Shelly Childers
Litr 5535
Dr. Craig White

Poisoned Romance 

In The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, the romantic standards that are associated with literature during the American Renaissance are evident. This popular novel, a New York Times Bestseller, embodies the concept of Romanticism with its gothic darkness, themes of loss and nostalgia, and a strong captivity narrative. The presence of a wise child and recurring double language are essential to the plot of the story. Nathan Price’s misguided mission to save souls in the Congo is transformed into an evil that invades a type of Paradise and so, the reader realizes immediately that this twisted attempt to Christianize the savages will result in a fall of epic proportions. The impending fall and the results are set against a backdrop of revolution and oppression and the Gothic element permeates the narrative as well as the lives of characters throughout The Poisonwood Bible. If analogy and metaphor are the standard trope of Romanticism, this book could serve as an encyclopedic text. Each page is packed with figurative language that transforms and mystifies while using romantic imagery that creates alternately a ‘Paradise’ and a ‘Hell’. "There’s a majesty, a 19^th-century-novel echo to this sweeping vision of nature doing its thing independent of the human will" (Kerr 7). American Romanticism, as a pattern for successful literature, resounds throughout this modern text.

Captivity is a strong theme running throughout American Romantic literature. This novel is a wilderness romance with strong undercurrents of captivity and escape. Not long after arriving in the Congo, their minds are already focused on escape. The jungle is a paradise, but a dark, gothic one where evil lies in wait – in the form of venomous snakes, flesh eating ants, and the poisonwood tree. Just as surely as the slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin were searching for escape from captivity, so too are these women and children, and their escape is equally fraught with danger. The entire time that they live in the village, they imagine that a return to America will release them from their heartache, but this does not prove to be the case for any of them. Africa takes the life of one sister, holds on to two others, and refuses to allow peace even for those who return to America. Just as The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper is a romantic novel revolving around captivity and release, so too is The Poisonwood Bible. Although Orleana Price and her four daughters are not abducted and forced out into the wilderness, their trek into the wilds of Africa is fraught with danger, uncertainty, and despair. As the story unfolds, escape becomes a descant that runs constantly through the fabric of their lives. The desire for escape pits this family against the family patriarch, Nathan Price, whose conservative fanaticism has become a rigidity that isolates him from his family and his would-be converts. The jungle seems to envelop this family, cutting off all avenues for escape. Not only the harsh conditions but the political unrest revolving around independence works to imprison this family. Their need to escape is a constant theme and even after they find their way out of Kilango, they are trapped by memories that refuse to rest. At one point, early in the narrative, Orleana describes her feet as "twin birds helpless to fly out of there, away from the disaster she knows is coming"(6). She sees her captivity in terms of the mysteries of nature – "Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sandbars to the sea" (91). Leah, one of the twin girls, voices her greatest desire and her greatest loss. "I missed my freedom" (146). Their captivity is a living, palpable chain that keeps them buried in the jungle.

