled from her family when her youngest daughter died. With each exile, Orleanna’s personality is enriched by the things she learns during that exile, and Orleanna finds herself alienated from the people and lifestyle she used to have before each exile. In the first exile, Orleanna’s personality is enriched from the general life lessons she learns with the experience of age. During that exile, she is alienated from everyone she meets if they meet, have met, or even

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When in fact, he is only trying to compensate for what he didn’t do in the war. Barbara Kingsolver reveals, “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.” She explains that Nathan Price wants to “save” the people of the Congo in a way that he thinks is just. Which, would not be so bad if he did it the correct way according to the Congolese. He is forcing them to convert into christianity.

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