Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications
Chosen People: American Exceptionalism
in Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
SUSAN STREHLE
ABSTRACT: Kingsolver has called The Poisonwood Bible “a political allegory,”
developing complex links between the private domestic story of the Price family
and the public political narrative of U.S. intervention in the Congo. The novel
shows how American exceptionalism reproduces itself in the American home, as
Nathan’s assumptions about chosen people shape his daughters. After Lumumba
and Ruth May die, the daughters choose unsettled homes and complex, diverging
paths away from their father’s American legacies.
Keywords: allegory, political, in fiction; American exceptionalism; Congo, history in
literature; home, ideology in; Barbara Kingsolver
B
arbara Kingsolver was moved to write her epic novel, The Poisonwood
Bible (1998), by what she calls “my belief that what happened to the
Congo is one of the most important political parables of our century”
(Web site). Her goals in this successful, important novel go well beyond criticizing
U.S. foreign policy in Africa during the cold war: in the character of Nathan Price,
she explores the American assumptions that create national arrogance; and in the
characters of his wife, Orleanna, and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May,
she considers various ways in which American citizens are rendered passive supporters of, and eventually resistant heirs to, a legacy of imperialism. She calls her
novel “a political allegory,” an elaborately researched “historical fiction” combining “political and domestic” elements; she says that she wrote it “because as an
adult I’m interested in cultural imperialism and post-colonial history” (Web site).
She observes that people in the United States “can hardly even say the word ‘postcolonial.’ We like to think we’re the good guys,” and thus we avoid recognizing
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what has been done in our name (Web site).1 As Kingsolver sees it, the American
public did not approve of the decisions made regarding the newly independent
Congo; few even knew. Thus, in her allegory, “We’re the captive witnesses, just
like the wife and daughters of Nathan Price” (Web site).
The meanings of Kingsolver’s allegory, its complex linkages between the
private domestic story of the Price family and the public political narrative
of imperialism and murder, have not been adequately explored in published
criticism. Indeed, although the novel won prestigious prizes, sold millions of
copies, and remains popular almost a decade after its publication, relatively
few critical essays have discussed it.2 Among these, one focuses on home in
the novel (Jacobson), while one clarifies the political history of U.S. intervention in the Congo (Kunz); but neither explores their joined implications. No
essay reads the novel in light of Kingsolver’s allegorical project. Although at
least one writer regards the novel as Kingsolver’s “masterwork” (Snodgrass
34), others voice reservations that emerge from an insufficient understanding
of the novel’s allegory. The Poisonwood Bible has been criticized as “preachy,”
“sentimental,” and “a didactic work” with an overly simple and “schematized
view of moral life” (Demory 191, 192; York 148–49). Critics have faulted
Kingsolver’s development of characters, finding Nathan and Rachel simply
“bad,” and Leah, Anatole, and Brother Fowles simply “good” (Jacobson; York).
Others object to her portrayal of Africa as “an essentialized [. . .] figure” of
suffering with a romanticized past (Koza 288) or as an Edenic locus for the
disabled (Fox 410). One critic finds the novel self-reflexive and misses its
politics altogether: “The Poisonwood Bible is finally more concerned with its
own discursive constructedness than with the history and the political, material reality of the Congo” (Jacobs 116). The novel can be understood through
its allegory as a powerful artistic reflection on cultural imperialism, I believe;
Kingsolver’s complex links between private and public, home and homeland,
illuminate the novel’s focus on American exceptionalism.
No recent historian has defined American exceptionalism as well, ironically, as
the neoconservative Samuel Huntington, who argues uncritically in favor of renewing American identity after 9/11 through a return to America’s foundational values.
For Huntington, America should recall its evangelical origins to unify and mobilize
the Anglo-Protestant core culture in a restorative “clash” against Islam. He recalls
the basis for America’s historically exceptional status in Who Are We?:
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans defined their mission in
the New World in biblical terms. They were a “chosen people,” on an “errand
in the wilderness,” creating “the new Israel” or the “new Jerusalem” in what
was clearly “the promised land.” America was the site of a “new Heaven and
a new earth, the home of justice,” God’s country. The settlement of America
was vested, as Sacvan Bercovitch put it, with all the emotional, spiritual, and
intellectual appeal of a religious quest. This sense of holy mission was easily
expanded into millenarian themes of America as “the redeemer nation” and
“the visionary republic.” (64)3
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Considering himself the chosen emissary of a divinely inspired nation, Nathan
affirms just such a sense of America’s exceptional status.