In Fannie Fern, by Annie Price, as in "The Lost Boy," by Thomas Wolfe, we see the recurring Romantic convention of the Wise child. This child often sees things with a fresh eye in ways that adults miss completely. Ruth May is the wise child in this story. As the youngest of the four sisters, she adapts to the jungle in ways that elude the other members of her family. As they struggle with strange rituals, fearful customs, and a difficult language, Ruth May plays with the little black children, teaching them "Mother May I" and learns to communicate with them effectively. Through childish naivete, she hides her malaria pills, leading to a terrifying bout with the deadly disease. Although her death appears to be imminent, Ruth May rebounds only to fall victim to the evils of paradise. Ruth May is the innocent child whose observations and words betray the guilt of her family, her nation, and her race. She becomes a catalyst that works to split the Price family apart; yet, she watches carefully over her mother with a childish compassion that is nothing like the angry eyes of Nathan’s God. Ruth May takes in her family and the village in which they live, and is perhaps the first to realize that there is little hope of ever converting the villagers. She realizes that "Father is trying to teach everybody to love Jesus, but what with one thing and another around here, they don’t (157)". This simple truth is impossible for her father to see and creates philosophical problems for her mother and sisters, but Ruth May sees the obvious and accepts it. Ruth May’s native friend, Nelson, tells her that if she dies, she will disappear, but if she follows a ritual involving chicken bones, she will be able to go to a safe place instead of disappearing. Ironically, the safe place that she imagines is up in a tree where she can look down on her family while being sheltered from their eyes. Her safe place is in the body of the great venomous snake that eventually takes her life -- the evil serpent that invades their already tainted paradise. In the final chapter, the closing of the book, Ruth May speaks. She says, "Listen, being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger (538)". Ruth May is "muntu Africa, muntu one child and a million all lost on the same day"(537). As her eye watches with "the glide of belly on branch," she admits, "all are accomplices to the fall. I am muntu, all that is here"(537) and her last thought that we hear are words of encouragement, telling her family to "walk forward into the light" (543). The wisdom of this child underlies the entire novel and ironically embodies the light of paradise in the body of the serpent. The paradise that is Africa is also the hell of Satan’s serpent – and the wise child is the one who embraces this truth.

Gothic imagery is the thread that binds this manuscript together. There is a sublime element throughout this amazing novel. The unbelievable beauty and lushness of this tropical jungle is terrifying in its complexity. Little black children, playing happily with round bellies and happy smiles, are actually starving to death, although the Price girls fail to see beyond their bright faces at first. The play of dark against light is evident as everything native to the Congo is dark and in shadows while the Price girls are pale and blonde – nicknamed ‘termite’ by the village children. The Congo has plagues of killer ants, parasites, lions, venomous snakes, malaria-infested mosquitoes, tarantulas and many other fearsome aspects of nature. In a review for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani describes this novel as a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption, and the ‘dark necessity’ of history." The novel’s main character, Nathan Price is an evangelical missionary reminiscent of Roger Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter. Both men are coldhearted and judgmental villains who are willing to risk the lives of the people they are supposed to care about "in pursuit of their obsessive mission" (Kakutani 1). Nathan Price arrives in the Congolese village of Kilanga, leaving all of the luxuries and familiarity of home behind him. His zeal for gathering lost souls is first and foremost above his family’s comfort, health, or even their safety. The readers begin to see the Gothic tones within this book as early as the first page with "…a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever" (5). On their first night, the family is greeted with a meal prepared by the villagers. Goat meat complete with burnt hide and the bristle of stiff hairs caused Rachel to weep "for the sins of all who had brought my family to this dread dark shore" (29). Just as Mr. Hooper was shrouded in darkness behind his black veil in "The Minister’s Black Veil," Nathan Price is shrouded in the darkness of ignorance. He refuses to see the spirituality of the African people and preaches his message of hellfire and damnation from behind his own darkened mask. When Mr. Hooper goes out for a walk, he ends up in the graveyard, but when Nathan Price is outdoors, he is working in his garden, building "rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds" (63).

Adah and Leah are two of the most fascinating characters of The Poisonwood Bible. The girls are twins and extremely gifted, but Adah is a victim of hemiplegia – as a result of a difficult birth. Her physical handicap keeps her silent - viewing her world and recording her thoughts but rarely speaking aloud. Her gothic description of the stronger twin sucking the life from her in the womb, leaving her twisted and bent, could be straight out of the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. Nelson, the native houseboy, is appalled when he realizes that the girls are twins. In the Congo, as in Gothic novels, twins are a dark element signifying mystery and danger. African tradition dictates that twins be taken out to the jungle and left there, in order to avoid the stigma and the curse of twinship. Adah describes the "grass that writhed beneath the shadow, dark and ravenous" and her mother as "rising out of the rootless devouring earth" (305). At one point Leah says, "I pictured myself a ghost: bones and teeth." (201) This gothic image of ghosts is further enhanced by the presence of evil in the guise of religion. "My father was not a ghost; he was God with his back turned" 9310). Orleana see herself "…lodged in the heart of darkness, so thoroughly bent to the shape of marriage I could hardly see any other way to stand" (201). Each of these images adds to the gothic feel of the novel and when they are added to the superstitions of the natives, the forest seems to be alive with evil.