The Poisonwood Bible shows the historical impact of U.S. intervention in the
Congo largely through the retrospective narration of Orleanna. The novel focuses,
however, on the reproduction of an exceptionalist national ideology in the American home, together with the passivity that enables it. Through allegory, the novel
narrates the logic that sustains an imperialist mission to impose American doctrine
on other lands; it also dramatizes the patriarchal mission to create a network of
support by disciplining young Americans as quiescent domestic subjects. The story
is largely told by four daughters, one sixteen, twins of fourteen, and one five when
they arrive in Africa in 1959; their youth reflects Kingsolver’s interest in girls’ formative education in and by the home.4 An evangelical Baptist missionary, Nathan
practices both hegemonic discipline of his wife and daughters and, occasionally,
the violent abuse latent in his attitude toward women and inferior others. Both
strategies aim to produce just the docile bodies needed for the reproduction of the
imperial home and the maintenance of empire. I begin with analysis of Nathan,
showing in some detail how he enacts American exceptionalism. I turn then to the
four daughters, exploring how they are taught the absence of their own election,
instructed in a binary vision of reality, and disciplined into silence and passivity.
Nathan shapes all of his daughters, each of whom reflects him in different ways
and battles his legacy with various results, considered in the final section.
“His Confidence in the Lord Is Exceptional”
In his journey to the Congo, Nathan recapitulates the founding of America. A new
Puritan, he preaches the salvation of Christianity and the damnation awaiting those
who refuse it, the superiority of American farming methods and technology, and the
exceptional qualities of American civilization. Since the Lord has saved him from the
Bataan Death March, Nathan believes that he is intended for a great and significant
mission: his “confidence in the Lord is exceptional” (276). He believes that God has
chosen him to bring the Word to a new frontier in the African wilderness, where he
will create a purified community. Returning to the model of Christ’s baptism in the
River Jordan, he hopes to baptize saved Africans in the crocodile-infested Kwilu
River. Nathan is arrogant, inflexible, and passionately committed: in short, an American exceptionalist. Persuaded of Americans’ election as the chosen people, he ignores
local Congolese customs, resists help and information from villagers, and strenuously
insists throughout on his own exceptional destiny.
These same dismissive attitudes toward Africans, coupled with an inexorable
certainty of American power and right, inform America’s actions in the Congo
during the time of the novel (1959–61). America did not invent imperialism or the
exploitation of Africa: Kingsolver reminds readers of the sordid history of imperial
control under Belgium, which extracted a vast fortune in rubber and diamonds from
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an enslaved population. When the Underdowns, a Belgian missionary couple, tell
the Prices that Belgium “went on speaking of rule with a fatherly hand,” Orleanna
objects: “Using these people like slaves in your rubber plantations and your mines
and I don’t know what all? We’ve heard what goes on [. . .] One old fellow got his
hand whacked off up at Coquilhatville, and ran away while he was still spurting
blood!” (165). Horrific tales of murder, rape, and the chopping off of Congolese
hands came out of the Belgian Congo, detailed by Adam Hochschild in King
Leopold’s Ghost (1998). But when Belgium granted independence and charismatic
Patrice Lumumba was elected prime minister in June 1960, the United States
intervened to overthrow a government and depose a leader. Desperate to prevent
a communist takeover—“another Cuba” in Africa—top U.S. officials decided that
Lumumba must be removed (Berkeley 110). In August 1960, CIA director Allen
Dulles called the change of leadership an “urgent and prime objective,” and in
September, Dulles cabled Leopoldville that “we wish give every possible support
in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position”
(Wrong 79–80; Kalb 102). A scientist was sent with poison (never used) to kill
Lumumba, and $1 million was funneled through the United Nations to support an
alternative leader, Joseph Mobutu, with what Kingsolver calls “freshly purchased
soldiers” (320). Rebel troops finally murdered Lumumba in January 1961, leaving
the American-supported Mobutu to enjoy thirty-six years of despotic “kleptocracy”
from which the Congo has not yet recovered (Berkeley 111; Wrong).
American imperialism works to distinguish itself from its European antecedents by
championing freedom and democracy, disavowing outright profits, claiming benevolence, and asserting that American righteousness makes American acts right.5 These
understandings color the narrative of American intervention in the Congo. As the story
unfolded to the public, first in 1975 in the Senate Select Committee headed by Frank
Church (D–Idaho), and then in several books detailing events leading to Mobutu’s dictatorship, President Eisenhower himself authorized the assassination and overthrow of
the government (Kalb 102–03; Wrong 80; Berkeley 110). He must have believed that
sacrificing an elected leader’s life in the name of Western security was fundamentally
different from the brutalities of Belgian colonial rule; thus he would distance his own
“fatherly hand” from the Belgians’. He probably thought of the action as necessary for
the safety of a free world caught in cold-war oppositions, rather than imperialist meddling in the choices of an independent democratic people. Diane Kunz concludes that
the United States acted on “credible” fears that Lumumba would be “easy prey” for
an assault by “Communist agents” who “actively subverted liberal institutions in the
United States and elsewhere. [. . .] Equally clearly we can understand that for Africa,
Communist domination would have been at least as great a disaster as what eventually befell the continent” (295). In her view, American intervention was appropriate
and necessary. Yet from Kingsolver’s perspective, the president and his administration
acted from positions much like that of Nathan: arrogant, persuaded they spoke for God
and goodness, they pursued a course founded on America’s exceptionalist identity as
the world’s chosen people.6
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In characterizing Nathan as an American exceptionalist, Kingsolver takes care to
root Nathan’s religion in American Puritanism, buttressed by his confidence in the
providential history of his nation. Americans are God’s chosen people, he holds, and
of his family’s endeavor, he might say with William Bradford that “their condition
was not ordinary, their ends were good and honorable, their calling lawful and urgent;
and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding” (Miller 14).
Nathan’s God practices simple, direct justice: “God created a world of work and
rewards [. . .] on a big, balanced scale,” Nathan says, so righteous acts will be rewarded
(37). Because God watches and judges constantly, the Prices, like the Puritans, can
read God’s justice in the small events of their daily domestic lives. When they devote
themselves to duty and self-denial, they will thrive; but if they fall into idleness and
dissipation, punishment will follow as their just deserts. Orleanna recalls:
Nathan believed one thing above all else: that the Lord notices righteousness, and rewards it. [. . .] if we suffered [. . .] it was proof that one of us had
committed a failure of virtue. I understood the failure to be mine. If I stood
still for a moment in the backyard between hanging up sheets to notice the
damp grass tingling under my bare feet, His eyes observed my idleness. God
heard whenever I let slip one of my father’s curse words, and He watched me
take my bath, daring me to enjoy the warm water. (200)
Because suffering is the just consequence of a failure of virtue, misfortune conveys God’s negative judgment—for Nathan, a judgment of others.
Nathan’s faith in God is complemented by his belief in the superiority of American
civilization. He plans to introduce American farming practices with a “demonstration
garden” in Kilanga; he will show the Congolese how to raise American crops like
Kentucky Wonder beans and Big Boy tomatoes and then supply food and seeds to the
Africans (35). To produce this American bounty, and despite Mama Tataba’s advice
that seeds will not grow in the Congo unless he mounds the earth, Nathan reconfigures African earth into American farmland. He levels the garden into “flat-as-Kansas
beds,” making them “as flat as the Great Plains” (63, 41). He believes that civilization
comes to Africa only from without, from its colonizers who import their superior
cultures: “The Belgians and American business brought civilization to the Congo!
American aid will be the Congo’s salvation” (121). He tells Leah that, after independence, American aid will “set right” the slums outside Leopoldville (231–32). With a
naive faith in the American government’s will to solve problems in the Congo that it
has not addressed in American cities, he sees America as the redeemer nation. Above
all, he believes in American instrumentalism, that “take-hold” initiative to solve problems with technology. To reenact and update Jesus’s biblical miracle of the loaves and
fishes, he uses imported American dynamite; he has men throw it into the river, killing
thousands of fish. As Adah reports, the fish rot because of a lack of refrigeration, and
“[o]ur village was blessed for weeks with the smell of putrefaction” (70).
In the tradition of American independence and individualism, Nathan practices Emersonian self-reliance. When the Underdowns arrive at the airport to help
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the Prices navigate through customs, “Father made it clear we were completely
self-reliant” (17). Mama Tataba’s advice to create mounds in the garden and her
warning not to touch the poisonwood tree strike Nathan as meddlesome, and he
dismisses her. When drought and famine dry up the food supply and Orleanna
and Ruth May lie sick with malaria, “The Reverend seemed unconcerned,” writes
Adah (217). He dismisses his translator, Anatole, and delivers sermons by himself
in “wildly half-baked Kikongo” (213). Although Nathan might wish to model his
independent self-determination in the wilderness after American heroes like James
Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, it falls ironically short. In fact, Nathan relies
for his life on the labor of his wife and daughters and the gifts of his African neighbors, whose help he ignores.
Nathan believes in his cultural and racial superiority to the Congolese. To
adapt Chinua Achebe’s memorable phrase for Conrad, Nathan combines the
“evil of imperial exploitation” with “the racism on which it sharpened its iron
tooth” (Achebe 349). Nathan regards Africans as lacking in maturity, intellect,
and sophistication; he also condemns them as pagans who worship false gods. In
his first words to the people of Kilanga who have prepared a feast of welcome,
he rails against their “Nakedness [. . .] and darkness of the soul!” in a biblical
harangue comparing them to the denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah (Kingsolver,
Poisonwood 27; emphasis in original). Nathan dismisses the people’s belief in
gods and ancestors as false idolatry and the traditional priest Tata Kuvudundu
as a witch doctor (131). He considers Brother Fowles foolish and deluded in
his respect for the Congolese, and he ridicules Orleanna for treating Anatole as
a valued guest at dinner. The Congolese, he says, “don’t have the temperament
or the intellect” to want political freedom and apply “the logic of children in a
display of childish ignorance” (168, 332). In the distorted evolutionary logic
of nineteenth-century imperialism, Nathan considers Africa as inadequately
evolved, backward, primitive—a childish culture dwarfed by its grown-up Western colonizers—and thus in need of help from the advanced West. As Leah puts
it, “My father thinks the Congo is just lagging behind and he can help bring it
up to snuff” (284).