In much the same way that Frederick Douglass uses the double language of "passive resistance," the natives of the Congo speak a language inundated with examples of double language. Mbote means either hello or goodbye depending on the direction that you are going. Kikongo is a language not spoken but sung. "The same word slanted up or down the scale can have many different meanings" (94). The word nzolo could have as many as three different meanings. It means "most dearly beloved," (172) or a type of potato, or a thick yellow grub worm used for fish bait. As the children work hard to learn the language and communicate with village friends, Nathan Price’s rigidity distances him from the natives. His fire and brimstone messages are met with confusion as his words are cloaked in double meanings that he cannot or will not comprehend. For this man "there can be only one source – the Bible, unambiguous and entire, even in a land that demonstrates daily the suppleness of language" (Klinkenborg 2). The word batiza, "our Father’s fixed passion" means "baptism" or it means, "to terrify"(214). Since the natives know that the only things awaiting them in the river are crocodiles that will eat their children, they can not agree to be baptized and the word is much easier to associate with terror. "Tata Jesus is bangala." Nathan Price shouts from his makeshift pulpit, never dreaming that his ignorance of the nuances of Kikongo, has him preaching a message laced with fear and dread. "Tata Jesus is bangala." In the flat accent of an American zealot, bangala means the poisonwood tree instead of "precious and dear" as he intends. Instead of declaring, ‘God is Love’, he is shouting, ‘God is poison’ like the tree that causes boils and rotting skin. Though his family becomes aware of his mistake, Nathan is oblivious and uncaring. Later in the book, his daughters refer to his religious preference of "The Poisonwood Bible" and his inability to view the natives with any type of humanity. The gospel according to Nathan Price is one of double meanings and language that can be twisted and distorted.

The Congo is paradise in the form of a jungle garden created by God’s hand and tainted by man’s sin. Just as Columbus found a paradise in the New World, as soon as he began to shape and pattern this world, giving order to Paradise, the fall could already be predicted. We begin to explore the competing dimensions of the moral mission and the spiritual mission that gets tangled up as one civilization totally destroys another in the effort to civilize them. This pattern is replicated in the Congo. Their mission is to Christianize the heathens, with little consideration to the spiritual rituals that have existed for centuries. Religion itself becomes the serpent in this tropical garden. Early in the novel, Leah says "to tell the truth, it’s not purely paradise here, either. Perhaps we’ve eaten of the wrong fruits in the Garden, because our family always seems to know too much, and at the same time not enough" (103). The dark, secret sin that must be hidden away is reminiscent of Mr. Hooper’s state in "The Minister’s Black Veil." With "secret sin," and "…those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest…forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them" (632), both men hide their dark secrets as they proclaim God’s word. In the Gothic tradition, a secret looms up from the past with dark images. With a political twist, the dark sin in the Congo is the assassination attempt on Lumbada, the freely elected leader of their Independence. The fact that the attempt is carried out by agents of the United States only adds to the conflict between blacks and whites within this novel. The girls soon become aware that their father’s message of salvation and redemption is delivered by a white man -- with a white man’s considerations -- never seeking to know the native’s mind or his convictions. This denigration and distance leads to the inevitable fall. Most of the victims of war are children and their loss becomes "that great, quiet void moving slowly upward through us" (523). The Congo is torn apart by the white man’s war, starved by nature’s alternating droughts and floods, and served by two Gods. At the source of this tremendous conflict is the role of religion. Adah wonders "that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires" (141). Each of the girls have to make their own decisions about the "exacting, tyrannical God" (525) of their father. Leah decides to "…trust in Creation, which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation" (525). Her turn toward nature, and her return to paradise is indicative of the Romantic nature of humans, turning toward nature and beauty in their individual quest for paradise. Adah realizes that Africa "has a thousand ways of cleansing itself" (529) but questions why God would "set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden" (529) where diseases are rampant and death is inevitable. Rachel lives her life without any faith in God. Her reality is Afirca "…where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up" (517). Paradise left its impression on each of these strong women. Orleana, the matriarch, returns to Georgia, where she surrounds herself with flowers and where her eyes always look toward Africa. And as for Nathan, "the villain-hero is, indeed, an invention of the gothic form, while his temptation and suffering, the beauty and terror of his bondage to evil are among its major themes" (Fiedler 128). Nathan suffers his own taste of hell. After years of living in the jungle, ranting his demented gospel, villagers finally chase him out of their home. Armed with sticks and stones, they follow him to a field where he climbs up on the overseer’s tower. Surrounding him, they "set the tower on fire" (486). The villagers leave him for the animals to drag off. In a literal reflection of his favorite punishment, his death reflected ‘the Verse’. When his daughters were punished, they had to copy one hundred verses from the Bible with the last verse giving them their only indication of the reason for their punishment. Adah’s ‘Verse’ was about Antiochus who burned his enemy on a high tower. "By such a fate it came to pass that the transgressor died, not even getting burial in the ground" (487) but the ending verse, the lesson, was much simpler. "So this will be the end" (487). Adah felt that this verse was her punishment for being slow and for being handicapped. Ironically, her father met the flames of hell for much the same reason. His ignorance and his inability to see caused his literal fall in flames, at the foot of the Congolese natives. Paradise is consumed by evil, in the guise of rigid religious fervor.