Nathan’s attitudes toward women follow from his patriarchal faith in God’s
masculinity and his contempt for those not identical to himself. He believes that
women’s purpose in life is to marry and support their mates: “My father says
that a girl who fails to marry is veering from God’s plan,” Leah writes (149).
As a result, when Leah and Adah are declared “exceptional children” by their
elementary school principal, Nathan “warned Mother not to flout God’s Will by
expecting too much for us. ‘Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your
shoes,’ he still loves to say [. . .] ‘It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out
and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes’” (56). Women’s
ideas and voices annoy Nathan, who complains about the “blabber” of his family
and who “often says he views himself as the captain of a sinking mess of female
minds” (34, 36). His attitudes reduce women to bodies, but he abhors the female
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body as well for its temptation to sin. He rejects sexuality, hates and fears nakedness, and feels embarrassed by Orleanna’s pregnancies; he responds to intercourse with guilt, “blaming me [Orleanna] for my wantonness” (198). As Leah
comes to realize, women have no place in her father’s system of values—indeed,
no place in his view of the Kingdom of Heaven: “For Father, the Kingdom of the
Lord is an uncomplicated place, where tall, handsome boys fight on the side that
always wins. [. . .] But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules
don’t quite apply to us, nor protect us either” (244). Women and girls cannot be
exceptional, in Nathan’s view; their proper role is quiet, humble acquiescence to
and support for the exceptional man.
Nathan’s character does not speak or write his own sections of The Poisonwood
Bible, but he dominates his wife and daughters to such an extent that he remains
central to the novel. He serves as a negative portrait, not of the Christian missionary or the masculine head of household, but rather of the American exceptionalist
convinced of his own righteousness. Kingsolver describes him as “charismatic
and complex” and insists that he “is single-minded all right, but hardly one-sided”
(Web site). As I have argued, Nathan demonstrates a web of arrogant attitudes that
undergird and explain a particularly American version of self-righteous imperialism. Although Nathan has nothing to do with the decision to overthrow the
Congo’s government and assassinate its leader, his attitudes have everything to do
with those of the historical figures who made the decisions.
Nathan uses his power over his children—the “exceptional” twins, the less
gifted Rachel and young Ruth May—to reduce, channel, and contain their gifts.
He would make them into girls and citizens who do not think for themselves, but
passively accept the decisions of others. Kingsolver’s novel has a pointed feminist awareness of the limited roles taught to and required of women in America.
But the narrative of their education extends beyond exposing the devaluation of
girls to suggest how children of both genders can be disciplined into the passivity required for a broad-based support of imperialism. At this level, the novel
meditates on the production of citizens who offer blind trust and acceptance to
their leaders and thereby enable their nation to commit atrocities: it explores the
conditions of possibility for American exceptionalism. In this sense, the novel is
about America’s international posture and politics, as well as the reproduction of
American ideology in the home.7
Training “Exceptional Children”
When the Prices fly to the Congo, they carry vital parts of their American
home with them. They bring a hammer, seeds, and Betty Crocker cake mixes.
They bring schoolbooks and homework, so the education of Rachel, Leah, and
Adah can go on undisturbed. They bring fabric, intended for baptismal dresses
for African children, but used for curtains to enable a Western privacy otherwise
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unknown in the small town of Kilanga. They bring a photograph of America’s
president, Eisenhower, which Orleanna will hang in the kitchen house for its
symbolic assurance that the family has not traveled beyond his benevolent reach.
Orleanna brings embroidery hoops, thread, and patterns for her daughters: they
will work on linens for their hope chests, dedicated to the promised reproduction
of the home in their married lives. As they travel, padded by the excess baggage
they have worn on their bodies, they are exporting the American home—materials
to replicate it, as well as assumptions about its cultural superiority—in ways that
graphically insulate them against contact with the colonized land.
The goal of their American home is self-propagation: to replicate Georgia in
the jungle, to convert Africans to Western worship, to transmogrify Congolese
earth into Kansas fields, and to raise children prepared for and enthusiastic
about the perpetuation of America’s religious and secular values. Although each
daughter is unique, all are shaped by their experience in the Price household.
Kingsolver self-consciously writes about home: “I’ve spent hundreds of pages,
even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think
it’s the only thing I ever write about,” she says in “Household Words” (197). In
fact, as I will show later in this essay, the Price women eventually secede from
their father’s home and refuse to reproduce it in their later lives; I agree with Ruth
Smith and Kristin Jacobson that this novel unsettles home.8 One of Kingsolver’s
achievements in this allegorical novel, however, is to illuminate the subtle but
inexorable shaping power of home, which operates to bring the Prices into line
with the Eisenhowers. Although critics have explored their differences, showing
how the girls’ values, like their voices, are impressively distinct, their similarities
comment in important ways on how the American home constructs a domestic
support system for an exceptionalist ideology.
In Nathan’s understanding, God’s chosen people are male; women may be
called as helpers and mates, but they need to be trained above all else to accept
their secondary and supporting status. Rachel comments that “[i]t’s just lucky for
Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them” (337).
For the daughters, his indifference and Orleanna’s exhaustion teach the girls
to compete for a limited amount of love and to obsess about being chosen—or
more accurately, about being passed over. The most dramatic example of this
occurs to Adah, whose life changes course on the night her mother chooses Ruth
May to carry as she flees the driver ants, ignoring Adah’s spoken plea for help.
Weeks later, she observes that “Mother held on tight to the hand of Ruth May, her
chosen child” (345); months later, she reflects that in leaving Africa after Ruth
May’s death, “she chose me” (413; emphasis in original). Even years later, Adah
worries that her mother might “choose Leah” if she returns to the United States
with her children, and she telephones her mother in the middle of the night to ask
about these choices (444). Ruth May loves her mother best and enjoys time alone
with her: “Mama, I hope he never comes back,” she says of her absent father
(215). But even Ruth May believes that she is passed over in favor of Nathan, the
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chosen Price: “Baby Jesus knows what I said about wishing Father would never
come back anymore, and Father is the preacher. So God and them love him the
best” (215). Leah is the only daughter who wants to be chosen by her father:
“I crave heaven,” she says, “and to be my father’s favorite” (66). She is jealous
of Adah when Nathan, pleased at the increase in his congregation after Adah
escapes from the lion, puts “his arm around her shoulder in public! Which is not
entirely fair” (151). Children of the promised land and daughters of God’s messenger, these girls experience only the absence of election. Not chosen people,
they must serve in secondary supporting roles behind a distant leader/father who
holds absolute power.
This focus on being chosen or elect, with its opposition in being damned,
abandoned, passed over, or—in Thomas Pynchon’s term—preterite (509, 760, for
example), underscores a habit of binary thought inscribed in all four daughters by
their father. With origins in the Puritan view of the world as divided between saved
and damned, it permeates the secular thought of the Price children and leads them
to read experience as a set of polar oppositions. They are conditioned to think of
alternatives in binary polarities that function to minimize choices and discourage
the imagination of complex middle terms. Ruth May, for example, ponders racial
differences and struggles to understand relationships between whites and blacks.
Her thinking leads to the erasure of middle grounds and ambiguities, as black
and white are ranked by law: “The man in church said they’re different from
us and needs ought to keep to their own. Jimmy Crow says that, and he makes
the laws” (20). Twins Leah and Adah naturally reflect on duality and doubling,
and their understandings also reflect the binary hierarchy of elect and preterite.
Leah’s distinctions come closest to duplicating her father’s religious binaries; she
sees her father as a heroic enlightener, the Congo as “unenlightened glory” (17).
Even later, she says, “I want to be righteous, Anatole. To know right from wrong
[. . .] to live the right way and be redeemed” (309). Adah, developed unevenly as
a result of hemiplegia (and resentful of her healthy sister), bitterly contrasts her
elect sister with her own preterite self: “I am a lame gallimaufry and she remains
perfect” (34). Materialistic Rachel repeatedly contrasts elect “home” with preterite “here.” These patterns of binary perception, shared by all four sisters, reflect
their father’s reduction of complex phenomena into simple choices that offer, at
base, no choice at all.
They are similarly conditioned by their father’s Puritan heritage to believe in
a direct, simple balance of just rewards and punishments for their actions, and
thus to read God’s intervention in their daily lives. But like Orleanna, they are
programmed by their gender to fail in virtue; just as they cannot be chosen, they
cannot follow the narrow path of righteousness. Influenced by Nathan’s negative
and wrathful theology, which bears strong resemblance to the Jonathan Edwards
of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the Price children expect punishment and struggle anxiously to avert it. Ruth May often rehearses the rules she
knows, as if to reconfirm and memorize, and in the “Mother May I” game, she
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acts out a rule-bound version of parental permission with herself as the maternal
lawgiver. When the driver ants arrive in the village, each girl interprets the event
as a negative judgment rather than an act of nature. Leah is tempted to see the
ants as “the hand of God,” who “hates us”; “the Lord is supposed to be with me,
and he’s not!” she protests (307–09). The girls reveal just what their father has
taught them: they are constantly judged and often found wanting. Their anxiety
over his frequent negative judgments and sudden punishments produces watchful, self-restrained children and citizens.
Nathan’s punishments commonly explode over words that should not be spoken; thus they encourage silent obedience. He punishes with the biblical verse and
occasionally with physical violence as well: he punishes Ruth May with the razor
strop (54), hits Leah so hard he leaves a hand-shaped bruise on her neck (156), and
beats Rachel so severely she falls against the wall (238). These physical punishments are almost always for “talking back” or saying things of which he does not
approve. He also beats them for exchanging useless words rather than applying
themselves industriously to producing his dinner; the three older girls have “an
unresolved argument over whether there are or are not worms in the flour,” and he
beats all of them (219; emphasis in original). When the parrot Methuselah begins
to say “damn!” in a feminine voice, Nathan demands to know who taught the
word to him. Leah narrates the anxiety suffered by herself, Rachel, and Adah as
they protect their mother. “Oh, dear Lord. He was staring directly at me. My heart
palpitated fiercely,” she writes (67). He orders the three older daughters to copy
a verse culminating in the warning “to watch what proceeds out of your mouth”
(67). Children raised with a firm commitment to this principle will be, as the folk
saying has it, seen and not heard. Democratic citizens produced on this model will
not object to their nation’s actions.