Only at the end of the book do we see the role that forgiveness plays in the restoration of paradise. Following the themes of restoration and loss, Ruth May, the child whose death tears apart this family, speaks across the void of death, and she speaks in the voice of a serpent. She offers forgiveness and her own advice to her loved ones. "You can hold on but forgive, forgive, and give" (543). She offers her forgiveness and a statement about the sin that led to their fall. "The sins of the fathers belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in iron bracelets, and here you stand, remembering their songs. Listen" (543). She encourages everyone to "walk forward into the light" (543). The reader is left to decide if that light is the light of paradise or just the light of life after the fall.

The captivity narrative of Orleana Price and her four daughters is an arresting novel full of romantic imagery. The premature death of a child, whose wisdom gives her maturity beyond her years, is tragic and damaging to a family already in crisis. Double language is evident in the title of the book and in Nathan Price’s misuse of the native language, but perhaps the greatest romantic convention is the Gothic element. The evil that has invaded paradise is the white man’s effort to infuse civilization and social change into the jungle. Another popular novel of the American Renaissance attempted to bring about social change through literature. "By stirring the emotions of readers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin intends to convert readers to a more humane and Christian way of being" (Budick 109). Through individual conversion, this novel as well as The Poisonwood Bible hopes "…to transform the entire sociopolitical configuration of the nation" ( Budick 109). Religious references and the dark images of terror and fear all combine to create an eerie paradise that is destined to fall. The fact that religious fervor and rigid fanaticism create this Gothic atmosphere is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s writing during the American Renaissance. The Poisonwood Bible could serve as a catalog of Romanticism for this century much like the writing of Edgar Allen Poe did in the 19^th century. Ironically, this family pays a stiff ‘price’ for their efforts to Christianize the natives of the Congo. Nathan Price loses his family, his sanity, and his mission to the jungle and his family suffers through captivity often without food but always with a fear and terror of the darker elements of Africa. The tradition of American Romanticism prevails in this Gothic novel of religious conversion and romantic idealism. Each of the women chooses their own paths toward recovery and reconciliation becoming stronger individuals through their struggles. The Poisonwood Bible reveals this quest for identity and enhances the American tradition of Romanticism.

Works Cited

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperCollins

Publishers, Inc., 1990.