All of Nathan’s teachings discipline his children to passivity: not to express
themselves, not to speak, not to develop opinions or ideas, not to choose or act
in the world. By mocking and devaluing their intelligence (as “a mess of female
minds”), he tries to convince them not to exercise it. By punishing infractions
of speech, he enjoins them to a kind of silence that assents and obeys his word.
What he cannot silence, he expels: he casts Methuselah out into the jungle to stop
the parrot’s uncontainable speech. The mute Adah reflects the culmination of her
father’s wishes: because she does not voice desires, objections, or ideas, her father
determines things for her. Her silence, which turns out to be learned or chosen,
muzzles her considerable intelligence and renders her agreeable to a father who
thinks of it as “God’s Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees” (34).
From another angle, the dead Ruth May represents an even more perfect symbol
for the silent acceptance Nathan cultivates in his children. Her wrapped body,
planted in his “Great Plains” garden, is the ironic fruit of his labors in the Congo.
Disciplined into docile bodies that leave decisions to their leader/father, Nathan’s
daughters represent both women and citizens who are produced in support of a
patriarchal American exceptionalism.
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Unsettling Home and Homeland
Kingsolver’s novel is an education story or bildungsroman in which the narrators
learn crucial lessons from their experience. Orleanna and her daughters do not overtly
rebel against Nathan’s rule until the day of Lumumba’s murder and Ruth May’s death.
On that day, they all abandon him. Orleanna, Rachel, Leah, and Adah walk out of
Kilanga in the rain, leaving behind Nathan and the God he represents. Although their
assessment of their own complicity in Africa’s misfortunes and their sister’s death varies according to their personality, the survivors give up on the settled home that was
planned for them. In different ways, they also abandon the America they had hoped
for, with its promise of an exceptional destiny.
Soon after Ruth May’s death, the family scatters, and each woman moves through a
series of unsettled places. Orleanna moves to a “plywood cabin,” followed by an apartment in Atlanta and a small brick house on Sanderling Island where she can stand on
the sea wall, glaring at Africa across the ocean (408). She remains isolated and never
takes another partner. Rachel has seemed to be most influenced by her father’s view
of women’s need to marry: Her habitual expression, “man oh man,” reflects the close
attention she pays to males of every age. Unlike her sisters, she works diligently on her
hope-chest embroidery and even more assiduously on her posture, cuticles, hair, and
clothing—all designed to attract a mate. After a disappointing stint living with Eeben
Axelroot, she has two brief, disappointing marriages. She takes lovers from among the
married businessmen who stay at the Equatorial Hotel, but never marries again and
has no children. Rachel knows that Nathan would condemn her African lifestyle: “Oh,
if Father could see me now, wouldn’t he give me The Verse!” (515). Adah, like her
very different older sister, takes lovers but refuses marriage and has no children; after
attending university and medical school, she rents an apartment in Atlanta and devotes
herself to work. These three women refuse the married state for which women were
supposed to be intended; each of them chooses independence in a commercial hotel
or a rented, impermanent place.
Leah’s marriage also does not “settle” in the way her father would have intended.
Leah weds Anatole “in a ceremony that was neither quite Christian nor Bantu” and
lives a monogamous life with her husband and children (432). But Anatole is in and
out of prison, and she lives in a series of transient places, including a shack in Kinshasa, a thatched mud hut in the Kimvula District, and a house on a cooperative agricultural station in Angola. Married to an African husband her father and his culture would
abhor, she has biracial children, four sons with whom racist Rachel disavows kinship.
Rather than founding a dynasty or perpetuating a legacy, her children will counter
the white imperial curse on Africa and erase the sins of the fathers: The boys “are the
colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I
understand that time erases whiteness altogether” (526). Her sisters call her marriage
into question: Although she admires Anatole, Adah observes that Leah’s “religion is
the suffering,” and Rachel comments that after Ruth May’s death, “Leah’s decided
to pay for it by becoming the Bride of Africa” (442, 465; emphasis in original). In a
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423
marriage that deconstructs the racial exclusivity of white America, reverses the imperial process in Africa, and counters her own personal legacy of guilt, Leah certainly
does not establish a home in any conventional sense.9
After their experience in Africa, the surviving members of Nathan’s family
also lose or renounce a secure and confident relationship with the American
homeland. Only Orleanna and Adah return to the United States; the others
remain in Africa—although none live in the Congo ruled by Mobutu. With her
eyes fixed on Africa, Orleanna chooses a series of marginal and even oppositional positions; for example, she participates in civil rights marches designed to
protest her government’s racist laws. Although Adah appears to live a version of
the American dream—becoming a doctor in Atlanta—she understands that her
mother’s sense of complicity holds for all the survivors: “All human odes are
essentially one. ‘My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it’” (492).
Adah’s choices lead her away from practicing medicine for American citizens;
instead, she researches African viruses. Like her mother, she keeps an eye on
Africa, and like her sisters, she undoes and inverts her father’s legacy: “Out of
sympathy for the Devil and Africa, I left the healing profession. I became a witch
doctor. My church is the Great Rift Valley that lies along the eastern boundary
of Congo” (528). Rather than trying to cure Ebola and AIDS (in the imperialist
model of advanced American science solving African problems) Adah studies the
viruses with respect and admiration.
Three sisters remain in Africa, both physically and spiritually distanced from
their American homeland. Ruth May has been transformed by death into “muntu
Africa,” the spirit of all beings, including the green mamba snake (537). In the
novel’s last section, her spirituality recast in non-Western ways, she inverts her
father’s baptismal prayer and urges her mother to find a secular peace—to forgive,
remember, and “[m]ove on. Walk forward into the light” (543). With a pointed
sense of her nation’s guilt in the death of Lumumba and the long, damaging dictatorship of Mobutu, Leah chooses Africa and renounces America: “When the neighbors or students ask me my nationality, I tell them I come from a country that no
longer exists” (433). She has made several trips to the United States—to visit her
mother, study agronomy, vaccinate her children, recover from disease—but found
herself more “a stranger each time” (466). What finally convinces Leah to choose
estrangement is the pervasive racism she sees in America:
The citizens of my homeland regarded my husband and children as primitives, or freaks. On the streets, from a distance, they’d scowl at us, thinking
we were merely the scourge they already knew and loathed—the mixed-race
couple, with mongrel children as advertisement of our sins. [. . .] I can’t drag
a husband and sons into a life where their beauty will blossom and wither
in darkness. (468–69)
Like Ruth May, Leah becomes a part of Africa, working in small steps to erase the
legacies of the America she has renounced.
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The most complex of the expatriate children, Rachel appears to remain her
father’s quintessentially American daughter, but can neither go back nor believe
in the national myths any longer. Rachel maintains some of the worst attitudes
and assumptions she has inherited from her father and her fatherland. She is
materialistic, racist, selfish, vain, and shallow. Like her father, Rachel expresses
contempt for Africans’ intellect and competence, and she maintains the segregation of her American childhood in her hotel. With many latter-day Americans,
she abandons her father’s Protestant theology while retaining a firm commitment
to the material rewards held by the Protestant ethic to signify God’s approval.
With some justice, then, one critic calls her “clueless and morally neutral” and
another “a rather heavy-handed symbol of crass American consumerism and
paternalistic racism” (Ognibene 31; Demory 191). While making Rachel a
flawed and comic character, Kingsolver also suggests that her faults should be
considered in relation to her American heritage.
Rachel recognizes the fatal absence at the heart of America’s exceptionalist promises. Her sister Adah writes cryptically, “Rachel seems incapable of remorse, but she
is not. She wears those pale white eyes around her neck so she can look in every
direction and ward off the attack” (491). Part of a group of references to Eliot’s “those
are pearls that were his eyes,” Adah suggests that Rachel dresses up in affluence,
complete with pearl necklace, to repress both her grief over the losses of Ruth May
and the Congo and her understanding that she has really inherited a wasteland. Rachel
expresses pain, however ironic its phrasing, over her loss of the redeemer nation: “I’ve
missed being a part of something you could really believe in” (512). When Ruth May
dies, Rachel grieves for her mother and realizes that
nothing would ever be all right again. [. . .] Until that moment I’d always
believed I could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened.
The misery, the hunt, the ants [. . .]—those were just stories I would tell
someday with a laugh and a toss of my hair, when Africa was faraway and
make-believe like the people in history books. The tragedies that happened
to Africans were not mine. We were different, not just because we were
white and had our vaccinations, but because we were simply a much, much
luckier kind of person. I would get back home to Bethlehem, Georgia, and
be exactly the same Rachel as before. (366–67)
Ruth May’s death cancels Rachel’s belief that she can return to a carefree, fortunate
destiny in America. It demolishes her illusion that Americans are a different “kind
of person” from Africans: a privileged, exceptional breed, as her father and her
homeland have implicitly promised, who will be excepted from the miseries and
tragedies of the world.
Kingsolver’s novel links private and public, home and homeland, to develop
her political allegory about the dangers of American exceptionalism. The novel’s
implications exceed a historical concern over U.S. foreign policy in the Congo in
1960 and speak to an ongoing fear that America’s very foundational myths make
its leaders liable to assume postures of arrogance in world affairs. The novel
SUMMER 2008, VOL. 49, NO. 4
425
suggests that seemingly innocuous practices in the privacy of American homes
may in fact reproduce the conditions of possibility for national arrogance. In the
aftermath of Ruth May’s death, developed at a length that puzzles some readers,
The Poisonwood Bible also suggests alternatives in the daughters’ pathways out
of the American legacy represented by Nathan. With the collapse of their father’s
American exceptionalist mission in the wilderness, the daughters turn away
from the Word to embrace words—plural, secular, nuanced, spoken, interpreted,
exchanged, and affirmed. They fulfill the potential of their first-person narratives,
whether these are understood as interior monologues or journal entries, to use
language to think for themselves about the meanings in their experience. In the
process of finding words to tell their stories, they move away from simple binary
opposites and into the mazed world of complex alternatives. Rejecting their
father’s arrogant claim to speak for God, together with their nation’s imperialist
presumption to decide for other peoples, these children of exceptionalism speak
only for themselves. It is their mission, like Kingsolver’s, to recognize in the
world’s preterite the only chosen people.
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY
BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK
NOTES
1. Kingsolver observes, “It’s very hard to criticize this country, our domestic or our foreign policy,
or our attitude, or our Americanism [. . .] Even though we’re a secular state, we’re deeply religious
about the religion of America” (Epstein 36).
2. The Poisonwood Bible had sold more than a million copies by 2000; it won the National Book
Prize of South Africa, the Orange Prize, the Patterson Fiction Prize, and the Book Sense Book of the
Year Award from the American Booksellers Association. It was named one of the best books of the
year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice. In 2000, Oprah selected
it for Oprah’s Book Club, and then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton praised it in O: The Oprah
Magazine. It was reviewed positively by Jane Smiley and hailed by John Leonard in the Nation as “a
magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment” (28). Nine years after its publication, the novel
continues to be taught in high school and college classes; one book offers strategies for teaching the
novel (Thomas), and reader’s guides by Barnes & Noble and Wagner-Martin provide summaries and
commentary.
3. Huntington’s quotes come from Bercovitch, Hastings, and Morone. In an attempt to undermine the
negative connotations accruing to American exceptionalism, Huntington writes that “exceptionalism” has
now turned to “universalism,” as democracy is now accepted “as the only legitimate form of government”
(257). I am indebted to my colleague William V. Spanos for his insightful analysis of Huntington’s relation
to American exceptionalism (187–241).
4. Kingsolver rejects the idea that Nathan represents maleness: “Male or female, we are not like
him” (Web site). Although the novel addresses the patriarchal treatment of daughters, its larger focus
is on the production of subjects who will accept or ignore the reign of an exceptionalist ideology.
5. Amy Kaplan writes that “imperialism has been simultaneously formative and disavowed in the
foundational discourse of American studies” and observes, in a reading of Perry Miller that would
serve as well for Nathan, that he “represents a coherent America by constructing Africa as an imperial
unconscious of national identity” (5).
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6. Orleanna writes an ironic version: the grandfatherly president whose “household was the world
[. . .] finished making up his mind about things. He’d given Lumumba a chance, he felt. The Congo
had been independent for fifty-one days” (320).
7. I would complicate Kimberly Koza’s assessment that “Kingsolver’s novel is essentially about
America, not Africa” (287). The novel attends to America’s international role and situates its representation of the Congo in elaborate historical and cultural research.
8. Smith has written that “the moral significance” of homes in Kingsolver’s fiction reflects “complexity and uncertainty” (193–94), and Jacobson concludes that the “neodomestic politics” in The
Poisonwood Bible “argue for change and instability” (120).
9. DeMarr sees Leah as “the most memorable” of the women and adds, “If any one character serves
as protagonist, it is Leah” (130). Although I agree that Kingsolver sympathizes with many of Leah’s
later views and decisions, Leah also has important flaws, including a pride much like her father’s that
blinds her in Kilanga. The novel’s five perspectives give it a collective protagonist rather than a single
individual, appropriately reinforcing its critique of American individualism.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Ann Marie Adams is an associate professor of English at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century British
literature and film. She has published studies of modern and contemporary authors in
journals such as Modern Drama, Callaloo, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.
Samantha J. Carroll is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the School of Arts
and Creative Enterprise at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, Australia. She is currently writing a metafictional neo-Victorian novel inflected by her
research interests in class, race, gender, sexuality, literary nostalgia, and postcolonial
Australian identity.
Lauren J. Lacey is an assistant professor of English at Edgewood College in
Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches contemporary literature. Her work focuses
on the relationship between fantastic literature and the power structures that define
existence in our world.
A
Laurence Petit is an assistant professor of contemporary British literature at
Central Connecticut State University. She has published several articles on text and
image in the fiction of Anita Brookner, A. S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, and Salman
Rushdie, as well as translations of theoretical essays by George Bataille and Pierre
Bourdieu. She is currently working on the emerging trend of “iconotexts” within
contemporary British fiction.
Susan Strehle is a professor of English and interim dean of the School of Education at Binghamton University in New York. Author of Transnational Women’s
Fiction (2008) and Fiction in the Quantum Universe (1992), she also coedited
Doubled Plots: Romance and History with Mary Paniccia Carden (2003). She
has published essays on contemporary writers, including Margaret Atwood, Jane
Smiley, Edwidge Danticat, and William Gaddis.
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CRITIQUE
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